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!

Gear Thoughts (long, rambling)

Sitting looking out at the snow this morning, contemplating NAMM and trying to decide if I have a hole for new stuff and whether old stuff should be put away for a while. It leads me to a philosophical muse on the instruments and effects I really like, and why. This may be of no interest to anyone but me, but then again this blog is more of an untidy diary and brain dump with photos.

Photo example (from just now):

Let's kick off with something new and that I've reviewed already, the Lyra-8.
I like the Lyra because I can always approach it and start playing it. I hit a note, I begin to respond and start messing with the controls, any effects, whatever. It has a responsiveness and immediacy that is important to me, plus it has a definite range of sounds and behaviours that I understand now. If I want to change it for a bit, I swap some of my effects chain. It's an instrument basically.
An obvious follow-on from this is the Synthi. In many ways it offers the same kind of responsiveness and immediacy, but with an incredibly rich and endlessly fascinating palette. I rarely use the eurorack plugin board I have for it. Partly this is still a fear leftover from the days it blew my power supply (resistors since added to the design so should never recur) but also because it leads me into a different realm, and Eurorack is a whole different ballgame, about which more anon (as I so often say).
The Synthi has to be my desert island synth. And in a way I like it because it isn't endlessly expandable, has its own recognisable sonic footprint and has that 'alive' feeling that very few electronic musical instruments have.
What next?
The P3, well why not? It seems to be the sequencer to which I compare all others and find them wanting. And it boils down to what is starting to look like a set of requirements already: immediacy, responsiveness, a certain range of capabilities that's wide enough to be interesting yet not too wide as to be brain-numbing. It has good knobs, fast access to what you need, and can store a limited number of patterns - not so many I can't keep track. Paired with a Novation KS4 or Vermona Perfourmer and it gives me what I need in sequencing terms.
The Vermona Perfourmer should be next really. It seems to have as ridiculously simple architecture. And yet, I can start playing or sequencing it and happily lose myself. There would be no point to it if it didn't sound good. I could wish for better MIDI control, more synthesis options and so on, but instead I do clever tricks with sequencers and voice swapping, with cross-mod and external filtering and it never gets old. I should probably have Tony look at its stability though as it's a bit too variable lately.

Well, I seem to have established a pattern here so perhaps it's time to look at some things I keep even though they annoy me, sometimes quite a lot. Elektron, I'm thinking about you. Sometimes I really like my Octatrack and Analog Four, at other times I find them difficult, obtuse, frustrating and crap-sounding. It's true. Take the Analog Four, which can sound great, can store lots of patterns and projects, has a nice reverb and delay which can even process a couple of external instruments. Lots to like. Indeed, I used to process my DSI Pro2 through its effects, leaving the Pro2's own delay off completely. But where the A4 starts to drive me crazy is in its basic design. I dislike encoders. There, I've said it. At best, I put up with them, but I truly hate Elektron's way of having to push and turn to get large increments.It should be the other way - push and turn for fine adjustment. Or there should be an option for it. I also really dislike the menus, the low resolution of filter env depth which means that you get just 63 values (cos they made it bi-polar) to play with. Sometimes a single increment makes way too much difference. Anyway, it can take me ages to set something up on it, and when setting up a new kit, creating a performance config from scratch takes forever. Building structures on it is ugly and I really despise the 4-bar thing they obsess about. I keep thinking of just putting it aside, or finding some role it can fill like percussion or chords (each track is locked to the same timebase!).
The Octatrack is slightly better in some respects. Hugely powerful but stupidly obtuse, it can at least run tracks at different clock divisions and the conditional trigs does introduce variation that is much-needed to its static replay. BUT, its effects are horrible, the inability to name patterns becomes a real issue when you've spent ages setting up D03 to do something cool and interact with Scenes etc.... then later you have no way to remember which pattern was the good one, what tempo it should be. It's even worse returning to old projects and wondering what's in them.
Don't get me started on the Arranger, cos I've tried and just hate it. The OT does amazing things nothing else does, but it also drives me mad and I've lost more time to it than almost anything else and I still don't have a way I always like to use it, probably never will, just periods of love and hate. I can't even save mutes in each pattern so end up programming complex mix type things in Scenes to compensate. Inevitably, later I have no idea how the Scenes interact with the rest of the bank. It's a mess.
So whenever I contemplate more Elektron stuff, such as the cool FM Digitone, these ideas hit and deter me.

Other brill stuff includes the SH-101 - probably my favourite Roland, just perfect really especially with Tony's mods and put through the Moog ring mod. The sequencer's awesome, the arpeggiator useful, the sound impeccable and the UI spot on. Just can't fail with it. The Minimoog is similarly fab, although oddly enough I'd probably take the 101 in a straight battle between them, especially as I have the Behringer Model D (which I probably use more than the Mini as it's so easy to sequence). The Korg Odyssey should have been better than it is, the sliders are already starting to fail (I keep it under a dust sheet usually). Sounds good though and maybe will be better if I get Tony to sort the LFO nonsense. Can never be universally loved because of the coarse tune sliders.

In case you're wondering 'why all this typing?', it's cos we've been up since the early hours awaiting new chair and sofa delivery. Sitting around, basically.

What else?
Well, there are things I keep that are useful even if I'd love to replace them with something better. The Waldorf Blofeld does so much, it has Duncan's great mellotron samples and so on. But mostly I just dial up sounds I've already made. It takes a while to make new ones and although I like the wavetable implementation, I wish the UI were faster, more like the Microwave 2. OK, its encoders were crap and got worse over time but the menu system was brilliant.
I keep the Emu Proteus 2000 because it's maxed out with my favourite cards and is always there for a spot of worldy percussion. I like its reverb too but would rarely program it now, not like I used to. The Morpheus was ropey when I got it (a foolish trade for a Korg Electribe) and is now turned off permanently. I still have the Electribe sampler but the UI sucks, even if it can do cool stuff. Getting samples in and out is a pain and the stupid 24Mb memory limit is insane. In many ways I still miss the ESX-1, even if the new one does offer 16 tracks of chromatically-playable samples. Hey ho.
I have a JV-2080, maxed out, and have probably not heard every sound in it. It's there to dial up random stuff when I run out of ideas.

I'm rambling now. Just heard the sofa delivery is another half hour, so really pleased we set the alarm for 06:20. :)

In conclusion, if I'm going to form a lasting bond with any piece of gear, it must be direct, accessible, responsive, logical. If it's an instrument it needn't have a zillion functions as long as it sounds good, isn't covered in encoders or menus, isn't designed by a fucking idiot... oops. Yeah, the point is that it needn't do everything, shouldn't be unfinished or in an ongoing state of development. It shouldn't need me to print shit out and hang it on the wall just to remember its button combinations, it shouldn't work in exactly the opposite way to all classic gear developed over the last 30-40 years just because some 20-something had an idea in his bedroom. If a synth, it should have nice envelopes.

You'll notice I didn't mention Eurorack...
That's because it's an almost entirely different discipline to me than regular music-making. It's about building an instrument conceptually then thinking of something to do with it before you strip it down again. It's about taking a lot of time to make something and is a solo activity, not about spontaneity or collaboration. It's more like meditation than anything else.

The sofa arrived so it's back to business as usual, which today involves me possibly finishing a review I started or starting that painting or just faffing around achieving nothing. Hey ho. Dunno what other gear I was going to talk about, possibly the RC-505 (fab), the V-Synth (fab), the KS-4 (fab), the Pro2 (OK), the various drum machines I have...

At some point I'll have to decide if I'm attending Superbooth this year.

Studio B

Got to the end of another quick novel edit, which was an exercise in small trims, colouring in lines and clarifying a few plot points. When I looked, I'm not sure it was necessary but at least one reader either missed them or at least failed to grasp the whole thing. Several readers do seem to have spotted the deeper structure though so perhaps not all it lost.

I sketched my Tree and am starting to have different ideas for the cover. Had to go see mum this morning as she was having a weird one, which means tomorrow could be free (unless we go taking photos early). Had an hour in Studio B today and it was splendid fun.

Monday now. Had a walk and then grabbed an hour with the Elektron stuff. Still enjoying it but pretty sure I'd be happier ditching the lot and getting a Deluge :) Fortunately there aren't any around and the review model never showed. Maybe I'll get a Digitone, which I suspect I'd like better than the A4.

I took a lot of photos today. These are some of the ones Facebook didn't get.

Tomorrow definitely working on cover. Or that module review. Definitely something.

I have no decent title for this post so don't get excited about the content

So that's a good start. I guess I've been busy of late since I have forgotten this blog exists. Still, I've managed to get a review off that I've been struggling with and filmed a video with Tim, probably do another for the Birmingham guys. I set up the modular this afternoon to do a series of interesting things - but of course by tomorrow I'll have forgotten what everything is doing, the tuning will have gone, the bloody Quadnic will have reset its values. Hey ho.

Got some more novel feedback, mostly negative but oddly enough I still feel kinda cool about it. I resisted explaining or clarifying because I think the book does have the answers, at least to the things Tony struggled with. However, it does illustrate the need to read and think about the previous Bogus Realities. Oh well. Maybe I'll write something easier next. Or harder. :)

Wednesday, Jan16th and good in the sense I pottered more with Studio B, decided a 'standing up' studio might be a good idea, since I sit so much. May take out the Octatrack as I'm enjoying the Analogue Four and TT-78 more. Perhaps replace it with a Digitone.

I've been reading Huxley's Brave New World and have come across the idea of a 'soma-holiday', which somehow equates to eternity from a pill. So much for my Eternity Program idea, which I'd been quite pleased about. Are any of my ideas original, I wonder?

Oh well.

Studio B, dunno if it shows up here
https://www.instagram.com/p/BssuC9Ch64W/

Bye bye 2018

We had a good summer in 2018 but winter seems not to have happened yet. Insanity seems to be driving humanity to destroy itself at an increasing pace, and destroy everything else first if possible. Maybe these things are related? Anyway, it's a nice thought to end the year on. I used to think all these dystopian authors were drawing on their imaginations, naive fool!

Seems like a limbo day, and not the fun kind involving dancing under a low stick while drunk.

Recorded a groovy thing with just the Pipe and my RC-505. Don added to it and it's already becoming one of our weirder tracks. Today's Saturday and I think I might write a module review.

Seems to be Wednesday now, January, 2019. I didn't write that module review but the guys turned my Pipe track into a brilliant new ANT track, kinda ravey thing. Actually, we seem to have done two or three recently. I'm starting to lose track.

Contemplating turning Studio Two into the modular room. Lots of good reasons to do so but some questions to ask myself first. Have spent so long slotting everything neatly into that corner it seems a shame to undo it all... but since modular is a totally different process/mindset, putting it as a separate area for modular composition would seem to make sense. I could remain locked in indecision though, that also works.

Those were my NYE photos, posted on facebook but now here too as I've nothing else to bulk out this entry. There are guides to writing successful blogs, apparently. Don't worry, I have no intention of reading any.
Happy New Year! Please don't let it be ruled by cunts again!

New authors, some free time

Well, I struggled through Sheri S. Tepper's Grass wishing, all the while, that she had smoked some before starting. Still, I got to the end - but I won't be ordering any more of her work. David Brin, on the other hand, has begun well and I'm already much more intrigued than with dear flat, slightly sweet Sheri. See what I did there? Well, I wrote in cliche for a start. Next I'll be saying someone 'smashed it'.

Where was I?

Here, as always. Listening to some Nitin Sawhney, drinking beer and contemplating doing a module review. My Euro adapter thing arrived - so all those weird bits of gear with euro adapters can sit in it as if they were really in Europe, as opposed to this grim and angry little island obsessed with self-harm. Oops, I go all Brexit Crazy whenever I visit my mum. It's Sunday you see.

I think I have a few days free coming up. Should have thought about the video for those guys in Birmingham but haven't. Will wing it and see how it goes.

Don's new song is rather good. My modular sequences work well so it'll be interesting to see what Dean adds. I had an idea for a melody but left it off to give them more space. And I still really like the vocoder one, more so than 'Memory Foam' which is the one song out of everything we've done that never clicked. It'll doubtless be the one that earns us our immortality and hysterical devotion of old people who are missing Last of the Summer Whine.

But I digress.

Right, beer and modular noodles. Or beer and the little stand-alone setup. Decisions...

Monday. Strange. Almost fell into the online discussion thing with a rabid Brexiteer. I managed to get out before I wasted too much time by asking a simple question: which leaver minds have most inspired you?
Turns out to have been a clever move on my part as the answer included David Davis, James Dyson, Tony Benn and Margaret Thatcher. I kid you not. There was obviously nowhere sane for me to go after that.

Last night I solved the first of my problems for writing a time travel novel: I worked out how time and space really co-exist. Turns out Einstein was quite wrong, the silly old duffer. Anyway, it allows me to fit my skeleton plot around something so I'll start fleshing out the characters in my head. I'm starting with a couple of Time Ladies, an evil assassin and a Jeeves and Wooster-style pair of heroes, all of which I hope will develop personalities of their own once I start writing. I even have a title that I like, already!

I finished the first third of the David Brin and it's ... OK. I've started the next chunk but it's not really doing it for me. Still, of the people reading my novel, I've had only a handful of lightweight comments so I guess my writing isn't captivating anyone either. Maybe I'll keep music and writing to myself in future. Family meal type thing today. Mum still sounding a bit off so it may be fun. Can't fecking wait.

Studio B takes shape. Bought grey import Zoom R24 from a dodgy place called tobydeals.co.uk (a Hong Kong company in disguise). Octatrack not really fitting in there like I hoped it would. I've spent so long trying to make that thing fit somewhere haven't I? Time to put it in a box for a while.

Cold drags on

Yeah, it does. I wake up each morning with my eyes full of the gunk my body is expelling, I cough up a few green jellyfish and my head rings like the inside of a belfry. But as the day progresses I feel OK, weak and listless but OK, and then in the evening I start coughing again. Rinse and repeat.

Still getting slugs in the house. Gonna have to go around everywhere there are holes into the gap beneath the floorboards and seal them all. Not today though. Still writing, feel I'm perhaps 10,000 words from the end. I thought of a clever shift too, a fitting ending for my long-suffering female lead character who never got enough good lines and basically got shit upon throughout every novel she's appeared in. I'm very happy with this one, as I may have said before. Will need to start thinking about how to get a cover done, how to represent a mountain-sized tree presiding over the Elysian Fields, a Heavenly courtyard, a magical river and rainbow bridge without it all seeming a bit cliche. Getting the scale to look right is going to be paramount. Aiming for a 75,000 word paperback even those with no attention spans can get through so a pretty cover is essential.

Have not done owt with the 2 review modules I have. Well, I've played with them (good, fortunately) but not written a word. Barely going into the studio at all, except to do a few recordings for ANT. All I do is sit around being weedy and writing novel. Oh well.

Wednesday, may have spent too long writing but the winning post is drawing me. A lot of what I've written is unrefined but gets from A to B. Almost at the end but forcing myself to stop.

Wow, it's been some time since I started this entry!

Yeah, still done pretty much nothing in studio. Starting to tidy and clear out the other half as much as possible and maybe make a little setup in there of small boxes. I even ordered a Zoom R24 to serve as mixer and to record anything worth recording, loops and shit.

Mum has been wonky again. The usual: refusing to drink, getting kidney infection, raving down phone. Can see it's gonna be a long winter.

Have sent copies of novel to about a dozen people. A single comment back so far. I must really be working the magic.

At least the cold is pretty much gone. A last few coughs and my ear is still bunged up and whistling like a bastard, otherwise OK.

Fascinating PRS this time - not tapering off yet and all my top earning tracks are the new age and melodic ones I did quite early (and which always do well in Japan and New Zealand for some reason).