The best thing I saw online yesterday was some advice to a musician full of self-doubt:
destroy the notion you are competing.
I think it’s great advice for all sorts of things in life. Driving would be much more pleasant if nobody on the road felt like they had something to prove, for instance.
Oddly, I kind of feel like this applies to the Olympics… possibly the most competitive thing ever. It makes me happy that athletes at this level, under this much intense pressure, are willing to say “nope, for mental health reasons I am going to bow out now.” Far from cowardice, I feel like this is a much more important kind of strength.
My TipTop Fold Processor arrived yesterday and I had a little bit of a go with it. It’s got a very different tone from the folder in Shapeshifter — not really as nice, a bit buzzier and with more clear emphasis on some harmonics. But useful for some things. The real magic comes in modulating it, and/or from the divisions on the SubDiv output. It’s a simple patch: wavefolder output goes through a comparator, turning into pulse waves, binary essentially. Then those pulses go through flip-flops to divide them by 2, then 4, then 8, and you can mix them together. Thanks to some odd harmonics and just the extra “bumps” in the signal generated by wavefolding, the divisions are not necessarily octaves below the original signal and can kind of crawl around relative to each other in the coolest ways. It’s a great way to thicken up and complexify sound.
It’s DC-coupled too, so an envelope run through it can generate partially synchronized but unusual gate patterns on the Subdiv out and simultaneous smooth wobbles on the main out. And that’s a good time. 🙂