if this is the main goal ime the best way to get here is literally just familiarity with tools, and the only real way to do that is just to use the tools for a while regardless of what they are
so it’s basically just find what feels the most fun to you and just make it a kind of everyday thing to open your work up, add/remove/do a thing, and then that’s it for the day? at least for me. something i’m trying to get better at is allowing myself to add new tools to the workflow if i know how they work and i know they’ll add something, so ever since tim added a usb drive mode to the m8 i’ve been making loops in the m8 and then exporting and arranging in ableton, which is way more intuitive to me
exactly. just like drawing, you can use anything that leaves a mark but first spend time practicing, sketching models/references, recreating existing works, technical exercises. throw those away and do them again & you’ll see yourself getting faster, or dropping the tool for one that suits you better
I finally got a 32gb micro sd card for the prebuilt picotracker I bought myself as a birthday gift recently so last night I finally could fire it up and try to learn it. I was jealous of everyone’s M8s and the price was right.
The SID engine is fun. I need to do a bit more reading to get it sounding good but it’s easy to get it sounding wild.
I didn’t really get very deep into messing with the other synth engine because it didn’t seem good for cooking up a drum tone at first glance.
I’ve never really been a sample-based person outside of live resampling my field recording loop cassettes or books on tape, so I’ve got to find my contact mic and beef up my arsenal there. Luckily I’ve somehow ended up with a couple oddball sample packs on bandcamp so I had something ready to try it with.
I haven’t tried midi at all yet but honestly that’s the feature I’m most excited about. I’m hoping one of the little 3.5mm to din adapters I have from my other sequencers works with it.
I haven’t really figured out the performance aspect of using it yet—just making sequences and hitting go—but hopefully I can crack that soon.
oh yeah I actually took action on this, someone locally had the vv rare 410 version of the same for sale, I offered him my 210 and a bit of cash and made the trade. happy to have a rig that can physically harm people again
I’ve been trying to think through how I can most easily integrate drums, samples, & other sequenced elements with live bass or guitar & vocals for a solo thing. I find sketching out ideas and some elements of sound design v easy and fun on my old ESX-1, but that feels pretty limited, and getting things in & out of it for real deal recording is a pain. ableton is probably the path of least resistance but I find the workflow to be a drag, I always get sidetracked when I’m trying to write in/with it, and I guess I’d just rather not have a laptop on stage. this has me considering various sequencer/groovebox type things, but I don’t really know that space well. digitakt seems v popular, but I’ve used a friend’s before and didn’t love it. from watching demo videos it seems like an mpc would work well? or maybe one of the polyend things. ideally said device would have pretty robust i/o, it’d be nice to be able to record samples straight to it, run other hardware, send midi to my pedalboard, etc.
best vocal mic for rap/singing under 200? my voice is a tenor2/baritone range. i was looking at a condenser… maybe the at2020 or lewitt lct 240
sort of a future purchase tbh, i have a mic and interface to get started (those xlr and usb cables are around here somewhere…) i know sub-200 for a mic is as entry level as you get.
currently my ‘mic locker’ such as it is, is an sm57 (with windscreen and fethead), + an mxl 2001 i got for free (i hear it got bad reviews)… i guess i will learn microphone and recording technique with these and see how it goes. it would be nice to have a condenser that gets good reviews for vocals tho.
neat looking drum machine controlled by magnets. I’m not jumping in at the kickstarter period, but if it makes it to production I’ll probably get one. Looks amazing but I doubt they’re ability to fulfill the pre-orders on KS
The pain of being a lefty means I’m specifically not an Equipment Guy, so I’ve solely used a Jackson DK2 the past five years. Intonation is permanently fucked and I get dead frets if I tune past Eb.
I need to play some guitars in music shops and develop some taste to make an informed purchase. The plan is to go to Denmark Street in London next week as I’ve got tickets for Ronnie Scotts (to see Mohini Dey). Denmark St has a bunch of boutique guitar shops so they’re bound to have some lefties, he says out loud.
last weekend i strolled into the gibson place just north of oxford street for no real reason, but it was interesting to see some of their recent finishes in person, they do a metallic superdark green that’s quite handsome
was sort of tempted to say “show me the lightest lester in the joint” and give it a strum but couldn’t be arsed in the end, i have more than all the singlecuts i’m ever gonna need already
I guess I’m nominally a Strat guy by virtue of mostly playing a Squire growing up. I did handle a Tokai Goldstar in a vintage shop and hated the C-neck profile, so we’re making progress. Maybe I do need to handle some right handed guitars even if they’re upside down.
i got really into using a similar feature on my hand me down mpk mini and it’s a great alternative to actually learning how to play the piano
i got a mpd 218 in the mail today so i can get 48 notes per program instead of 16 and 16 programs instead of 8, plus it’s lighter weight and doesn’t have a keyboard taking up space so i’ll feel a lot better lugging it around
you have to preconfigure the pads with an app that runs on a computer but that’s fine by me, you can run a little macro that populates them with scales and modes
chord progressions though, it would be nice to have those semi-automated. i’ve tried some experiments with that in bespoke but haven’t had satisfactory results yet
once upon a time akai put out a piece of software with some integrate-able controller keyboards called VIP
was a vsti host with preset databasing. it had a bunch of really sophisticated chord and note playback mechanisms, including progression automation, flam… it’s basically shelved at this point, no update of any description for years, but the developer who came up with the entire thing is still very much on staff and much involved with mpc featurework, so i dare to hope this shit gets revisited hence
the chord selection here is completely random and i would prefer to move the chords into the script module or at the least have it configure them but here’s a sketch in bespoke of the idea i gleaned from your post (maybe a creative misreading) - this works if you have the pads set to send notes 0 - 7 which also incidentally allows you to drive a drum machine from the same program on the mpk mini
(the fact that ‘a’ is a slider means you can bind the octave to a knob)
from the scripting reference it looks like you should be able to configure the chorders programmatically but only if you switch them off of diatonic mode so that they present an indexable dropdown of chords like this
so you could use theoretically use python to populate them randomly but semi-intelligently and provide some means of swapping them on the fly if desired, or just have your own index of presets that you address with one of the input variables bound to a knob of your choosing
orrrrrrrr have them bound to buttons on another midi controller like that lp8 i’m looking at right now
outcome of first attempt to configure the chords by ear, walking up and down:
plays nicely with the arpeggiator on the controller:
