they’re gonna make a michio kurihara bee baa one day cuz I told them to in a rare youtube comment
one day
This is actually sorta cool but it’s too noisy and the tremolo only has depth not speed. tough to work with that. Eventually I will have to take it apart to see if there is anything to do to quiet it down, but I’m gonna learn the secrets of spring driving and recovery now
I think they were selling those on their last tour for way less than I expected (earthquaker is one of those companies I sort of assume I’ll never afford anything new from), and I was ready to pull the trigger, but I came down with covid and couldn’t go (and also couldn’t unload my tickets even as freebies)
Has anyone tried that picotracker thing? Seeing that it has midi out has me wondering if that might be a cooler way to sequence my gear, but also I never fully adapted my brain to the tracker mode of doing things (but I like it in theory).
i would if i could find a kit, there’s no way I’m going to be able to order something via PCBWay or whatever.
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It still weirds me out that Earthquaker is from Akron.
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Oh wow, I would have guessed LA or somewhere fancy pants
I would bet there are a lot of empty manufacturing buildings in Akron, so it sorta makes sense, but yeah.
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okay yeah this rules. I was worried it’d be too isolating but nope, it feels like wearing a good set of earplugs w the ability to blend in pristine sound from the board, best of both worlds 
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i wanna ask you a bunch of questions about this but i’ll just do two
what is your setup like at an unfamiliar venue with the iem system?
do you have or have you ever had any issues wearing in-ear headphones? i ask because for me, these damn things never fit properly, they either fall out or hurt or whatever for me. i never use them because i’ve never gotten them to work properly, even with the ones with multiple sizes of caps etc. curious if you have any thoughts about that.
more straightforward than I thought, it just requires an xlr out from the board. last night we told the sound person we were using in ears and they just grabbed an xlr that had been set up to run to a wedge on stage, took like 30 seconds to set up. I think it’s supposed to help with latency/connectivity to have the transmitter nearby rather than across the room anyway. if you don’t want to lose a wedge you could probably just ask the sound person to run another line or use a splitter. also not sure how generalizable this is to different systems, we’re using the xvive u4.
yeah it can be hard for me to get a decent fit! most default ear tips are too small, so they don’t seal well and I end up losing bass. I got these aftermarket ones and the large ones seem to work well. the other thing is that iem cables have sort of a semi-rigid built in ear loop, they go back over your ears instead of hanging straight down, I think that helps keep them at the right angle.
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the t8 is like the best thing i could buy. It outputs a really good midi signal to my NTS, and because the t8 bass is based off the 303 everything sounds good. so I can finally use this nts’s synthesizer properly. that and the PO-33. now i just have to figure out how to add the Gameboy or NDS to the mix …
the t8 has so many good features for live play. looping, random pattern generation, and random note playback.
main complaint is lack of more drum sounds and overdrive being behind a bunch of menus. (no 808 cowbell???) it doesn’t supplant my Tb-3 because that one is much more capable and flexible. would like to have a separate bass and rhythm output so i could route those thru more effects. but honestly on its own it’s great, its a force multiplier for the little setup i have going.
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all of these little portable things in the synth/groovebox market are neat but aside from the dirtywave m8 they all seem so unnecessarily hamstrung for product segmentation reasons and it means they all have soooo many caveats (as you alluded to above). i love these little things! they run on batteries! they have proper i/o so you can interface with them!!
but i can’t convince myself to get any of them because they all have extremely annoying facets that i can’t get over.
still considering a korg NTS-1 mark II, that one does seem kinda dope. also considered a SH-4D from Roland, which is like a “large boy” version of the boutiques and volcas and whatnot
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update:
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I keep using more of the T-8’s features like the fill pattern, so I think another track is in order
hi yes i was going to respond to this earlier! this and what you had posted about the t8
yeah the t8 is really really good! me and lafrae sci (she runs the electronic music portion of willie mae rock camp here in brooklyn she’s pretty amazing) have both become t8 evangelists because it’s super jammable and it sounds REALLY good…it does have a few very strange omissions which prevent it from being something that you can just run solo but you can definitely run a portion of a live set with just t-8 stuff and it’ll be good. only thing is that midi implementation is pretty poor but it’s also like the least expensive thing on the table 90% of the time so it’s fine
the tactic that i used in the live set i made a while ago for fill vs. note repeat is basically determining how long i wanted the actual fill to be in the moment - if i’m feeling something like just a quick 1 bar lil’ thing i’ll use the note repeat but if i need something more substantial then i’ll use the fill, because what you can do is kind of “double trigger” to extend it from 1 to 2 bars if you hit the fill pattern again while it’s playing the first fill. AND you can vary the timing on when you hit the initial fill pattern so you have a bit of set and forget going where if you have a 4 bar phrase and you want a 2 bar fill at the end, you can hit the fill at the beginning of the 2nd bar, wait until the pattern starts playing and then hit it again right after that pattern starts so you get essentially 2 entire bars to fuck around with other stuff while the fill pattern repeats itself. it’s usually good for something more “regular” like just having the snare on the 16ths, and then you can use the note repeat to make something a little more interesting live
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continuing from my prior post in this thread, extremely curious what is in this category (groovebox that can be entirely run solo and isn’t intentionally hobbled) … and how many arms and legs they want for it.
honestly, sincerely: i didn’t know “something you could run solo” was even a thing in this space anymore 
pretty confident single elektron device made in the last two decades has random stuff missing, and those are ungodly expensive.
every relevant teenage engineering device is exceptionally overpriced and still has random stuff missing
the volcas and roland boutiques and similar are all relatively cheap, so hey!!!, but they have way more random stuff missing. at least in those cases it kinda makes sense even though generally it’s an intentional hobbling and not something the device actually couldn’t do if the manufacturer allowed it
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ahh i wanted to respond to that too! sorry i’ve been kind of all over the place
if i’m being honest, and i’m incredibly anti-shilling so i actually mean this, the only thing i would even nudge forward as something able to be run solo is the dirtywave m8
it’s the only thing that has enough “stuff” in it (onboard synth engines, sample playback + sampling, sequencing, 8 tracks, ability to play w/ midi controllers) that i would be comfortable with just bringing my m8 somewhere. the main issue right now is that the main version of the m8 is supply-limited so you basically have to get on a preorder situation in order to get one that you can take around with you…but you can also run it headless on a teensy (which is ~$45 pre-tariff) and plug it into your computer. the only thing missing is a control surface, which is a pretty big omission, but everything else is there
i do kind of think that the promise of a solo groovebox is false and despite being a big nerd about them, i don’t really think that one exists with a control surface that i would be comfortable getting on a stage with by itself…maybe the octatrack? but at that point i might as well just bring ableton with a shitty midi controller because the actual performance of the octatrack would be so abstracted as to be meaningless and i can just make more sounds in ableton. like a hugely inspiring live set to me was polar inertia in boiler room and i’m pretty sure they just ran ableton with a beatstep pro lmao. the digitakt 2 with the 16 channels might be good too but it would have to be a very percussion-heavy set and i have still never managed to figure out song transitions on a digitakt
i’ll also say that i am a bit of a romantic in that i really do actually enjoy hardware limitations if they feel intentional and not just kind of like, an arbitrary omission sound-wise or workflow-wise? but as grooveboxes get closer and closer to Just Playing In A DAW because they’re all running some sort of lil OS inside them it’s harder to find one that isn’t promising the world and underdelivering in some strange way. every groovebox these days is a little version of what all those people mad about no man’s sky thinks they’re mad about, and it’s because we have the ability to just do it on a computer, which tears the veil off the whole thing most of the time, and so my weird little creative project is trying to find that little pocket of “some of the time” where the veil is still there and feels nice, but it’s hard? if i’m in a bad mood i’d say that the only way you can get there is to literally go all jeff mills exhibitionist and just straight up play on a 909 by itself
i think that’s why i would only put forward the m8 honestly…if i’m thinking about my relationship with the m8 and LSDJ and trackers in general, i have been making tracker music for longer than i have known nika (lol, lmao) and so it’s something i’ve developed over a really long period of time that i kind of can’t escape from which is pretty heavily biasing me toward it. i think the closest outside of tracker-land i can see is honestly ableton move? mostly because it seems really hackable and they’re adding things to it still (although midi in/out and midi clock in is like, laughably basic for a 1.5 release) and also because it looks like what i wanted from the electribe 2 but with a software ecosystem that isn’t korg just being like “sure whatever”
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alright, thank you this is helpful. at the very least i understand we’re on the same page esp since lol
it’s the only one that even remotely makes sense to me. but yeah. i guess i’m getting a macbook air m4 at some point. fuck.
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re: hardware limitations and my feelings on them
hardware limitations can be fun in a lot of settings. often even a positive, but of course it’s very context-dependent. sometimes, having no limits at all is far worse than having significant constraints!
being in a “device-centric mindset” where you’re trying to channel unplanned creativity through a specific, limited device has value all by itself. especially if you end up finding a device where the limitations give you the goldilocks just-right canvas. it’s also doable for me to use a limited device to generate new ideas that i’ll then take to a more full-featured recording environment.
my 450MHz Pentium III w/ 256MB RAM Windows 98 SE PC running FL Studio 4 was very limited, but in pretty much exactly the right ways. for one thing, the limitation wasn’t obviously useful functionality removed for product segmentation reasons. the real limit was purely hardware capability: if i put too many tracks/effects/etc. the whole computer would do horrible buffer underrun shit. it didn’t artificially stop me from doing anything. if the software didn’t support it, it’s because no one had coded it yet, not because they were “saving it for the flagship”.
but on these grooveboxes, they seem to universally straight up lack functionality that directly prevents me from doing things i want to do, to the point where i seemingly may only rule them out entirely. i’m not a huge hardware enthusiast but being 100% in the box all the time can be very de-inspiring, if that makes sense.
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