It’s Ja(n/m)uary 7 and I’ve managed to record and post something for each day so far. While I’m generally prolific, starting and finishing something daily is on another level. It’s a musical marathon.
I sold my BeetTweek to a local in person (and we used the short trip to the meeting spot as an excuse to get some Greek food for dinner, cupcakes to make up for not getting them on our birthdays, and the international grocery store).
I’ve got Function and Mini PEG installed now. Function of course is exactly as I remember — great feel and knob ranges, everything just right. Mini PEG is a little on the odd side, but I think it’ll be quite useful. It syncs the total length of a rise/fall cycle to the tempo of an incoming clock, regardless of the shape and curvature. You can get some interesting things happening by combining cycling with the trigger input. Basic usage (which is already quite flexible) is intuitive and needs no manual or cheat sheet, but a look through said manual reveals a bunch of hidden features which honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever use.
I have played a bit with stretching the bounds of hardware/software integration. Warps in VCV Rack as a wavefolder sounds pretty great, but honestly in the context of a mix the difference from the analog folder in Shapeshifter is minimal. With some patching techniques, the latency going into, out of, then back into the DAW can present challenges. I will probably play with the other effects a bit more before deciding whether I want a hardware Warps again — honestly it could just be I miss that sweet glowing knob.
I got Marbles in VCV Rack successfully sequencing Eurorack stuff, but dealing with the routing was a bit awkward; I had to put VCV in a PreFX chain of a Grid device to sort it out, and also carefully tweak levels so the signal coming out of Optx was still one volt per octave. I can’t see myself using it this way on a regular basis, so whether I keep the hardware Marbles depends really on… whether I want to use Marbles in hardware. I just got some good use out of it in today’s Jamuary jam, but I could have easily used 0-Ctrl instead. But I’ll just hold onto it for the foreseeable future, keep working it and decide whether it’s pulling its weight.
In a couple of the jams I’ve been using the Thingamagoop 3000 again, and really enjoying it for drones. I’m glad I never sold it off though it sat idle for a good while — it’s back, baby!