Plan 9

Yeah, well, my plan to leave the modular mostly patched has some flaws in it, not least that I am battling to keep my cabling arrangement coherent and the knobs accessible. It was so much easier with the Digisound as they thought that baby through, put all the patch points on the bottom, the knobs on the top.

I've been waiting over a week to return this Easel-K and somehow each day nothing happens. Just heard that it won't be today either. Similarly, I have no idea of the status of my order (the Roland case and Endorphin oscillator). It's been a long and frustrating episode really and I think I've given up on the idea of any Buchla gear, ever.

Today, possibly to cheer myself up with retail therapy, I ordered a little 8-step sequencer. Yes, I know Cirklon is more than enough, plus I have the P3 and BSP, but what I *really* want most of the time is a simple sequencer I can tweak, trigger, interact with as both a mod source and LFO (the one I ordered has slew, very important).

I grabbed some cool loops from the modular the other day into the Octatrack, starting to build up quite a library. Rusty's s/ware is looking more necessary if I want to gather all my original stuff together to arrange it.

Monday 29th now. Dunno what day I started these jottings on. The Easel-K went back last week but still no ETA for Roland box and oscillator. I should have shopped elsewhere.

NAMM had surprisingly little of interest. Korg had a new synth called the Prolapse or something and Strymon put one of their pedals into Eurorack format. For me the winner was probably Elektron's FM synth/sequencer as I've been interested in getting an FM synth and hoping, foolishly, that Korg would have the imagination to make one. The addition of filters, overdrive and effects, plus parameter-locking all the FM bits could really make this a fun box. Dunno if I want one personally but might look out in future for people who get one, get fed up, and want to swap for an Analog Four.

Have written most of a review today and may go into the studio to verify the DLD really is dead. Then again, I might just go play piano for a bit. Feeling a bit directionless today, grim weather not helping. Went to gym but got that twinge again in the old hernia spot. What a crock.

Here's a random picture to show why Eurorack has probably expanded to about the optimum size for me. I could spend my life moving modules around, trying to keep the knobs accessible and so on but ultimately I don't want to grow this thing any more. That said, I'm definitely buying the module I just wrote about ;)