I am a fan of AIWeirdness.com, but today’s entry is especially relevant.
Neural net names effects pedals
Some of those generated names really hit the mark.
I’m down to two pedals in my setup — Dark World and Tensor — but I would totally be down for an Akahashi Harp of Confusion.
(Yeah, I live in St. Louis, and hockey fever is rampant right now. Every time I see an “LGB!” sign I want to change it to “LGBT.” Otherwise I don’t care one way or the other and find it all kind of amusing. I just thought it was a clever-ish pun on the subject at hand:)
The Sad State of Happiness in the United States and the Role of Digital Media
This chart will probably surprise no one:
(I do notice a pretty big additional drop in happiness in 2016. I can think of something that happened in 2016 which affected the happiness of a lot of Americans, but that’s not what this is about.)
This one has some non-surprises and a few big jolts, though.
I (and probably most people) need to prioritize adequate sleep. (It’s supposed to be better for blood sugar, anxiety and other things as well.)
Watching TV news (and radio news) is positively correlated with happiness, even though TV overall is not? As is homework, a little? And people still go to video arcades?
Reading books isn’t on here at all. I wish that surprised me.
The generic “leisure time alone” counts as a phone activity?
But the big one here is that listening to music (marked as a “phone activity” because that’s how kids do it) has the strongest correlation with negative happiness. I’d probably be a lot sadder too, if I had to listen to much current pop music…
But seriously: there are notes about correlation vs. causation in the article. It’s possible that listening to music has the strongest reverse causation, being the thing that’s easiest to do when you’re depressed. The circumstantial evidence pointing toward social media and “screen time” leading to unhappiness really doesn’t seem to apply to music.
Is there anything I can or should do about this as a musician? Am I contributing in some small way, despite everything, to the unhappiness of the human race? Or am I making things a little better for those having a rough time? (To quote A Closed and Common Orbit, “…she taught Jane about something called music, which was a weird bunch of sounds that had no point but made things feel a little better.”)
Okay, it makes things better for me, at least when I keep the right frame of mind… and I am pretty sure that my music isn’t secretly being listened to by millions of 8th and 10th graders. I’ll keep going 🙂
My Filter 8 arrived yesterday. I’m pretty sure I made the right choice (instead of keeping QPAS or trading for Three Sisters). It’s as good for basic filter and VCO duties as I thought, is wicked cool as an LFO, and it turns out to be pretty great at waveshaping too. This morning I had 20 minutes to play with it before heading to work, and I had it turning a simple sine wave into an 80’s “brass” synth sound.
And then I happened to spot someone selling their DPO for a fair bit less than I’d seen elsewhere. Reader, I did not close the tab, sit on my hands and wait for Knobcon as previously planned. I bought the DPO and put a couple things up for sale that were previously “trade only.” The risk here is minimal; I know I love the sound of the DPO from other peoples’ recordings, and I know from previous module experience that the essentials of its design are exactly what I wanted. So Synth Farm 2.2 is now settled.
The current album project, now likely to be titled Internal Reflections, has 51 minutes of completed work. I could certainly stop now and move on to mastering, but I think one more song will do. I’ll get that in before the DPO arrives as a sort of chapter close.
The new headphones and mini Bluetooth receiver for the office are working out great. I don’t know why semi-open back headphones aren’t more popular — the sound and comfort are fantastic, there’s still enough isolation for anything that doesn’t require close mic recording or jet engine level noise cancellation, and they clearly don’t have to be expensive either. I’m currently using them to listen to the 4th Ambient Online Themed Compilation, Death and Rebirth, on which I have a couple of tracks. It’ll make for a chill day of listening.
I just learned about 3 hours ago that today is Drone Day. That is, a day to celebrate drone music, rather than the flying kind (there’s an International Drone Day for that too).
I don’t think there’s anything locally going on for it, but then I didn’t look either. Instead, I made a thing.
If there are drone purists, they might scoff at some of what’s going on. They might say “this is more like dark ambient, not really drone.” That’s okay. I still like it.
For many years now, I’ve thought about getting a tattoo. Mostly not seriously, but sometimes more seriously. Indecision about what to get and whether I really wanted it has always held me back.
At one point I was interested in “invisible” tattoos that glow under blacklight. I like the symbolism inherent in a hidden thing that only reveals itself under certain circumstances. The downside of those is that they’re not really “invisible” because the scars still show, apparently.
When my spouse did the cool pyrography design for my modular case, I thought the central element of it, inverted, would make a pretty cool tattoo design. It’s got a star of course (gotta have that), and spirals that are somewhat reminiscent of both wind and my spouse’s own tattoo. It bears some coincidental similarity to the “Sesa Wo Suban” symbol which apparently means “transform your character,” and also to symbols for “void” in various fictional settings.
I’ve got some other thoughts about symbols that are personally meaningful that would work for a tattoo. I doubt I should cram all of them into a single design, though. (And once again I shake a metaphorical fist at Starbucks for ruining any combination of mermaid and star I might have otherwise run with…)
The reason I’m thinking of this now is I’m reading Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit, wherein one of the main characters has a fascinating conversation with a tattoo artist. What resonates with her — and with me! — is the idea of a tattoo as unifying mind and body. Turning a mental image into a physical one; exercising some control over a thing that doesn’t always cooperate with our mental images.
And then coincidentally, someone on the Lines forum started a thread about tattoos (from artists’ perspective). And I overheard someone at lunch talking about getting a tattoo, too. Bauder-Meinhof phenomenon or not, I was paying attention.
Of course, the most likely outcome is I’ll think about symbols for a few days and then not make any decision about a tattoo. You never know, though…
…or I could end up selling the QPAS to someone and turning it around into a Joranalogue Filter 8, which ticks all the right boxes for interesting filters and then some, sounds great and I’m pretty confident will not get traded for some other filter in the future.
One of the keys to this choice is, when it’s self oscillating it can be either a VCO or an LFO — and it has 8 outputs at different phases that can be patched back into itself to change the shape. And it also goes slow enough to act as a sort of resonant slew limiter for CV signals. Fun times! And it has both exponential FM (which most filters do) and linear (which most don’t) and a hold function (which none do, and is a bit more like the first Tides version).
The Reface CS is set up and I’ve whiled away a few hours messing around with it. It is indeed fun! The warm fuzzy glowing reviews are only a little overstated. The synth’s limitations as I see them are:
That aside, it is really good at some things. Especially supersaw pads with the phaser lending it a lush 70s “string machine” sound, “singing” organ-like tones with the filter resonance, and some unusual tones with the sync, ringmod and FM types. Right now I feel like I’m going to need to rotate and jiggle things to get the Reface to fit in with my vibe — but that’s a challenge I welcome. The keyboard feels better to me as a controller than the Microbrute.
I dug up my “DJ” “laptop” stand and have the Microbrute hovering above the Reface, but unless I want to steal an input from the modular, right now I can’t use them both simultaneously. I had a dodgy little analog-to-SPDIF converter that theoretically should work with my audio interface, but Maschine has a max of 8 inputs anyway for some reason. If, over time, I find I’m just not using one or the other of the keyboards I’ll likely move it upstairs to the Jamming Room.
Those headphones at work are just not getting better. I can listen to some things without too much disappointment, but others I really can’t — and it just feels like I’m wearing buckets on my ears. I get why people called headphones “cans” back in the day when they were all closed-back liked this.
But all will be well. My favorite pair of headphones, which I’ve used at home for years now for music production and everything else, is the Superlux HD688B with a velour ear pad replacement. If I spent 6 times as much I might get slightly more accurate sound reproduction, but I’m totally used to these. Well, I found a barely-used pair with the pads already replaced, and also a tiny Bluetooth receiver I can attach right to the thing and stay wireless at work.
I’ve finished a first skim through the big Curtis Roads book, and gleaned a few things I might want to play with in the future. I’ll do another pass just to make sure I’m not missing anything since I don’t need to return it for another month. A lot of the book covers material I’m already familiar with, or am not interested in personally working with, and a lot of it is oriented toward academic experimentation and technologies from the 90s and earlier. Overall it was worth looking at but I’m glad I didn’t pay full price to own my own copy.
While I’m overall not planning on doing more buying/selling until after Knobcon at least, I don’t think I said anything about trading. 😀 I went ahead and put up a very specific “have these, will trade only for these” list, and as I did it, realized I kind of miss the Three Sisters filter. Its general sound was my favorite among them, it’s straightforward yet has a few neat tricks, and does FM and self-oscillation really well. I’ve got a potential trade lined up for my QPAS, and if that goes through I’ll just stick with that for my filter needs.
Back at KnobCon 2017, among all the gear I tried, aside from Natural Gate the thing that stuck with me the most was how pleasant the Yamaha Reface CS was. It uses the AN1X virtual analog engine, and relatively simple controls and no patch memory in the style of a classic synth. My impression at the time was that it just can’t go wrong, can’t be made to sound bad; it was pure fun to play and tweak. That’s what its owners and reviewers say too — you play with it a bit and it just takes you somewhere that you want to curl up inside and play with it for hours. A feel-good instrument.
It had a few things going against it in the market:
I found it at that discount price though, and it fits within my “I’ve still spent negative dollars” budget. So there’s one on the way.
Whether I’ll attempt to keep both it and the Microbrute with a 2-tier stand, or make them compete for my favor, remains to be seen. Microbrute went from being used in 1/3 of my recordings for quite a long time to much more rarely used recently, but I still have a pretty high opinion of it.
The current album project has been ticking along a bit more slowly than I often go. Much of the blame goes to illness; I “got over” my cold a couple of weeks ago but a lingering cough and chest congestion has put a damper on everything.
I’ve been occasionally reading up on bits of subject matter related to the theme, and writing a thing that I keep trimming back. A whole lot can be said about conformity, individualism, authenticity, their less healthy aspects in our society, how it relates to music and what the actual relevance is when you’re trying to use it as an album theme. But my goal here is to write an album, not a book.
I’ve been playing a fair bit of Guild Wars 2, instead. It’s been a couple of years or more, so I deleted all my old characters and started over, finally settling on a condition Mesmer. I also noticed I had 97% of the Steam achievements in Bejeweled 3, and maybe that’ll be the first (possibly only) game I ever hit 100% with. Heh. I don’t want to get too much in the habit of gaming instead of making music, though.
My spouse did the interlibrary loan thing and snagged me a copy of Curtis Roads’ The Computer Music Tutorial for a month or so. I knew there was a lot in it, but didn’t realize it was a five-pound, 1200+ page tome. While some of what it covers I’m already familiar with, there are a lot of methods I’d heard of but didn’t really understand, or things that have been tried but for various reasons never became popular methods. It doesn’t get into deep details of implementation, nor explosions of impenetrable calculus — it stays on a level to inspire patches, experimentation and insight. (Oh, that’s why exponential FM works that way…). I’m taking a few photos and notes as I go. It remains to be seen whether I decide I’ll need to own my own copy.
That new audio interface is working out just fine. I even found I can use the Mutable Instruments style Rogan knobs on it, so now the main volume stands out clearly from the row of smaller knobs.
I had to replace my headphones at work — cheap QY Bluetooth earbuds, which got all intermittent in the left channel. I made the mistake of going for closed-back headphones, and I’m not sure I like them. It’s a bit like holding seashells up to your ears, or perhaps buckets. The semi-open ones I have at home are fantastic, with clear highs and solid bass and just the right amount of isolation where I can still hear some of what’s going on outside them. I’ll keep using these to see if I get used to the differences, and because I don’t want to immediately buy another pair of headphones. They’re pretty comfortable, at least.
My current musing on gear is, I’ll probably stick to my 2.2 plan with the DPO. It strikes me as being an instrument, with a particular character that I like, and that feel of a classic complex oscillator. Also it conveniently needs a bit less current on the -12V rail than my other options. Generate 3 would be awesome I’m sure, but I really feel like I couldn’t go wrong with DPO.
Okay, that seems dubious. Philadelphia is about the same latitude as Madrid, Sardinia, and Ankara, while Berlin is about the same latitude as Saskatoon, or halfway between Minsk and Kiev. In the States we kind of forget how far north European cities are compared to our own.
But it’s definitely not sunny at the national park where we were going to camp this weekend with my parents. (Which has a latitude near Málaga, Tehran, Nagano, and San Jose.) The forecast calls for tornadoes and major flooding. So that’s called off. Boo 🙁
But about Berlin: its Superbooth is by far the biggest synth þing of the year at any latitude. The announcements, press releases, Instagram teasers, and hype trains of shiny new objects with knobs on them — both from exhibitors and others strategically timing their releases — began earlier this week. So those of us not in Berlin are now down to waiting on video demos.
There are a lot of clever designs and a fair amount of filling in waiting niches. For the most part I am just nodding and moving on, but a few items have caught my attention.
Current plans:
My tentative Synth Farm 2.2 plan before any of the new stuff was announced, was simply to trade Plaits for a DPO, and rearrange the case a bit for better ergonomics and flow. There’d be 4HP of space left and wiggle room for other possible substitutions. With the options of Generate 3 and/or Godspeed+ instead, there’d of course be more free space.
Not much else going on now other than
