New week, February almost gone, ordered Minilogue XD

Yeah, decided 'what the hell'. I held off buying the Digitone and that turned out to be daft, so let's jump the gun on this one. Half tempted to sell or swap my OP-1. It's great but I'm not really using it and I think the Digitone fills the 'small but engrossing' brief pretty well. The whole idea of batteries and needing to do stuff on buses, planes and trains doesn't really apply to a guy who stays home as much as possible. May swap for a GR-1 if I can.

It's a beautiful Monday morning. I should go to the gym but maybe after another coffee and more basking and red pen action.

Ladybirds on balls. Just saying. 

Tuesday. Spawn (maybe 7-8 chunks) and got to end of second proof of novel. Will write changes in next few days. Like summer today. I actually look forward to going into the Light Studio each day. I spend an hour or two and make progress with stuff. Less really is more. Tried out new grass. Works.

Some issues either with Digitone stopping playing certain channels or Octatrack suddenly stopping passing some tracks through. Only been an issue with Digitone so suspect its voice allocation wonky. There's that other envelope issue too. Still fab anyway and I'm forcing myself to stick with the same gear, at least for now. I do miss the P3. Swapping to the Elektron sequencer from a P3 reminds me of swapping to Logic from Cubase, realising how much harder it was because there was no clever tool and toys. 

  

Thursday now. Continuing to edit proof, added a few sections where necessary, looking good.
Back in Studio of Light. Nice hippy drape came. Worked on Bank C, everything sounding peachy. Think the voice reserve parm might have been my prob after all, seem to have got things working nicely today. Introducing a few 'crash at start' type effects in OT patterns. Keeping the same Part copied to each bank as a starting point is great for consistency. As usual, reducing the options the OT offers is better than actually using them. For an old man anyway :)

The ANT tracks continue to roll in, almost done I think. Very impressed by the more relaxed and spacious, confident mixes I'm hearing. These guys are fecking gods and I'm a dwarf. Yeah, had a pleasant afternoon of vague beery smokedom. Some guy spent £75 buying my entire catalogue, so I'll be ordering lots of stuff off bandcamp. Friday coming up, Matt might be here. Either way, an afternoon of chilled music-making. 

Onwards!!!

Phew, a knackering few days..

Grandparenting, that is. Which involves waking up at 05:20, letting Pat do the bulk of the work I admit. It's exhausting and relentless but the wee lad is very charming and soon calms down to our pace. Means I couldn't do anything though and I feel so sleep-deprived I told Tony not to come today as I was practically hallucinating.
This year's frog orgy is much smaller, perhaps due to the strange weather, perhaps to the lack of insects and general wildlife. At this rate, in a few more years we'll hardly need a pond at all.

Yeah, that lot of random pix kinda describes my week.
I went over to Manchester to see Dean in action - fab gig. Made me think I should probably have a smart phone though as he was expecting to talk to me on Messenger, as was Keith who I was meeting. I never think of stuff like that. Anyway, I think they're number 9 in the album charts or something, and very well deserved. Nice hanging with Keith's pals, good bunch.
Went to a good gig at Harris, a couple of guys doing music to a German Space film from the 1920s. Sweet. Talked over John's project and will start preparing some space music of my own soon.

Oh yes, went to a Korg thing. Played the Prologue and rather liked it. The Minilogue XD was there but I only heard it demoed - then we had to go to the pub. It sounded great and made me think of getting one - excuse, it'll be useful as a very small thing with effects to do live space music. Hehe.

Continuing going through the novel, on second pass now and making larger plot tweaks - adding stuff mostly (red herrings and extra detail to flesh out some of the thinner chapters). Will be a lot better than earlier drafts.

It's all go. Still haven't started Pipe review, feeling guilty about that!

A bit of painting and drawing, plus Digitone arrived

Ideas progressing for cover. This was an idea until Tim pointed out several vital flaws :)

Digitone comes today (Tuesday). In preparation I had to think where it would go, what would control it. A useful exercise as I thought it most sensible to put it with the other Elektrons - which led me to choosing the Octatrack as the master now for clock and sequencing. I haven't gone the whole hog and decided it would be an audio processor too, but have at least let it be the MIDI sequencer for both the A4 and DT. It has the advantages of individual track speeds and p-lockable arpeggiator, so makes a lot of sense to have it as the main brain. It isn't a bad MIDI sequencer too now probability is included. Will have to set up the various CCs it can handle as these can be targets for the MIDI LFOs.

Well well, the Digitone is a fabulous little thing. I've dithered over getting one for quite some time and now I realised I should have just plunged in. The encoders are really much nicer than the old ones, the form factor better, the streamlined OS too. At last you can save mutes, name patterns and a whole bunch of other stuff I've wanted. And no more fucking kits, yay! Wish they would roll out some of this philosophy to older machines, such as the Analog Four.
Haven't done a lot yet in the hour I've had with it - just set up a project, auditioned a few sounds, made some patterns - which are empty but triggered from the Octatrack, all the pattern numbers synced up. I won't put any notes into the DT patterns but will put some parameter locks so that unmuting any track will have a similar effect to the old 'motion sequencer' of the Radias. I can set each track to its own length too so the parm tweaks will move around in interesting ways.
Tomorrow I'll dig in a bit deeper but for now I'm very happy indeed. Factory sounds seem good too. I've mainly concentrated on the obvious FM tinkly stuff for now since that was my main reason for getting it - the filter works well though and makes tweaking a doddle. My little Elektron Room is going to be a nice place to play around in now. 

Choice, choice, choice!

I'm rubbish with choice. I had this lovely sequencer piece going yesterday and, maybe cos I'm out of weed, I recorded not one but three versions of it. Each time I listened through it occurred to me I could play it a different way. Now I'm left to decide the version I like best, which may not prove to be the third but the second.
Or I may do another today. Thing is, doing a concise version of a drifty ambient track seems like a nonsense. Perhaps what it should really be is much longer, but... ah, darn.

You'll laugh, I ordered a Digitone. I suppose it was always likely, despite the encoders, despite the whole Elektron thing. Stark truth: nobody makes knobby multitimbral synths any more. If Roland had made a module of the JD-XA that would have enticed me but I've been wanting some FM in my life since reviewing the Volca FM.

So there  you go.

Noticed a (nice) review of Bogus Realities on Amazon. Dunno who from but not complaining. Noticed there's a new 'test print' option on the publishing page, so I've ordered one. Will work on the cover in the next few weeks, look for an author pic, and push readers for some response. If I get one or two I'll probably have to settle for that. Anyway, wrote synopsis and set up the basic details - this will be much cheaper than the others as it's significantly shorter. Yay.

Oh, I released an album. 

Some days of free noodling

Yeah, Pat's doing the kiddie visiting so I have a few days to paint, to potter, to poop. We have the wee fellah here at the end of the month so it's that kind of a month planned out.

First sketch of a death mask idea for novel cover. Will paint it when I'm happy with the rest of the image. Fits the idea of 'After Life' although may suggest more gravity than the book delivers.

Well, it's Monday afternoon, I've drunk beer, eaten some ancient (and slightly manky) shortbread and produced a cool Steve Reich-style piano piece. It might prove to be the piano sounds that I ultimately like the least about it, should probably have used Konktakt versions. Anyway, done now on the third attempt (earlier ones had some over-fussy percussive ornaments with excessive tripletting).

The new album will be 'The Silent Kingdom' and it is quite atmospheric I think, possibly due to the megatons of reverb employed. I think tomorrow is painting day. I really need a cover for the book.

Right, been a productive day but it's time for some stinky chilli, Netflix and pootling around aimlessly.

Heh

Did a couple of nice ambient pieces today. Very happy with them. Used Volca FM for strings, did Pipe overdubs and Minimoog too. Lots of reverb.

Asked question today: How weird a world would it be if all the coolest new products of large companies were built upon freely-given innovations from small companies? If this became the norm, where might it lead?

Seem to have a new album 'The Silent Kindgom' almost done, plus a simpler/better idea for novel cover. Good day basically.

Getting a lot of good stuff out of a very simple process at the moment. Indeed, I'm not going to fiddle with it until I have an album's worth. All I'm doing is dialling up P3 banks, pointing them at random KS-4 multis, making a copy then tweaking to fit, playing with any P3 bit that cries out for attention, then recording in a soup of Oto BAM reverb. By recording the reverb and synth separate I can decide at any point whether to dunk the synth into reverb and blur it a bit. Adding Korg Volca FM has helped hugely and I'm trying to keep the recordings largely free of bass. This offers a lovely feeling of space. Yes, its Saturday and I'm chillin off me face.

Apart from Jeremy Hardy dying, a most excellent day.
Did an ambient thing in the studio, codename Taggart. I think that's an ambient album of P3 driving KS-4 with occasional assistance from other gear. Lots of reverb, because.

I listened through. It's cool. I have a thing.

Heh!