well i’ve been wanting some echo-type effects! so thanks for hte heads up
rip wevvers
such a star in the british club music firmament, glad i got to be at more than a few nights and meet him over the years
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i have never been a gear person. as far as my electronic music, it’s been a pirated copy of fl studio. that’s been pretty much it for me since 2004. maybe some free VSTs, maybe a pirated copy of NI’s Massive. sometimes i’ll record some shit on a horrible phone mic or sm58 or whatever and work that in somehow, usually heavily processed.
i really hate sitting at the computer while writing music, and i think it’s the main reason i mostly just record myself improvising on my second-hand kurzweil ensemble grand mark iv digital piano into a zoom h1 lately. it’s massive but the keybed is amazing and i got it for free from one of my dad’s friends.
to be fair, it’s mental fucking illness, and buying random shit isn’t going to make me less mentally ill. still, i can spend my days being both mentally ill and making music. that sounds ok.
but there’s too much shit and it’s all fucking useful, er, useless.
i don’t know, i don’t have a purpose in writing this. i read back through this entire thread and spacetown’s journey to get all this gear that was then all sold off and replaced with other gear a few years later just sounds like… well damn is it even worth it to bother with any of this shit
i know frustrations with music are never solved by throwing money at them, but i am interested in stuff i guess. but then everything seems like it sucks and is too limited.
behringer’s deepmind 12 is pretty cool, but i’ve also been looking at stuff like yamaha’s MODX range and like arturia’s keylab mk2 shit… i already have a good alesis midi controller but it’s very barebones.
idk lol this shit is more exhausting than anything else
when i play at rehearsals i have a laptop and my alesis Q49 midi controller and it’s like…
it’s fine.
but i don’t want to use a fucking laptop just to play sounds. it’s not reliable (my laptop) and it’s obnoxious (this setup)
im currently trying to sell a bunch of gear i bought <1 year ago, i wish i could get my head around sitting down at a computer to make music. i know how to use ableton well, but i just can’t get ideas down that way.
the way my brain thinks about the production of sound, different gear really makes sense to me, but i don’t have use for most of it.
my favourite ideas are still the ones i hum in the shower and sometimes remember later
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I mean to be fair a lot of my journey through this whole music tech thing was me not being very smart about it and so “the journey” of me going through this process of buying and selling gear is really the story of me slowly becoming less of a dumbass about this stuff and not trying to treat the next thing as the “cure” for whatever creative block I’m going through right now
I did also go through a bunch of different styles I wanted to write in, and part of the problem of having hardware to do that stuff is reorienting all these workflows around writing in different styles that require more or less parameter automation. so I’ve settled on this techno thing because it’s just the right amount of me messing around with automation vs. me jamming out with like, filter cutoffs live and stuff
part of my aversion to the act of sitting down and recording things linearly on a keyboard or what have you is because I spent like fifteen years of my childhood doing the really traditional classical music thing where you drill specific parts or songs over and over again until it’s “correct” and then you go do that in front of people that tell you whether it’s correct or not. and I know that I am perfectly capable of removing the external judgment of others from that process, but it also just wasn’t the kind of physical motion I wanted to have with music making anymore. I started this whole music thing using LSDJ and making chiptune and so much of what I liked about it was feeling like my gameboy was a little friendly sketchpad that could help me find the playfulness of music while I was making it IN ADDITION TO being able to give me that feeling back when I reloaded the track or something. so this whole journey has been me finding different pieces of gear that help me to recreate that feeling
there was a period of time where I swore off hardware and went entirely into ableton but I ended up getting away from that because it felt too much like work to make music. like, it was all recorded and external and that was nice to have when I felt like I hadn’t accomplished much musically, but the act of composition was just so arduous and labor intensive to me that I resorted to just making the same stuff over and over again and calling it a release. so I was more “prolific” than I had been but at the same time fewer people were listening to what I released, and so I got really morose when it came to music for a minute there
so getting all this gear and going through the process of figuring out what I like and don’t like has mostly been me trying to figure out what I liked about making music in the first place, and it turns out that I just want to feel like I have a bunch of little musical friends hanging out with me doing their own thing while I adjust a filter cutoff or w/e
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i guess what i’m saying is i’ve been looking at this thread for like a whole month now and i really wanted to just like
send you a dm or something and talk to you about shit
but also since there’s a thread right here, i mean
anyway i’m pretty sure i’m going to buy some shit but i guess i want to pick your brain because i do not want to audition a bunch of shit, i don’t want to collect anything… like i really don’t mind spending more for more powerful shit but i don’t want to buy too much shit
hence something like an MODX where i can do portable sounds (read: without laptop), plus doing some light sequencing and ideas workshopping on the instrument itself, plus it has audio interface capabilities
did u know i don’t even use my midi controllers on 99% of the electronic music i make
i have some kind of weird hangups and inertia and i really hate it
not just you spacetown i’m interested in everyone’s opinions. i’ve been thinking about getting an mpc4000 (why? idk) and like, brooks fucken works for them
well don’t ever feel afraid to ask about things here - I can only speak for myself but I feel like I have made enough mistakes buying things to help other people not make the same ones hopefully
I will warn everyone though I like sequencers too much
are there any hardware sequencers that don’t feel instantly limiting when you’re used to the unlimited sequences, unlimited length, unlimited channels, unlimited polyphony, etc. of DAWs? or do you just prefer those limitations? i haven’t been able to get a good idea of what the absolutely mindboggling array of hardware with sequencing capabilities is capable of and where its limitations lie, honestly
things like limited resolution and 4/4 assumptions bother me and basically feel like dealbreakers right off the bat
so I personally like those limitations, as much as they feel stifling on paper - I like knowing that what I’m dealing with isn’t endless because I always end up getting choice paralysis and comparing my work with people who are better than me at what I’m trying to do
that said, the very first sequencer I was interested in was the squarp pyramid: https://squarp.net/pyramid
it seems like the most freeform sequencer you could find that doesn’t have those 4/4 assumptions and has the ability to do parameter/FX automation in a more intuitive way. you’d definitely need to learn the workflow of the sequencer for a while but it’s the one that seems the most open to non 4/4 dance music use cases that I’ve come across
it’s expensive tho. and when I was starting out I got kind of weirded out thinking that I’d be spending more on the sequencer than the things I’d be sequencing. so it’s not like, the absolute perfect solution as far as hardware sequencers go but if you can stomach the price it might be worth looking at
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i love the sequencers on recent elektron gear (digitone/digitakt). they look very dense, but are super intuitive to use once you’ve spent like an hour with it. i really like being able to control the chance of triggering steps.
it also helps that both of those instruments are really good at their own thing too (fm synth/drum machine).
yeah the more I’ve used them the more I’ve liked elektron sequencers as well - their paradigm is nesting commands and stuff within individual steps as opposed to having settings per-track that every step within each track follows, which makes sense considering how most of their gear has been focused on the sequencer interactions with samples/synthesis
I really really loved the digitakt sequencer and the model:samples/model:cycles are pretty much there as far as how intuitive they are
setting up non 4/4 stuff is a little bit more involved, but only insofar as you have to set the track length to be something that isn’t a multiple of 16, so it’s a pretty easy thing to get your head around
So does anyone have a good rec for a cheap-ish midi controller that has a midi out on it? I hoping to use it to mess with my volca stuff, but I am totally new to this kind of thing.
While people are asking, i’m going to ask too.
I have a Volca Keys and Bass, and some Pocket Operators. I get the impression there is some kind of machine that can connect to these instruments and then after a lot of messing with this machine i will be able to press a button and all the instruments will play a song together.
Is that the case? I’m guessing the machine is called a sequencer but i don’t know for sure.
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this is a popular midi controller:
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/KeyStep--arturia-keystep-controller-and-sequencer
it also has a sequencer, but you’d need something more dedicated to sequence multiple instances of outboard gear simultaneously, like an octatrack or MPC or something
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Yeah, I was looking at the Keystep, definitely. Was just wondering if there were any other recs aside from that, just due to budget and such.
stuff like this is totally workable too, though:
https://www.amazon.com/Korg-25-Key-Midi-Controller-NANOKEY2BK/dp/B004M8UZG0/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=korg+midi+controller\&qid=1584104627&s=musical-instruments&sr=1-3
but you need an actual 5-pin MIDI port, right? this thing is USB-MIDI only
do volcas actually use 5-pin MIDI or do they use TRS adapters?
Yeah, the Volcas only have a 5-Pin MIDI in, so i would probably need some kind of adapter or something, which from what I understand gets more expensive.