About three different conversations on different forums were talking about the Soma Labs Enner last night, and the one that said it was about halfway between a Strega and a Lyra-8 got my attention. I really don’t need another instrument, and after watching videos, I can skip it. It seems more of an instrument to play/explore on its own rather than with other synth gear, a bass, etc.
But that inspired me to fire up the Strega in some of the free time I had this morning before needing to log in to work. Between Strega, Afterneath, and 0-Ctrl I have quite a nice patch going, just a sort of droning loop that I can add subtle variations to with touchplates or small knob movements on one of the 0-Ctrl rows. I’m curious to try that with some bass improvisation, and find out how the Miezo’s pickup reacts to touchplate stuff. I’m looking forward to that as soon as I’m done with work!
I’m planning to submit a couple of tracks for the next Ambient Online this time. It seems like a good time to do it since I’m between albums and exploring the new bass, and some of the vibe I was getting while playing with it and the MIDI Bass plugin and Aalto really lends itself more toward “regular ambient” than my spookier stuff.
Trevor of SubMatrix Audio was kind enough to send me the flipped front panel for BeetTweek — I’m not sure why, but I appreciate it! Let’s call in a beta test, since in the process I found an error in the manual (the nuts around the encoder are 3/16, not 3mm). I do think the knob is better positioned this way, though some people might be offended that flipped mode doesn’t rearrange the jack order, so they’re now DCBA, WZYX instead of ABCD, XYZW 😉
I don’t think I’m cut out for this thing where I have more good Eurorack modules than active rack space for them. So I bought a MyVolts Ripcord to power my 4ms Pod60 via USB. I can put a couple modules in there and run them off a battery, moving the little case out of the way when not needed.
Having finished the four extant books of the Stormlight Archive, I found myself wanting to reread more Cosmere stuff. I chose Warbreaker and then Elantris, since:
- These are standalone books. Nona the Ninth is going to be released in a few days (whoooo!) and I don’t want to be deep in a series when that hits 🙂
- I’ve only read those once each.
- The scenes with certain characters (Zahel, Azure, Nightblood) in Stormlight made me more curious about them. Ditto for the Seon in Stormlight (possibly the only Elantris reference in that series).
- Hoid. In the books written so far, everyone’s favorite worldhopper is far more active and more fun on Roshar than elsewhere, and I couldn’t remember much about his other appearances. But I haven’t encountered him in Elantris yet, and it’s possible he’s not in it at all given that the Cognitive Realm around Sel is supposed to be super messed up.