it begins

I didn’t mention that I bought the Flexshaper, did I? I did, and it arrived yesterday from Glasgow in a relative jiffy. Signal Sounds is a helpful resource to the synth community, and even though I’m unlikely to ever attend any sort of event there or check out their mini-museum of vintage synths, I am happy to support them a bit.

Flexshaper is pretty brilliant in its flexibility. Basically it takes this:

And lets you set the height of each point, to remap the output to something like this:

That’s essentially what the Instruo tanh[3] does, without any control over the actual shape. One could instead choose something more like this:

You can use it to reshape audio or control signals — whether envelopes, LFOs, pitch sequences or whatever. Add saturation or folding, invert signals, make a simple decay envelope into something with an extra bounce. With a mode button and two outputs, it can convert in either direction between unipolar and bipolar signals, or you could use the knob settings to flatten or invert half the signal.

And then there’s the even more clever bit: CV control over each of those five levels. You can alter an envelope shape with a sequence, or alter your waveshaping with an envelope, or set up a sort of waveshaping tremolo with a quadrature LFO (like Filter 8). It’ll even respond at audio rates, but at lower resolution — so that means it’s also a bitcrusher. You can run audio through the “Middle” CV with nothing into the main input if that’s what you want, or even (kinda) fade between the crushed sound and a clipped sound by altering the input level (since quieter signals spend more time in the middle area, and louder signals proportionally less).

Overall I’m quite pleased with the module. I need to play with it a bit more as a relatively simple saturation tool, but I expect I will go ahead and let go of tanh[3] at the appointed time.

And just a little while ago, I pounced on a used Hertz Donut mk2 at a price I liked a lot. I look forward to comparing it to the mk3. I fully expect the mk2 will win, but I will know for sure after a few months with them side by side.

I don’t do this, but I totally did this

The one with the hat? That was me. And I also accept the way it was resolved.

The new year (and decade too, I grudgingly accept) is underway. I’m back at work today. I’m working on those 2020 goals: I started my new gear tracking a few days early, I’m making some effort to not engage with toxic forum threads, and I’ve started basic food journaling using an app called “My Symptoms.” (It’s intended to identify which foods lead to which negative consequences, but still works for my purposes).

I’ve found that, on Ozempic, I’m eating smaller meals. I just feel full sooner — unlike my experience on Byetta a few years ago, where I got “stop eating NOW or you will throw up” signals between one bite and the next. I do feel queasy occasionally, and I hope that will fade soon without any of the rest changing. I haven’t tested my blood sugar in quite some time, but I think I may start because I’m having some moments where it feels like it might be low.

I’ve started listening to The Happiness Lab podcast. I feel like, as with many books on self-help or similar areas, it’s padded a bit with selling you on it (when you’ve already bought it — or in this case, when you’ve started listening to it for free). Maybe bolstering the belief that it works makes it work better, but I often kind of wish they’d get to the point faster. On the other hand, some of the anecdotal stories have been interesting so far. Anyway, I’ll see how this goes.


One of the items on my goals list was to think more about process, technique, intent, etc. above gear. Having heard some really great stuff in the last few days that uses the Ciat-Lombarde Cocoquantus, I felt myself kind of wanting it… but not. It’s a bit expensive, I’d have to figure out where to put it in my setup, and seems to have quite a learning curve. What I would rather do is get the class of sounds I’m liking from it out of gear I already have, which I believe is entirely possible, and refine that into something that flows naturally for me. In my mind, it’s all about lo-fi and somewhat glitchy looping creating a wide ambient bed.

I know, that sounds a bit opposite to my feelings about some other gear, where the experience of using it and the workflow is all-important. But I’m not looking for that new experience or workflow change at this point.