STARTHIEF

I’ve been holding back from starting on the next album. Part of that is fatigue, since my sleep patterns have been more than a little bit weird. (For last night’s 4 hours of sleep and apparently only 15 minutes of REM sleep, I can probably blame the coffee milk boba tea I had after dinner combined with researching something on my phone when I should have been settling down.) But I think part of it has to do with not really feeling motivated to work with the project parameters as I laid them out, which is why I kept kind of changing my mind about it. I thought I’d settled on all-FM, including using FMd LFOs as my rhythmic source. But… meh.

The last project worked really well for me, and part of the beauty of it was simplicity. Zeroes also worked really well for me, and it was a more open and abstract concept. So, my decision for this next one is to call it Index and work with that as a theme in whatever way calls to me on a per-song basis. It’s likely still going to be a lot of FM and PM, but lookup tables — either for wavetable synthesis / waveshaping or for sequencing — are an obvious option as well, and I don’t have to be strict about it.

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Very important election coming up in the US (in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, and honestly I can’t blame you…). The stakes on a federal level are pretty obvious, but state and local politics make a difference too. Here in Misery Missouri, we have a number of state amendments up for a vote and most of them are bullshit. As one slogan goes: “Yes on 6, the rest are tricks.”

Amendment 3 repeals the vote that we just had in 2024 protecting abortion rights, and additionally prohibits “gender transition procedures for minors” (which are already illegal under state law). They’ve largely been using the second part as bait and not mentioning the first part — it’s 100% “overturn the will of the people” crap much like the state legislature tries to pull all the time.

Amendment 6, on the other hand, prevents the state legislature from negating measures that were brought to a ballot initiative by petition, and protects that petition process. It’s the opposite of the Amendment 2 we killed in the August primary election, which would have made that sort of referendum effectively impossible by requiring it to succeed in 100% of districts.

Amendment 7 is some crazy bullshit to replace all state taxes with some kind of weasely, non-specific “permanent endowment fund.”

Amendment 8 has the most deceptive language of any of them, but effectively it prevents anyone but the state attorney general from removing elected county sheriffs from office… no matter how corrupt. Given that our state AG is himself an absolute slimeball, how about no? Apparently this one’s ancestry goes back to the Republican furor over county mask mandates during the worst part of COVID. (We live in a very stupid timeline, y’all.)

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Mutable Instruments Beads was just yesterday made open-source. Nobody seems to know what Èmilie’s reason was for not doing this earlier, or the thought process that specifically went into this decision now — but it comes on the heels of someone who was planning on using AI-assisted reverse engineering to create an alternate firmware and was conscientious enough to ask permission to distribute it. Èmilie said no, and then quietly committed the code to GitHub with the same open-source licenses as the other stuff.

Since she didn’t offer commentary on it, one can only guess — but it looks like her hand was forced. It was a choice of making the firmware open-source, matching her other work and hopefully the people who care can learn from good quality, well-commented code — or watch as someone else just rips it off with AI and doesn’t ask for permission.

AI has made things very, very messy and chaotic and it’s hard to guess how things will go. I’ve been fending off anxiety about it most of the day, to be honest. This isn’t anything like the singularity that futurists predicted — our machines are still dumber than us — they’re just faster, and capable of pattern-matching stuff that would take massive human effort (but without the benefit of common sense, wisdom, ethics etc.) But we’re still in kind of a weird place in history I feel like. It likely means the end of some things, and we don’t know what yet. It could potentially be a massive social change, and those are seldom smooth sailing even when they are necessary.

Just a month ago I wrote about how hardware had an advantage over software in that there was less AI slop flooding everything now. But THIRTY-TWO AI-generated unofficial firmwares appeared so far for the cheap little M-VAVE FM1 synth, in about the course of a week. And some of them, apparently, are decent. What the hell?

Here’s Synth Anatomy’s take on this subject, also from today.

A bare majority of adults avoid “AI” chatbots, and not because of ignorance about how to use them (as some have projected) but because of intentional rejection of the technology — disinterest and distrust.

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Travis Alabanza’s None of the Above was certainly not the happiest book on nonbinary gender identity that I’ve read. It’s a memoir about what it’s like to be very visibly gender-nonconfirming and Black in the UK, written during the pandemic lockdown which was also when anti-trans sentiment was really starting to boil over.

They have a lot to say about the uncertainty that we’re not allowed to express and have trouble sorting out for ourselves and each other; about the sacrifices made to the gender binary (by everyone, not just trans folks); about how there is no way to be safe as a trans or feminine person (especially when Black) and yet enormous pressure to pass, including from within the trans community. It was very well written, and an important book, but… I recommend also reading something with more trans joy in it for balance.

Now I’m reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s nuts — aliens, the end of the world, and a galactic reality show competition that resembles a fantasy RPG. I don’t think I’m going to be a superfan or even continue with the however many other books there are in the series, but it’s entertaining me enough to keep going through this one at least.

My brother and his wife were in town for the last 6 days, and I took time off work to hang out. Hot weather and potential storms conspired against some of our plans, and folks not feeling 100% conspired against some others, but we still managed to have a good time overall.

One thing we did a lot of was book shopping. We visited a couple of indie bookstores in downtown St. Charles (Main Street Books which was decent, and The Book Worm which had a pretty great collection but high prices), and then the incredible Left Bank Books in St. Louis as well as a Half-Price Books. I picked up a few at Main Street and then went a little nuts at LBB. This was my overall haul:

…and at the same time, Bookshop.org had discounted several items on my ebook wishlist, so that’s stocked up a bit too. And I still have some books left from my last Alibris purchase. And my dad gave me The Throne of Saturn which is a big thick novel he enjoyed. So there’s quite a queue now, probably enough to hold me over until Jólabókaflóð.

(On this pile, starting from top: a chapbook by a local author, a book about wildlife in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris which is also a nature preserve, a Southern Gothic horror novel that caught everyone’s eye, a graphic novel about trans history, a novel I read on loan from the library that I’ve always wanted to buy to reread and support the author, a novel I keep hearing good things about, a book I was looking for after a chat about that very subject, a book on music that grabbed my attention, a graphic novel that looks fun, and a graphic novel by an artist who I used to work with.)

At LBB we also bought a couple of t-shirts, plus magnets and stickers, and we’ll be back. “Literacy and Justice For All” is their tagline, they are very much into progressive activism and local community solidarity; they had plenty more featured books that I’ve already heard great things about, they have multiple interesting book clubs, and I feel like their employee recommendations are super on point.

I’m currently reading Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz, which has been pretty entertaining so far. In the near future, California has seceded from the not-so-united States and there was a whole war and everything; intelligent robots theoretically liberated from slavery who don’t actually have full rights (obvious historical parallels much?) start their own business.

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What with the visit, I haven’t started on the new album yet. But I have some additional ideas. I might go all-FM this time as well as carrying a constant rhythm and no echoes.

I’ve also been looking at a couple of other module options for later:

Orphiser, which is based around an accumulator similar to one of the four on Walk 4… but it also has a “reflect” mode, slew, CVable min/max range, a CVable probability of taking a reverse step, momentum/gravity (which can interact with reflection for bouncing ball patches), and a “Shadow” output which can take on different duties depending on the selected mode. It seems like a lot of fun, though it’s a module where a cheat sheet is probably helpful.

Undertow, which was announced at Superbooth and isn’t out yet. It’s something like Kermit it that it’s a dual, syncable wavetable LFO/VCO. But instead of two outputs it has 15 — a span of 5 across which interpolate the waveshape and frequency between the two sides, and 3 down which have different “mod” settings (additional modulation of the shape) — making it also somewhat like Just Friends and Multiwave, just with a different philosophy. At this moment I’m leaning more toward Orphiser, but will keep my options open.

The plan is still Budapeszt first, then Splines. I’m also wanting a gate/latched switch of some kind — I might go back to Ladik for a basic one (dependent on another module as voltage source, but that’s no problem) or perhaps go for proper arcade buttons. And then quite possibly one of these two.

Speaking of gear acquisitions, I broke my “no more plugins” thing for the sake of Plogue OPMZ — a bit-accurate, meticulously researched emulation of the Yamaha OPM, OPP, OPZ and OPZ2 chips — as found in the Yamaha CX5M computer, several arcade and pinball machines (including my favorite, Marble Madness), the DX100 (which I used to own), Korg DS-8 (which I also used to own), FB-01 (which I borrowed from a friend for a while), TX81Z, etc. I watched their video on the years-long labor of love that was researching and reverse-engineering the chips and the hardware that controlled them, and was convinced to grab it. It’s very much the sound of my teens and early 20s, and yet it’s more than that. Unlike the OPS7, you can tweak stuff while a note is droning which is PERFECT for how I want to operate with it. Absolutely no regrets with this.

Plus, on that last album I got more use out of Sinusoidal Run Rhythm and Pyros, two of the effect plugins I bought this year that I started to doubt afterward.

I still think the overall strategy of limiting my gear purchases has been a great approach to take, and plan to continue that in some form in 2027.

The new album is out. I hope some folks enjoy it as much as I did, but I warn you, I had a lot of fun doing this one so that’s a lot to live up to. 😀

Notes are here. I went back to more specific gear lists due to the nature of the album. Of course if/when the REDACTED thing(s) is/are officially released I’ll go back and update.

Not only was the creative flow super fast here, the mastering process was uncommonly easy. A couple of songs did have their own technical challenges but it was mostly “if I do this to boost the level, I get unwanted crunchiness but if I do this other, slightly more laborious thing it’s fine.”

Eventually I’m going to figure out all the different paths to getting that sound I don’t want, and instead of having to fix it after it’s baked in, I’ll be able to avoid it in the first place. (Unless I want to take that path intentionally, of course — very often, dirtying up a sound and then doing something to clean up the dirt leads to a more characterful result.)

For the next project, this thought is subject to change, but:

• a constant rhythm throughout the album, kind of like Pulse Code but not a straight, fixed beat. Perhaps something Euclidean, perhaps not (“non-Euclidean” could be a fun theme). Or maybe, each track begins with the rhythm that the previous one ended with, but additional complementary rhythms can take over and become the seed for the next one (and then maybe it could circle back around to the original rhythm at the end, so you could theoretically play the whole album on a seamless loop). Hmm.
• No distinct echoes. I use delay effects a lot, and restricting myself to non-echoey forms (so, reverb, very short resonant delays, chorus/flanger/etc) would be a new thing for me.

I only released the last album 20 days ago, but I have 18 songs recorded and edited, ready for the next album. Actually, I did a bit more than that, but rejected them. Songs aren’t individually super long, but still it’s a 73+ minute album (just barely inside the maximum length of an audio CD).

The process has been fast and the flow super easy — at least for the initial recording. Playing fast and loose with things, keeping it simple, and often having another two or three inspired ideas queued up while working on one, pays off. The process does tend have more than the usual tendency to create something incoherent or too meandering that either isn’t going to work or needs some editing, but still I’m very happy with what I’ve done and kind of shocked about how quickly I did it.

I will say more about this when writing up the notes, but a guiding principle was “don’t take it too seriously.” I let myself get silly, go overboard, etc.

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Temperatures have finally cooled off, now that the official first day of The Best Season has arrived, and I went for my first decent outdoor walk in a while. Today the windows are open, and it’s about time we aired the place out a bit.

Work has been busy, and my brother’s visiting next week (staying at my parents’ house but we’ll hang out with them every day for a week), so there’s been a lot to do and think about.

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Also: A NEW HEILUNG THING IS COMING !!!!!!!!111 yeah I’m a little excited

(Rule of thumb: you don’t notice how much dust and hair is on your stuff until after you upload a photo somewhere.)

The knobs are from AliExpress, and came in a pack of 45 for about 30 cents each with free shipping. I went ahead and replaced the sequencer encoder knobs too, even though it’s a little silly for them to have pointer lines. The quality isn’t up there with Rogan knobs, and to nitpick the diameter and/or skirt would ideally be a little bit bigger for this synth — I might choose a different option if I were starting over. But they look OK, feel fine, fit fine, were easy to put on, and I’m entirely satisfied.

The fader caps from Etsy came in a set of 20 with selectable colors; I picked 12 white, 6 red and 2 navy so I could have some flexibility, and decided on this. As it happens, the center line of the fader caps doesn’t match the indicator lines on the panel — but the old ones didn’t either and I never noticed. But it probably looks closer from a more typical looking-down angle rather than eye-level on the 60 degree stand I have mine on.

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I’ve got 8 tracks recorded on the new album, but it’s only about half done since these are tending toward the shorter side. I also have a lot of thoughts on the process and inspiration to write up when the time comes. I’m having a great time with it, honestly.

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Rico’s been doing better generally, but is not quite there yet. He went several days without any painful yowls or unfortunately placed diarrhea bombs, although this morning broke the streak. I’ve got him on Nutramax Proviable probiotics atop Catit creamy salmon lickable treats (which he absolutely adores — he gets super obnoxious the second he smells it), and Stella & Chewy Raw Coated Kibble (also salmon, but not as beloved as the treat). I think it’s just going to require some patience and another bottle of carpet cleaning stuff.

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Almost certain to take my “most fun book of the year” award, Furiously Happy was just hilarious. But, since the author is a Democrat living in Texas, married to a Republican, and the book was written pre-You Know Who (and also pre-Neil Gaiman being outed as a creep, when she mentions a friendship with him), so I found myself kind of wanting more context. A quick check of her blog found (1) she was super not happy with the 2024 election but said she doesn’t plan to leave the state (which means, there was some discussion or thought about doing so…), (2) her child is now using they/them pronouns, (3) one of her books was banned from Texas schools. So there’s that. Anyway, that was more of a tangent — point is, the book is absolutely ludicrously funny and kind of inspiring. I’m thankful my anxiety never got as bad as hers because it was bad enough, and that my encounters with depression were fairly brief and not super intense. And that there are people with that much humor in the world, sharing it with us.

I know what my next album project is going to be, what it’s going to be called, and in fact recorded three tracks for it this morning.

Okay, technically two of them were previously set up. And the theme is straightforward enough at first glance: every song is a single voice, but complex in terms of timbre and modulation, with at least a little live tweaking.

My definition of “single voice” is whatever I would call a “voice” in my album notes. It doesn’t rule out polysynths I can play chords on, nor blending multiple oscillators in something like Silhouette, nor modulating one oscillator with another, nor patching Strega and Minibrute together. “Part” is another way to say the same thing, I suppose, if you think of it in terms of a score. There won’t be separate parts in any given song, just one unified part.

(And yes, I’m using “song” in the sense that I said I would when this blog was new. I don’t accept that a song necessarily requires a singer, or even necessarily a melody. “Songs Without Words” was a good enough title for Felix Mendelssohn, and Grieg’s “Lyric Pieces” for piano had no lyrics. For that matter, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and A Song of Ice and Fire don’t even have music. Deal with it!)

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I finished reading L.K. Steven’s Silvercloak. It was one of those books that showed up on discount at bookshop.org and got me curious. A romantasy and detective/spy story, in a setting where magic is fueled by pleasure but its intensity is fueled by pain. (But it’s not quite as BDSM-themed as that sounds.) And where the good guys are driven by prejudice and revenge as well as actual justice, while the bad guys are driven by obsession and delusion as well as greed, and the protagonist was caught in between. It was quite entertaining, but I’m not sure whether I want to go for the rest of the series.

I’ve just started reading Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson, aka the Blogess. It’s hilarious so far! Basically, a strategy of nonsense and fun to cope with depression (and partly anxiety)… and the author is really good at nonsense and fun. I don’t think it’s going to be a self-help book, so much as a laugh and relate book.

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Here’s my current thinking on gear stuff:

I know that I want to pick up Splines. As with my decision on Budapeszt, I don’t think it makes sense to make myself wait for 2027 just to say I did.

However, the plan is to get Budapeszt in first, unless its release turns out to be delayed a lot. From there I can decide what is going to be set aside to make room. My first crack at this will be Nibbler and Katowice, to see if Rings feels redundant or is a good partner for Budapeszt. Meanwhile perhaps I’ll mess with Spectraphon a bit more to judge whether I should hang onto it. Also, again, Akemie’s Castle (but it’s probably safe).

Oh yeah… Noise Engineering just dropped 16 new firmwares for the Legio platform. Before that there were 7! This has completely changed the game for me and I’ve gone from having it in a drawer to thinking about picking up a second one. Here are my favorites:

• Ovis Legio (“army of sheep”) — a “granular Shepard tone processor,” unique among a growing collection of modular granular options. This takes the top prize for me.
• AT Legio — based on Ataraxic Translatron, an LFSR oscillator, with extra features. One of those is ringmodding an external signal, which sounds super nasty in the best way.
• Gator Legio — a stereo supersaw oscillator, with phase modulation inputs. It sounds huge and with PM it will go straight to the Dark Side.
• Megafold Legio — great-sounding stereo combination wavefolder and chorus, with some dynamics stuff that makes it a bit more flexible.
• Cymbal Legio — I’m not into drum modules generally, but this one is just fun to abuse and I can see myself creating noisy drones with it, or using it to modulate other stuff.
• Marimba Legio and Snare Legio — both of these sound quite nice to me, for different reasons. Offhand I’m not sure if I will have a use for them in my music.
• Bitcrush Legio — crushing and downsampling like you’d expect, but with dithering, some handy dynamics stuff and lowpass filter options that track the downsampling and sound great.

Also they have new t-shirts through Threadless, so I can finally get one in my size.

Saturday morning I got the new Moderna Covid booster, and also a flu shot and Tdap shot. The combination pretty well wiped me out for the rest of the weekend — chills, muscle aches all over, fatigue, elevated heart rate. I was glad to have Labor Day off for a little more recovery time, but even Tuesday morning my Oura ring said I have “major signs of strain” and should take it easy today. (I’d read that the Moderna update is somewhat more effective than Pfizer but has worse initial side effects, and chose that particular tradeoff.)

Our cat Rico, meanwhile, has been having serious digestive issues again. About the same as what he suffered from last fall, which seemed to be resolved by switching him to different probiotics. The problem is, the packaging is the same for their probiotics and their hairball treatment, and I’d accidentally picked up the latter and given that to him for several days. But he’s been back on the probiotics a couple of weeks and it doesn’t seem to be fixing the issue. I’m also transitioning him to a grain-free fish-based food in case it’s either chicken or grains that he has a sensitivity to.

I keep going back and forth about whether to take him to the vet. Last year he had an abdominal ultrasound which didn’t find anything, so it’s not some kind of bowel obstruction or cancer. I’d also think that if he had chronic IBS from a food sensitivity that would have shown up, but maybe not? They were more concerned with tachycardia, which I’m almost certain was due to the stress of going to the vet. But that was the series of events that led to a panic attack about my own heart, and wound up getting the anxiety treated.

[Update: a few fellow cat owners have chimed in elsewhere. IBS or IBD honestly seem likely, with protein allergies apparently being a common cause of them. Based on a description of symptoms, I’d guess colotis particularly. Actual testing for it can be quite expensive, but the most likely effective fix is going to be a diet change and the right probiotics. Since the probiotic I’ve had him on both seems to be less effective now and contains chicken, I’m switching to a hypoallergenic option instead. It can take a month to clear up if that’s it, so it’ll require some patience. If I did go to the vet and they determined what it was for sure, maybe they’d prescribe anti-inflammatory meds temporarily or a course of steroids, maybe not. Either way they’d probably suggest an elimination diet anyway.]

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In the world of music production plugins, this has been a banner year for AI slop. Quantity over quality for sure. Most of these plugins wouldn’t be interesting even if they had been coded by humans — it’s stuff that we have already seen a thousand times before anyway, without any particular quality to distinguish it. I believe that the technical skill required to write DSP code is a very close relative to the knowledge about DSP that leads to original ideas worth pursuing.

I think that same thing must be true in music itself, and visual arts, and writing. “An idea” isn’t enough for a novel — you need a well of inspiration, a vision. Not a spark, but a flame. A plot that makes sense, a setting (place and society and history etc.), characters with motivations and quirks and styles, an overall writing style… thousands upon thousands of creative decisions, large and small, conscious and unconscious.

Anyway, this shit tsunami has made it especially easy for me to stand by my resolution. I’m not really willing to take the effort to wade through the sewer to find the good stuff. There are, currently, two plugins I would maybe consider buying if not for that resolution. One of them has a bug with MPE in Bitwig, which they are blaming on Bitwig despite the fact that the same developers have another one that works fine. The other is a reverb, and though it’s a cool reverb I have plenty of those anyway and would rather get really experienced with a couple of great ones than add more.

Eurorack has bigger barriers to entry, and thus, less garbage. It’s true that there are many brands that make fairly uninspired versions of basic modules that don’t really bring anything new to the table, and there are several that do nothing but clones of open-source Mutable Instruments modules, or unauthorized clones of other brands. There are some firmware DIYers who might or might not use AI assistance for their coding. But there’s a higher ratio of creative stuff — different takes on common functions, integrating paradigms from other formats into Eurorack, or completely novel designs.

Spectraphon was certainly on the more original side. Taking design ideas from two very different Buchla instruments, it married them in a unique way to create something new. But in practice I find myself mostly using the Chaos mode, which is effectively a 2-modulator, 1-carrier FM patch which I reproduced successfully in Bitwig Grid, K-Accumulator, and JF into Odessa, and nearly with Toros Iteritas Alia. (To be fair, there’s also a pitch offset on L/R channels and additional FM from the opposite side, so it can be more complex.) Granted this is super easy to dial in on Spectraphon, but that’s a big flagship module for just that single usage. I am looking to probably replace it in 2027.

A strong candidate for part of that space is Thorn Audio Splines. This is a clever module that acts as an LFO, VCO, envelope, step sequencer and quantizer (with some combinations of functions being semi-independent). There’s real-time CV over KB-spline parameters, which interacts in fun ways with the clipping modes. It accepts Scala files for quantization, which covers a weak spot that MD2 has. And the interface has gotten the highest praise from reviewers. I feel like one of these plus leaving space for its expander and some other interesting thing later in the year, would be a good move for me. But again… that’s for 2027.

Those Magpie knobs from Love My Switches arrived, and… I’m not thrilled.

Don’t get me wrong, they look and feel nice. Extra style points for the almost-matching colors (that Cutoff ring is orange and I bought a red knob). But they are those shiny aluminum knobs similar to Noise Engineering, which reflect glare that obscures which way they’re pointing. And on the silver knobs the white pointers are even trickier to see (I went for “metallic gray” and should have ordered “silver” which have a black pointer).

The glare is actually worse than this from my usual eye level below the knobs (it’s on an almost vertical stand). Maybe if the synth were flat on a table and I was above it there’d be no problem. The same is true of the Noise Engineering knobs.

I found that I didn’t need the brass inserts at all, and in fact the knobs turned less smoothly without them. And also that the hex wrench I have for this is utterly unsuitable for the small spaces (not an L-shape but a bulky multi-wrench thing). And the old knobs were super gross, leaving sticky residue all over my hands. I wish I’d worn rubber gloves!

I also found that Davies 1900h knobs for round shafts also fit (although mine are shiny enough to also glare). Tall Trimmer Toppers from Thonk fit absolutely fine, but look funny because of the small size. Shemp knobs (for T18 knurled shafts) from Love My Switches themselves, also fit fine with no fuss whatsoever. If only I had a spare 23 of them…

With a little more digging I found several options for 90-degree D-shaft knobs on AliExpress, A few brands of mixers use them apparently. So why didn’t I find this before? Sometimes I hate search engines 😛 I found a lot of 45 of these for under $14.

I haven’t noticed parallels between microgenres of music and the incredibly specific way people describe genders. One of those is that none of those labels fits me exactly and I don’t really want to create another one. 🙂

Today’s near miss discovery is dreampunk. It’s basically the major domain of the Dream Catalogue label, centered around the duo 2814 and their many solo projects and collaborations. (Although they do other stuff as well.) I’ve been listening to 2814’s album Birth of a New Day for a few years; apparently that was their one and only breakout success (so far, anyway).

The genre has also been described as “cyberpunk ambient vaporwave”, like the sound of the imagery of Blade Runner and stereotypical rain-drenched-neon-city cyberpunk anime. Mostly cinematic, melodic ambient and field recordings, with production techniques from post-dubstep and related genres, sometimes slow beats, sometimes dreamlike female or robotic vocals. It’s also sometimes kind of like if shoegaze was 100% electronic. And perhaps putting a touch of actual punk attitude in a (prefix)punk, there’s at least sometimes a lo-fi, fast-and-loose production style.

So you can see where that’s adjacent to my music.

(…although, listening to some things tagged “dreampunk”, it’s like any other genre label: it means different things to different people, so if you go looking for it you might find a lot of other stuff. It could be interesting stuff though!)

Enjoy! Notes are here.