2023 and for Osmose, yippee!

 It came!!!!

Back to 2022 briefly and it's Saturday, NYE, fairly cold and wet so I was listening back through recent Headshock recordings. Some absolute belters this year, very productive and diverse whilst retaining our mad, avant garde thrust for exploration and new things. There's so much material it's impossible to know what to do with it other than keep listening through in a kind of dazed wonder. Tim off to Wales for a bit and I'm awaiting the Osmose delivery... Can't seem to get into writing mode and have recorded tons of my own music lately too, should maybe move a few eurorack modules around or other pointless diversions. What I could probably use is another small case with some extra I/O to make it easier to use the few modules I still like using but can I be bothered? If it wasn't a mad idea I'd be tempted to buy a third rc-505. Curry tonight as Pat taking Marg out, yay!

Fast forward to Tuesday and Osmose arrived. Spent the day playing then Wednesday too. Have some thoughts on Facebook so maybe all I'll say here, for now, is that it is everything I'd hoped for and the editor as difficult as expected. Sadly it won't be any good on this laptop because the editor (which runs inside MAX) won't fit my resolution and won't resize. Hope they atttend to this as a matter of urgency as I really want to ditch a large chunk of the presets and bend them to my tastes. Some oddities with sustain pedal and running out of voices, arpeggiator not syncing to MIDI and some other things but it's early days and I'll just save the patches I like into user locations and work from there for now. The keyboard feels fantastic and is a real joy to play. All others will feel limited from this point. Oh, I ordered a Behringer RD9 after getting carried away talking to Dave Bessell. Silly I know, but the talk of filtering and waveshaping somehow caught my imagination. It's due tomorrow so we'll see if I did a dumb thing.

Someone on Twitter was asking for music and I sent her a half a dozen codes for albums, probably way too many and I didn't explain myself or anything. I never learn. I think she might be Radio 3 so I'd have been wise to send her some of the cool stuff done with Rick Curran. I mean, I did, but will she get to the end of a 20 min track to hear it? Seems unlikely. Of course I didn't send the new one with all the short, radio-friendly tracks. ;)

A lot of dead frogs in pond. Turns out there are many more leaves (must snot that magnolia) this year that I failed to clear (I did a lot but not enough) and the gases from decomposition get trapped under ice and turn the water toxic. Frogs napping over winter die, my fault for poor maintenance. In future clear all debris and make sure there are holes in ice for gases to escape. :(

BTW I can't help but notice you can see directly down onto the PCB if you stand above it. Somehow I'd have expected some kind of protection beneath the keys. Something to look out for - you don't want this thing at a festival in the open, for example. Today (Thursday) I moved it into the dark half, swapping with System 8. Thought it'd go nicely with the Cosmos - must swap its firmware back to the old, non-looping one. The looper really isn't long enough for the kind of things I do so will stick to its base functionality. Think I'll place the RD9 nearby so my thumpy kicks don't scare Hugie and Mavis ;) - can sync to the P3/JD-XA setup too.