Spectraphon is officially supposed to ship later this week. I have been waiting semi-patiently, only twitching a little bit. Likewise, Bela Gliss is due any minute now. I’ve been occupying myself usefully and not so usefully with other things meanwhile.
I received my Mystic Circuits 0HP Blinkus. It’s a pretty clever little passive circuit with four inputs and four LEDs interconnected in a ring; any jack can be either an input or an output, and it serves as a waveshaper, psuedo-rectifier, psuedo-ringmod, psuedo-logic, psuedo-panner, psuedo-jam-CV-sequences-together-to-make-new-sequences sort of thing. A true chameleon. I wish I’d bought two, and will probably pick up a second if Eli is at KnobCon.
I’ve recorded a couple more tracks, and have some bits ready that might form the backbone of the next.
I’ve been paying more GW2, and have gotten more used to the Reaper playstyle. It’s higher risk than a minion master, but still has fairly decent defense while doing ridiculous amounts of damage very quickly and with style. I’ve eaten dirt a couple of times to nastier Champions due to mistimed spells, and one damage reflection shield (ouch, lots of ouch) but otherwise am kicking ass. I have about 92% world completion at this point, and enough hero points to also fill in a second specialization and switch off, and finally got myself a jackal mount. I went ahead and bought the End of Dragons expansion while it was on sale, but I’ll probably go ahead and do Heart of Thorns first, which I’ve never done with any of my characters, and get the glider and flying mount.
And I’ve been considering future changes to my music setup. I expect Spectraphon is going to replace Akemie’s Castle. I don’t know whether it’ll also displace Shapeshifter and trigger a bit of other shuffling. We’ll see. But on the other side of the desk, I’m kind of thinking BrutePest just isn’t as compelling for me as I’d hoped.
I was kind of thinking about the Lyra-8 again. It’s an expressive and, dare I say, soulful instrument, but the sound itself doesn’t always appeal to me, and there are limited options on board to change it. I let go of it originally because that sound was feeling a bit stale. Since then I’ve heard some musicians who filtered it heavily as well as treating it with other processing, and I could do the same. But what if I could find a different, non-traditional, polyphonic, freely tunable, expressive instrument that had a sound I liked a bit more and was more flexible?
After some research (listening/watching a lot of demos, reading a bunch of forum posts), that’s what the Ciat-Lonbarde Tetrax Organ and Sidrax Organ are. So I’m strongly considering selling off the Minibrute 2S, West Pest, and auxilliary modules for that. Both instruments are played via wooden “barres” with piezo sensors, which are said to be wonderfully touch sensitive and issue separate attack and release stages, each of which controls a tunable oscillator. A “chaos” knob routes FM circularly between barres, while “glitch” inputs reroute the modulation. Sidrax has 7 barres; Tetrax has just 4 but gives separate control over rise and fall. I’m leaning toward the Sidrax though for more melodic options.
My initial fear of this stuff was that it’d be a gateway drug to more banana-format semi-modular gear. But considering what’s out there… I am not too tempted. The other Ciat-Lonbarde instruments, as well as Lorre-Mill and Bugbrand, tend to replicate things I can already do with my current system but in more esoteric and limited ways. I might get (or build) a format jumbler to patch the Sidrax to Eurorack stuff, or just leave it as a standalone.