Starthief

resolutions for 2026

It’s getting to be about that time, I guess.

Take care of myself.

Mental and physical health can’t really be separated. There is no system or organ in the body that works in isolation. There is no aspect of life or habits which doesn’t have a two-way, full duplex relationship with health and happiness. This lesson was really driven home for me in 2025.

One thing I should be specific about: I need to be vigilant about maintaining my blood sugar. I think since getting a good A1C number I might have let this slip a little. My blood sugar has been generally lower and I’ve often taken less than my previous dose of fast insulin at many meal times, depending on what I’m about to eat, and experience more noticeable (but not too extreme) lows. But I’ve also thrown caution to the wind and had a lot of carbs/sugar at a time, a few times, as well. Consistency and stability would be better.
Cultivate wonder.

I think wonder is one of the best forms of joy, because it’s so close to both curiosity and gratitude. If apprehension is the dark side of mystery and uncertainty, wonder might be its light side. I can indulge in wonder by seeking out what I read, watch, listen to, where we go for vacations/fun, and with the music that I create. (I’m not saying my dark ambient tendencies are suddenly going to turn to saccharine fluffiness. There’s wonder in the shadows and the night and the deeps too!)
“No New Gear Year.”

This happens to be the name of a Discord community. It’s not strictly a “buy nothing” pledge, but more about deeper familiarity with the tools we already have. And this particular resolution of mine isn’t necessarily to join that group (though it might be good and I’ll probably do it).

I don’t have a problem with so-called GAS — not a distraction problem, nor a budget problem. But I do have a lot of amazing oscillators, more than adequate sequencing and modulation sources, excellent controllers, a fine set of filters and effects, a set of really nice reverb pedals and a dizzying array of software synths and effects. I’m spoiled for choice, and it might be best to not expand that collection further for a while and just dig in with it.

I do have my Walk 4 preorder, and I am going to follow through on my intent to pick up K-Accumulator and explore the heck out of it. I’ll allow myself to consider Katowice negotiable for free space, plus the 8HP that’s already free… but I can also just leave this alone. After all, I might want to put the Legio back in especially if there’s new firmware for it.

I simply don’t need more of any other sort of hardware or software. I will allow myself to maybe pick up other software plugins but I want to be super discriminating about them. Instead of thinking “this is really cool, look what it does!” I would rather think “yeah but look what all of these other things do.”

And that’s it. It’s enough, and honestly #1 encompasses quite a lot on its own.

declassified

I’ve used Noise Engineering’s Granulita Versio firmware as a beta tester since the summer, and listed as “REDACTED” on three albums. Happy to be able to give it its proper name now.

Granulita and Lacrima have been tied as my favorite Versio firmware for half the year. I don’t know what I’ll do when a new option comes along…

Granulita is a fun combination of granulizer and arpeggiator. In the chiptune days if you wanted chords, you’d play a fast arpeggio that sort of fooled the ear into hearing a chord — here you can overlap multiple grains that blur together into one, and/or use the built-in and very vibey reverb. Or you can leave it choppy. Or you can just not mess with the pitch at all, and still get choppy, fluttery or smeared-out, faraway textures. Or you can sequence or modulate the pitch, which is sampled for each individual grain, and get some fun psuedo-chorus and chords and textures that way as well.

While it’s not as fully featured as, say, Beads or Arbhar or the like, I’ve been using it more than Beads. It just has a nice sound and feel to it, even when you don’t mess with the pitch.

I have got my two Versios next to each other once again, after rearranging my stuff. I made room for K-Accumulator, and consolidated small blank panels into one 8HP space in case something else must-have comes along later. (In fact I could go to 18HP easily enough with minor rearranging, if I decide to let go of Katowice. But I won’t burn that bridge until I’m standing on it.)

4ms’s Pod 60 claims to have room for 33mm deep modules, but you can’t really trust the depths listed on ModularGrid. Some of them count the PCB. Some of them count the power header. And some of them actually count the power header with a ribbon cable plugged in, which is the important bit. You just have to try it. Luckily, I was able to fit Nibbler (listed as 28mm) and Drezno (listed as 20mm but it barely fits!) in the Pod.

Perfect Circuit has preorders open for the next K-Accumulator run, but… I just don’t trust preorders from them after my past history with them. So I’m waiting on the newsletter notification and buying direct. It’s okay if I don’t get one right away, it’s not like I am lacking in exciting musical tools 🙂

There have been internet rumors that Chump is being treated for Alzheimer’s and that’s why he’s needed MRIs. (You don’t do “routine” MRIs to check general health, because it’s far too easy to find false positives in a healthy person. You do them to check a specific area for specific problems that you already suspect.) But some doctors would like to point out that his symptoms aren’t Alzheimer’s-like; they resemble frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

https://frankgeorge8675309.substack.com/p/dammit-its-not-alzheimers-heres-why-c9f

I find the argument fairly convincing. I won’t say alarming, at this point, because we have known he’s a narcissist who behaves inappropriately for years, and also that it’s no longer only “rich spoiled selfish evil asshole with a persecution complex” but also increasingly out of touch with reality. Frankly the more alarming aspect is how long his people have been willing to run with the absurdity.

so fancyyyyy

Last night someone bought the last module I had up for sale. But I’m already planning more changes…

and Fancyyyyy Synthesis teased a new “21st century complex oscillator” which is super intriguing – me on November 12

Behold!

There’s another video, which starts to give a little bit of a feel for how some of the individual features work — but it’s not a deep dive and there are a lot of things to cover. Perhaps more importantly, it gave a clearer representation of the sound when there’s not a ton of things going on… and that sound is very nice indeed.

I am intrigued… enchanted.

It’s definitely a different approach than Shapeshifter, yet there is some of that vibe. The harmonic frequency shift in particular reminds me of a couple of my favorite wavetables from that module.

One might wonder at first why the two extra modulation sources are built in — the universal function generator (UFG) and delta-sigma pattern generator. It’d be a smaller, simpler module without them, and might run on one Daisy board and power cable instead of the two that it has. But I suspect the designer felt they were important, and they do seem to be well integrated — the pitch controller can manage the osc, UFG or both, and many of the CV inputs can have either of them assigned with a button press. The UFG might be very good for pulsar synthesis for instance. They haven’t really covered this section in videos yet.

The initial production run sold out within a few hours… which gives me more time to make decisions about how I can make space for this, and to watch more videos and get more information. But I’m pretty sure I’m going to go for it.

So the challenge is, how to make room for its 32HP? I had a few alternatives in mind, with varying degrees of reluctance. I patched up the modular last night to have a listen to Akemie’s Castle (safe), Spectraphon (safe, and also I recorded what will be the beginning of the next album!), and RYK Algo…

Algo is certainly nice. But comparing it to Akemie’s Castle, I just think Castle has more charm and its character is harder to replicate. Algo has some friction in its usage which I’ve generally felt has been worth dealing with, and Castle has none.

That’s 18HP, plus 2 for the vented blank that helps me work around its stereo output issue. Auza Wave Packets is another 16HP, and it’s something I’ve pondered letting go of before but chose not to because of its F-Sync input. K-Accumulator has a similar feature.

Let’s remember I went for Algo because I felt like it would approximate what I was doing with Shapeshifter but offer more flexibility. In practice, I can get into similar spaces with Spectraphon and with Toros Iteritas Alia (which is also going to feature in this first track for the next album). And I think K-Acc will also get into that space.

So I think that’s my plan. It’s not immediate, because like I said, K-Acc is currently sold out. But it’s probably something I’ll do when the next production run starts selling.

Meanwhile, it’s nice to get the inspiration to record something with what I have, based on the announcement of a new module. Anxiety left me feeling pretty down and not really wanting to start a project over the last several days, and now that bad streak is broken.

And then there’s the surprise Absynth 6. I have not used its predecessor in many years, but I remember it as a wonderfully weird experimental synth with fun resonator stuff… and a fairly horrible, ugly interface like a WinAmp skin made by an edgy 12 year old, which made it kind of a drag to use. Its previous update was in… 2009 I think? And Native Instruments had said it was never going to be updated, and its designer moved on to other things.

Apparently they had a change of heart, and it’s back. With a fresh interface, VST 3, MPE, something-something-Apple-I-don’t-care, a few new filters, higher quality granular oscillators, an actually clever AI-based preset browser, and some overall spit and polish.

I will definitely check out a demo. But right now Bitwig is open in the background, waiting for me to get off work so I can put that recording together, and I don’t want to disturb it. 😉

UPDATE: aaaaaaaaaargh. Bitwig somehow managed to delete my saved sample of the Spectraphon patch. And my cloud backup software hasn’t been backing up for the past few months.

maybe?

I think maybe the Lexapro is starting to help a bit? Not 100%, but yesterday was a better day overall and this morning has been more or less okay. From what I can find online, many people do start feeling a bit of relief after a couple of weeks. The full effect can take more like 6-8 weeks, which is why my primary care doc wanted to do a followup around then.

The Things We Make was interesting all the way through. The overall lesson one can take from it is that engineering works with what it has — available resources, uncertainties, and specific needs — to create or improve something. The question of “best” is a thorny one. Math and science are tools to eliminate unfruitful design directions, but creativity, insight, persistence and rules of thumb are key. Diversity is incredibly important. The “lone genius” story is a myth, but there are many stories of brilliant engineers that just don’t get told. And neither Edison nor Tesla invented the light bulb — in fact Edison’s bulb wasn’t even the best in its time.

I’ve started Lilli Taylor’s Turning to Birds, because the ebook was on sale and the description sounded like it could be a fun read. The author is an actress who started birding, and found a lot of personal lessons in the process of observing avian behavior. I think birds are kind of neat but I don’t have that specific enthusiasm — but a well-told story of someone geeking out on a particular subject can definitely be charming, so I thought I’d give it a chance. And who knows, maybe I’ll pay more attention to the birds next time I’m on a walk. Once the weather starts to cooperate, that is… we’re having a string of very cold days, though last week’s snow did have a chance to mostly melt off.

This is day 10 on Lexapro, and though it isn’t unexpected, I’m disappointed that it hasn’t kicked in yet. I think the ashwaganda was helping, because stopping it has made the anxiety a bit worse again. I am coping with it as patiently as I can. There’s 11 more days until I see the psych nurse.

It’s… wearying, grinding. I think right now that’s worse than the mini-panics and sore muscles and digestive issues.

That “exhaler” arrived yesterday and my first try with it was the opposite of comforting. I’ve found this with some other breathwork and Qi Gong stuff, especially if I feel like I have to synchronize with someone else; I can feel my heart pounding harder rather than calming down. Belly breathing while lying down, and some other things, are fine though. Go figure.

After my research into tVNS devices, I started getting really obnoxious ads on my phone for one particular brand. It promised “brain orgasms”, drastic weight loss, specific percentage decreases in things like depression and inflammation, and had a comparison chart to Ozempic. Two problems here:

It makes the whole thing seem less credible, like it’s just quackery and a dumb fad. There is actual science behind these devices in general. This specific device is doing a couple of things differently — and some of the reviewers think it’s more effective than the others. One particular “this one is junk science” claim is coming from a competitor, so one has to be skeptical of the skepticism. The company has a high TrustPilor score but also a lot of complaints on Reddit about return requests being ignored. It’s hard to know who who to trust (more on that in general below).
I was served those ads relentlessly by a puzzle game I had installed, and I shouldn’t have been. I have all the options set on my phone & Google account to NOT use personalized ad targeting, and when I was browsing for that stuff I was in incognito mode which is my default for sites I don’t already know. I reset the advertising ID on my phone and that seems to have cleared it up. But I also uninstalled that particular game, because I’ve really gotten a lot less patient about having to see ads in between levels. I long for the days when the Play Store for Android was full of free and ad-free stuff.

I may have declared a favorite effects plugin just a little too soon. Create Digital Music had a feature on ADPTR Utopia, a unique spectral reverb, and I gave it a try. It really impressed me, with results ranging from beautiful ambience to impressively solid thickening to some rhythmic enhancement and weird stuff. Thanks I guess to the two-month long phenomenon of “Black Friday” it was on sale, and I picked it up.

It’s certainly not a typical reverb, and probably not a slap-it-on-everything effect but I may actually like it more than FutureVerb. And I do like FutureVerb quite a bit.

I have managed to sell most of the gear I was trying to sell, without yet resorting to Reverb or eBay. Had a weird experience with one thing though. The buyer claimed that I needed to give my name and click on a link to receive payment — which of course sounds like a scam, and I reported it to PayPal for phishing. But then a few hours later, I got the actual payment, an explanation that he was trying to use an app to pay, and everything went entirely smoothly afterward. My guess is, the app itself wasn’t legit, or else PayPal is doing something really foolish with their app. In any case, happy ending.

just a nibble

Schlappi Engineering Nibbler arrived yesterday and I’ve taken it for a couple of spins.

I’m glad I went for this rather than just a plain shift register. My very first patch was just plugging Just Friends outputs into various inputs — the gates, clock, shift, reset etc. — and playing with Intone, at audio rate. It created a wonderful variety of timbres — noise, obvious PWM stuff, sounds that would switch states periodically, etc. The dual R2R outputs with phase shift switches can generate some surprisingly nice stereo as well.

As a looping melody maker or rhythmic source it’s also fun too of course. As it turns out, the VCV Rack version that I have been playing with for a few days has a couple of incorrect behaviors, so some of the tricks I’d taught myself don’t quite apply to the hardware. But it makes logical sense (which it should, given that it’s a logic module) and the hardware is no less capable.

The anxiety seems to be easing off, with yesterday mostly being a really good day. But I had some discomfort this morning and wound up waking up early again.

Aside from medications and therapy, meditation and breathing exercises etc. there are a few tools which claim to help with anxiety. I’ve been looking into those. Some are no doubt snake oil or massively overpriced, and some companies like to flood the internet with paid influencers and “reviewers” who only parrot the marketing text, so I’ve been trying to sort all of that out.

One of them is simply a little tube, much like a straw or tiny flute, that you wear on a neck chain like jewelry and use for breathing exercises. It slows down exhalation, which can be calming. From what I’ve seen online it works pretty well, but a lot of people think the original one is overpriced if nifty. It was on sale at a more reasonable price, but then I found a cheaper (and neat-looking rainbow titanium) imitator online and decided that might be worth throwing a few bucks at to try out. There are also some electronic “exhalers” which help time breathing exercises, but those cost more and aren’t something I’d be likely to carry with me.

There are also tVNS (transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation) devices. These are non-invasive gizmos that give you a minor electrical jolt, much like TENS for back pain, intending to stimulate the vagus nerve. This runs from the brain (near the ears) down through the neck, chest and to the GI tract. It’s associated with the parasympathetic nervous system — the one that calms you — and regulation of heart rate, inflammation, etc. There are a lot of devices that make a lot of claims, and… some of them seem to be fairly legit. The worst review was from someone with no anxiety issues, who drinks and sometimes has hangover-related sleep issues, and also people reviewing an earlier version of a neck-worn device that was simply too big for some people. Also the experience of using such a device is apparently a bit weird, which given my experience with TENS is not a surprise. The vagus nerve is also said to be stimulated by deep breathing exercises, humming or singing, and other activities/techniques. So I’m not immediately rushing to buy such a device, but I’m curious what the psych nurse thinks about them.

we ain’t buying it

I only heard of this one this morning. But this was already the first year where I completed 100% of my online Christmas shopping without giving Amazon a single dime. (Is it weird to be proud of that? I have been on a sort of weak, semi-boycott of Amazon for quite some time, having dropped Prime — but I still tended to buy stuff from them if it was cheaper than elsewhere (which it often is) and did a lot of Christmas shopping there every year.) I also gave my relatives a non-Amazon wishlist which includes independent bookstores, small businesses, Bandcamp, etc.

This boycott targetting Home Depot because they ICE raids on their own employees got me researching the alternatives:

I will be avoiding Menards in the future, because their owner is a Trump buddy, union buster, and donated to Koch Brothers stuff in the past.
ACE stores around here aren’t great — okay for tools or fasteners but not the best choice for garden stuff, lumber etc. They donate quite a bit to Republicans and almost nothing to Democrats — but most of their stores are independently owned.
Lowe’s is something of a mixed bag. Like HD, they have a PAC that has historically donated about 70% to Republicans and 30% to Democrats. But in 2024 their employees supported Harris twice as much as Trump, and the total political donations are fairly small for such a large chain. Their executives just tend not to make those kinds of donations themselves. Also in 2024 they turned a little bit chickenshit in terms of DEI (“for legal reasons” or in response to a conservative boycott threat depending on who you ask), though they do still support it. They also stopped sponsoring stuff like (Pride) parades at the same time. Still, they come out looking less bad than HD, so I guess this is going to be my choice from now on, for the most part.
Harbor Freight, like ACE, is mostly about tools. Not super high quality tools, just “gets the job done but may not last forever” stuff in my experience. But their owners/employers donate overwhelmingly to Democratic causes. The nearest store isn’t very nearby for us though.

solutions

My doctor appointment was yesterday. For all that I stressed over it, rehearsed it, and made myself stop rehearsing it over the last couple of weeks, and then worked up a bunch of nervousness about it in the couple of hours prior to it… it was easy. I probably didn’t talk to the doctor for more than ten minutes. The nurse asked me some questions while filling out a form (probably the official evaluation). The doctor had me talk about it a bit, asked very few questions, and diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) — no surprise at all. She prescribed Lexapro, which is a usual first-line treatment for GAD because it has relatively few side effects and tends to work well for many people. She said it was good that I had an appointment with a therapist, and had me schedule a follow-up visit in eight weeks. That was it.

I stopped taking the ashwaganda supplement because it and Lexapro might interact, or the effect might stack up too much. There isn’t evidence that they do, but there haven’t been enough studies to show they don’t. Too much seratonin in your brain (like too much of anything) is bad too. The Lexapro will take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to really take effect, but just being on it and being in the process of addressing my anxiety, already makes it easier to tolerate the symptoms and calm down the worries.

Also the reassurance that my heart rate and blood pressure were both fine, even while I was sitting nervously in a doctor’s office, has been very helpful.

Today’s my birthday. It doesn’t seem to be something to be excited about anymore, but hey, some well wishes and going to a nice dinner are pleasant things. 🙂

We’re now in that time of year when we inevitably look back. I’ll start with my list of goals/quasi-resolutions for the year…

1. Keep my head held high and my joy intact.
Yeah, definitely had some trouble with this one at times, at least the “keep” part of it. I’ll say instead, I’ve been able to restore the joy. When I got knocked down, I got up again…

2. Do not obey in advance, do not self-censor.
I don’t think I did the best at this either. I got scared. In my defense, it was scary. Anxiety or no, I think it’s gotten less scary since the blue wave in the election and the evidence that even other Republicans are now distancing themselves from TFG.

3. Trump has no power over me. He is poison.
This ties into #1. I definitely did let the news bother me several times. But remembering this was still a useful strategy.

4. Donate to trans causes.
I have been.

5. People are wrong on the internet, it’s not my job to fix them.
I *have* been better about this one in 2025, I think.

6. Gear:
I had some specific plans here, which (naturally) wound up changing. I did stick to “no more desktop synths” and didn’t get any more controllers. But I did get into effect pedals, and did make some software purchases on a whim. No actual regrets.

7. Get the deck taken care of.
We had to DIY it, but that’s done.

8. Clean up and organize some around the house
Well… we did take care of the living room floor, and have maintained it by keeping Yankee out. We did get a pantry that helped organize the kitchen a little better. But we didn’t have the spoons to get done everything we wanted to.

9. Walk, maybe swim.
I did walk some, when the weather was friendly enough. The neighborhood swimming pool turned out to be more for kids than adults and we didn’t wind up getting memberships anywhere else.

I am only now beginning to ponder goals/resolutions for next year. Take care of myself is certainly one.

The quick summary of what happened this year in my life:

got more in touch with… whatever my gender identity is
shaved off my beard/mustache and kept them off (and geeked out a bit about shaving soap)
reacted to a lot of bad political news
got my blood sugar down to 6.5
saw a total lunar eclipse
got lots of home repairs done
went to the emergency room with chest pain that turned out to be nothing dangerous
picked up a new approach/technique in modular synthesis
played a lot of Guild Wars 2 and Soulstone Survivors
took my family on a loooong road trip to Maine
read… a lot
kept making music, listening to music, thinking about music, writing stuff about music etc.

I’ll do favorite new stuff of 2025 too…

Software synth: Kontrast. Runner-ups: Sine Machine, E370 for VCV Rack.

Software effect: Futureverb. Runner-up: Big Swarma.

Eurorack module: Multimod. Runner-up: Mimetic Digitwolis.

Other hardware: Mesmeriser. Runner-up: Slöer

Book series: Sir Callie, The Shadow (Wake of Vultures etc.), The Witch King

Standalone fiction: Chlorine, The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, High Vaultage, The Kindest Embrace If Firm Enough Can Suffocate

Nonfiction: In Transit, So Many Stars, Trans/Rad/Fem, The Audible Past

Albums: Belief Defect Desire & Discontent, Abul Mogard Quiet Places, Bowery Electric Bowery Electric (hey it was new to me)

My own album: Suspension (at least if you ask me this morning)

fresh air, but chilly

Partially to help with the anxiety, and partially just because it’s good for me and I like doing it, and entirely because the weather has been much more suitable recently, I’ve been walking a bit more. My favorite, the Mallard Lake trail, as well as the local park which isn’t nearly as picturesque but is a much closer and more casual walk.

Here’s some photos from yesterday. It was 47 degrees, damp and windy, which I made it a bit more effort than the previous week (when it was mid-50s to low 60s and I almost didn’t work up a sweat on the 2.6 mile loop). I’ll still take it over 80+ degrees though.

I’m not a great photographer by any means, just a casual with a phone camera — this didn’t quite capture the light and mist like I’d hoped. This isn’t too far after my starting point, the Lakehouse Bar & Grill parking lot where walkers and bike riders often start.

This probably wasn’t the biggest leaf around, but still almost a foot across.

Every once in a while you’ll see deer in this area, but it’s slightly more likely in the unpaved “back half” which gets less human activity.

Big bridge (MO-364 aka Olive Blvd) and small bridge. This leg of the trail that runs parallel to the road is shared with the Creve Coeur Lake trail and tends to get more walkers/joggers/cyclists, but the colder weather kept it sparse today. Once you get to the embankment at the end of this section, that’s about the halfway point of the Mallard Lake Trail and a right turn takes you off the pavement to the less traveled gravel/dirt section. I doubled back yesterday because recent rains tend to make it muddy.

View from the small bridge.

Sometimes the entire wooded section looks a lot like this — things can get pretty swampy. But this is just a finger of the lake.

Yesterday I watched a video on the Lorre-Mill Double Knot V3, which explained and explored it very well. That got me almost wanting one, though for my purposes it’s a bit limited, more than a little expensive, I don’t really have room, and its patch points are not Eurorack compatible.

So instead I started thinking about shift registers. The DK has two simple 8-stage binary shift registers which it uses for rhythms and sequencing. Not Turing Machines, not runglers, not a Benjolin, not an LFSR, just a simple chain of bits, and a simple R2R (*) output for pitch/other modulation. You can patch your own loops, psuedo-random input using an audio source, or cross-patch them as desired. And this makes it a simple but cool, flexible tool, more so than I found the Turing Machine or Zorlon Cannon. Especially in the context of a full modular system, where I could use a matrix mixer to derive different CV patterns from those bits.

(R2R = a resistor ladder network, so named because it’s just a passive set of resistors that assign one bit a certain voltage, the next bit half that, the next half again, etc. This makes a simple asynchronous digital-to-analog converter, and is also how Nearness works to mix signals at different levels.)

There aren’t many simple, SIPO (serial-in-parallel-out) binary shift registers in Eurorack, but there are a few, and I started looking into them. I wound up fascinated by the Schlappi Engineering Nibbler. While it only has 4 stages/bits rather than 8, it’s not just a shift register but a binary counter, and you can set the register bit values directly. The shifting and setting can be synchronized with the counter clock or not. There’s a Carry output which can be used to reverse the counter, for symmetrical up-down patterns. There are two R2R outputs, one of which can have a phase offset. Like Xaoc’s Liebniz series, it’s pretty abstract but there are a lot of possibilities — both for rhythm/modulation patterns, and for audio.

I decided to go for Nibbler, setting my Planar aside because I really haven’t been using it. I could also pick up a Holocene Electronics SIPO, a small 8-bit shift register, but we’ll see how I do without it — and maybe use Bitwig Grid patches if I want a second SR, although that involves latency and being careful about clock rate. I think Nibbler will interact in all kinds of fun ways with my other stuff without a second shift register, particularly since MD2’s sequences can be modified with trigger inputs. That means I get to keep my Gliss around, and try to take more advantage of its fun, instant gestures to create modulation loops.

there’s always a smaller Lego brick

I’m not sure where people got the idea that “the concept of modular synthesis” is to take the longest, most meandering possible path to creating a sound, or that if you’re not constructing everything from basic building blocks, you’re doing it wrong.

The first modular synths were… sort of that way, of necessity. Circuits were mostly quite simple. But even in those earliest days, the need was recognized that combining simpler circuits to serve a coherent musical function, as a module, made sense. Thus, oscillators with multiple shape outputs, instead of separating the waveshaping from the core — one never sees a complaint that the oscillator has built-in pulse width control instead of forcing you to use a separate comparator to convert triangle or saw waves to pulses. Or the sequencer, which combines a sequential switch (itself made of flip-flops made of logic gates) with a set of attenuators and a mixer. Or the frequency shifter, a complex network of ring modulators and phase shifters. These modules were designed for musical utility. My argument is, so are modules like Rings, Plaits, Entity Ultra Perc, Pamela’s New Workout, etc.

And there’s nothing stopping one from taking those more complex, comprehensive modules and using them in a patch with fundamental building blocks. Or processing the audio, modulating them, sequencing them in uniquely modular-ish ways.

I’ve started reading Your Anxiety Beast And You. The premise is familiar at this point: anxiety is a vital survival mechanism, but as with other things, human social/technological process has outpaced human evolution. So we should treat anxiety not as an enemy to avoid and dread, but as a well-meaning, vigilant but obnoxious and irrational primitive friend who’s trying to look out for us.

It’s like pain. You absolutely do want to be able to feel pain when it’s an appropriate warning that helps you prevent or minimize injury. But any pain that lingers after you already are aware of a problem — especially chronic pain — is extremely unhelpful.