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Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



I've been messing around with ableton and friends lately. I have a pocket operator (PO-32) and it's great for making little loops (and Little Jones loves it).

I just ordered an audio interface, so I'll be able to record soft synths and my PO and other stuff into ableton. i really like animoog and basically it makes me not ever really care about getting a real synth. maybe one day I'll want a midi controller but not today

I also dug my electric guitar out of the closet and have been having a great time re-learning it. im looking forward to what kind of weird poo poo I can do by running it into ableton

post about music you make, even if you suck at it like i do

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Crazy Achmed
Mar 13, 2001

I got given a keytar a few years ago, in the meantime i have doubled down and started a band: https://starcontrol1.bandcamp.com

I’m still learning about how all the millions of settings and stuff in ableton work but it’s pretty fun! for other newbie synthy types, there is a great tutorial video series by Dean Friedman on Youtube: https://youtu.be/atvtBE6t48M
the awkwardness and terrible jokes are pretty endearing.

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
I love using my synth so much. it’s a bass station ii

I’d love to make a stand up gig much like how some people use a guitar, but for atmosphere during a story. idk.

having a poly synth would change everything. I can get amazing sounds out of the bass station but hard to know how any of them would fit into anything

a bunch of the noises I make remind me of poo poo i used to hear on tool albums, i’m sure parts of third eye are synth

problem is I just don’t have the raw talent even if I can drum up the skill. i’m a knob twister at heart and am good at working out what everything does and how to take advantage of it, and that attitude works in rodtronics sometimes because everything visual is just placed and can be edited, but the temporal judgment required to make good music and melodies just isn’t there. i still try tho

Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



i couldn't make a melody in ableton just clickin' around to save my life, but animoog for real made me able to make them. they're still bad of course, but being able to say "now you're a pentatonic keyboard, it is impossible for me to play a bad note" and then mashing away whatever pops into my head has worked pretty well. maybe base station lets you do that, though?

i don't really recommend any of the expansions i've bought, but it's so worth $5. I think the ipad version is way more expensive, though, and i'm not sure if it has an android version. what i'm saying, though, is that i also have no talent but certain tools make it way easier. i'll never be great, but if we keep trying and practicing we can both be generally competent :unsmith:


Thanks for that link, Crazy Achmed! I'm gonna watch that today i think 'cause I feel like crap and am probably gonna call in sick to work. are keytars generally midi controllers, or are they keyboards all on their own with amazing form factors?

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
I’m always keen to embrace and expand. there’s also a but if music in the retrowave thread too

bassstation is a true hardware synth so morbid like you mentioned, but I can control it via midi with ableton so i could do that, and
it’s possibly more interesting to note that you can use the bassstation as a midi controller for ableton, and after making computer music (all of it poo poo right back to the fruity loops days) for almost 2 decades before using a proper midi keyboard and proper audio device I can say it’s definitely a game changer using both so take that as you will

Crazy Achmed
Mar 13, 2001

mine is a cheap midi controller, I’ve already had to open it up and replace a pot. but hey, it works. I tend not to stray too far from the presets, but i really should load up a basic analog synth and have a go with trying to make a nice tone out of it from scratch.

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
i never really got crazy delicious dirty noises until I started loving around with mine but I think it’s more the physical ness of the knobs and switches more than that it’s true analog rather than digital


god I want a novation peak



three oscillators and 8 voices. I think the oscillators are digital but very high hz and then the rest is analog.

resonance on the filter cutoff is meaning more and more to me now, working out how to use it to it’s advantage rather than just attenuating higher freqs

alexandriao
Jul 20, 2019


So I managed to get some super sweet pictures of my banjo the other day:




It's not a very expensive one (It's a chinese make) but the sound of it actually isn't all that different from the really expensive ones, and it looks really pretty, which is something that the $1000 banjos just don't do, apparently.

I've wanted to get into electronic music for a long time but I've never really felt very comfortable with any of the interfaces. They all seem very, very clunky ;-;

alexandriao fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Mar 4, 2020

Crazy Achmed
Mar 13, 2001

well you could go the other way, get a pickup for your banjo and then fall down the rabbit hole of effects pedals and live looping, that stuff is also really fun

theadder
Dec 30, 2011


echinopsis posted:

i never really got crazy delicious dirty noises until I started loving around with mine but I think it’s more the physical ness of the knobs and switches more than that it’s true analog rather than digital


god I want a novation peak

is this still about music

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
sadly yes

fart simpson
Jul 2, 2005

DEATH TO AMERICA
:xickos:

im in a pop cover band

Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



my audio interface came today and i made beeps and boops go from animoog into the computer. i hope to be able to have leads and pads/bass/etc all in the same track now

this track is gonna end up costing me more money than is reasonable

fart simpson
Jul 2, 2005

DEATH TO AMERICA
:xickos:

in college i wrote a 6 band fm synth in max/msp and tried to make a genetic algorithm to program it to sound like a piano, but i couldnt figure out a good way to evaluate and score for fitness so it ended up just making tons of sound effects that sound like they came from a horror movie foley studio

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

fart simpson posted:

im in a pop cover band

nice

Achmed Jones posted:

my audio interface came today and i made beeps and boops go from animoog into the computer. i hope to be able to have leads and pads/bass/etc all in the same track now

this track is gonna end up costing me more money than is reasonable

gently caress yes man

Zaxxon
Feb 14, 2004

Wir Tanzen Mekanik
oh hey i like music and synths. I have too many and I don't play with them enough. I guess the last interesting thing I did musically is build a distortion pedal, though not really a pedal cause it doesn't have a switch.

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
sick what kind of design

LuckySevens
Feb 16, 2004

fear not failure, fear only the limitations of our dreams

i was thinking about building a raspberry pi fx thingy with sonic pi and loving around with my flatmates guitar

LuckySevens fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Mar 5, 2020

echinopsis
Apr 13, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
do it plz I'm interested

Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



i have a new raspberry pi that does almost nothing an old raspberry pi that does literally nothing, sonic pi looks dope a f

Asleep Style
Oct 20, 2010

Working from home today. Gonna play some piano at lunch

e: trip report: it ruled

Asleep Style fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Mar 5, 2020

Poopernickel
Oct 28, 2005

electricity bad
Fun Shoe
Buy some UA gear before the price goes up when Luna comes out

Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



i plugged my guitar into the audio interface and did weird things to it through ableton at lunch

ableton's amp/cab modeling is terrible, but the weird effects are awesome. i was hoping that i'd be able to put my fender champion 30 dsp back in the closet, but it's generally better at getting crunch than anything i was able to do in ableton

Moo Cowabunga
Jun 15, 2009

[Office Worker.




my guitar stays in the case, my electric piano is covered in fly poo poo, and my recorder seems to be permanently in my child’s mouth.

matti
Mar 31, 2019

well the plan is to play some inane crust punk with friends 2020 (who actually know they are instruments)

toiletbrush
May 17, 2010

Achmed Jones posted:

my audio interface came today and i made beeps and boops go from animoog into the computer. i hope to be able to have leads and pads/bass/etc all in the same track now

this track is gonna end up costing me more money than is reasonable
I ordered an audio interface a few weeks ago (ExpertSleepers ES-9) so I can finally plug my eurorack monstrosity into my Mac in a somewhat sensible fashion but it's still not arrived, and I've not touched my modular since because it feels wrong somehow

On the other hand my AE modular kit finally arrived. I've only had about an hour to play with it but managed to do this fun little track...it's all the AE, no external fx or anything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OLoBr-2nw

Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



That's dope as hell. Is all of that coming from the rack? I have no idea how modulars work - it surprised me to hear "normal synth" and drums coming from it

toiletbrush
May 17, 2010
Thanks! Yeah everything is coming from that rack. I'm sort of cheating with the drum sounds because one of the modules gives you 3 lofi drumkits, on my eurorack I find it way more fun to build the drums from scratch but I don't have enough modules on the AE to do that yet. I can explain how that setup above works if you're interested, though.

Modular can look complicated but it's really dead simple, it's just the basic parts of a 'normal' synth except you hook the oscillators/envelopes/filters/amps etc yourself, which gives you way more flexibility because you can plug stuff in however you like and create crazy feedback loops and stuff. If you're sequencing from the modular itself (like in the above vid) you can do all sorts of generative stuff, or just hook stuff up randomly and let it loose. Plus you can buy a small system and just let it grow as your understanding gets better.

Or download VCV Rack for free or spend a few bucks on Reaktor, and mess around with those, it's exactly the same principle!

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


LuckySevens posted:

i was thinking about building a raspberry pi fx thingy with sonic pi and loving around with my flatmates guitar

Achmed Jones posted:

i have a new raspberry pi that does almost nothing an old raspberry pi that does literally nothing, sonic pi looks dope a f

only mess around with the pi if you already have one, if you are buying, get an http://www.axoloti.com/ instead, it seems much more geared towards making music and providing you tools for it at the get-go. the pi is a full general purpose computer, which means you'll have to janitor and set things up to do audio.

i got a pi for running pure data patches, and i found it cumbersome to work with, because:
* the integrated audio on the pi is crap, iirc the dac does not go up to 22kHz so i got a cheapo behringer usb interface to fix that
* i suck at linux touching so i could not get my pure data patch to start up on boot so that it would receive midi from my apk mini and output sound through the behringer interface

maybe one day i will revisit this project because what i wanted to do is have a midi/audio-looper that I could bring along to jam sessions without barging in with a "real" computer, basically a poor turbonerd's octatrack

the sonic pi stuff sounds good but if you're already using a laptop/computer to live-code, why do it on the pi?

Zaxxon
Feb 14, 2004

Wir Tanzen Mekanik

echinopsis posted:

sick what kind of design

s'a proco rat clone.I found a bag of the old opamps they use for those on ebay and designed a board to remember how to solder SMD.

Crazy Achmed
Mar 13, 2001

does anyone know of a cheap or free plugin to make ableton basically sound like the general midi setup that every pc had as default in the 90s?

the aesthetic is very important

Zaxxon
Feb 14, 2004

Wir Tanzen Mekanik

Crazy Achmed posted:

does anyone know of a cheap or free plugin to make ableton basically sound like the general midi setup that every pc had as default in the 90s?

the aesthetic is very important

I think you can get a soundfont player and a soundfont.

yeah here is an sf2 file
https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/713 (click the download button on the upper right)

and this is a vst that should work, it's by plogue who've been around a while and made some cool stuff.
https://www.plogue.com/products/sforzando.html

Zaxxon fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Mar 8, 2020

r u ready to WALK
Sep 29, 2001

sforzando is great and if you are looking for other interesting sample packs for it check out https://www.productionvoices.com/product/the-halfling-for-sforzando/ and https://www.productionvoices.com/product/death-piano-sforzando/

4lokos basilisk
Jul 17, 2008


on the subject of live coding stuff here is a sequencer that maybe also has the yospos aesthetic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaI_TuISSJE

edit: there is a comment that suggests hooking it up to the VCV rack which seems like a insanely good idea

reminder that ALL THIS STUFF IS FREE SOFTWARE meaning you dont have to pay nothign

4lokos basilisk fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Mar 8, 2020

Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



thanks for those links!

I watched those dean friedman videos and they were great. i didn't know what timbre was before (or how to pronounce it) and now i feel like I understand what's going on with all the settings I play with. I'm gonna download vcv rack today. ngl though I stopped halfway through the third video cause it seemed to be about how to do things on some then-current synths rather than new concepts about synthesis

toiletbrush I would absolutely enjoy an effortpost on wtf-modular, but if it's easier to point me at an article or video somewhere that's 💯 too

alexandriao
Jul 20, 2019


Penisface posted:

on the subject of live coding stuff here is a sequencer that maybe also has the yospos aesthetic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaI_TuISSJE

edit: there is a comment that suggests hooking it up to the VCV rack which seems like a insanely good idea

reminder that ALL THIS STUFF IS FREE SOFTWARE meaning you dont have to pay nothign

Ughhhh. So I was involved in the community where this was made and gave advice to the author before it became a music program (it was going to be a programming tool originally).

It looks like a super cool thing! But I have really bad memories of that place. I went through about 2 years of some repeated harassment by an admin on the slack that was never sorted out, and then got kicked out because I finally, finally lost my cool at them and it happened to be the one day the owner was in (They lied to my face and said it was just a tempban, too). After asking other admins to deal with it and going through every single process I could to get it resolved. Turns out about 5 people if not many, many more left the community because of that single person.

So my cursory warning about Merveilles: Use the tools, just, don't touch the community with a bargepole.

E: back On Topic - I used VCV Rack a while back? It seemed cool but I had zero idea of what I was doing and felt I needed to learn a lot, lot more. Anyone have any articles on like, synthesizer theory or explanation or something? I didn't find anything worth reading ;-;

Progressive JPEG
Feb 19, 2003

name and shame

distortion park
Apr 25, 2011


alexandriao posted:

Ughhhh. So I was involved in the community where this was made and gave advice to the author before it became a music program (it was going to be a programming tool originally).

It looks like a super cool thing! But I have really bad memories of that place. I went through about 2 years of some repeated harassment by an admin on the slack that was never sorted out, and then got kicked out because I finally, finally lost my cool at them and it happened to be the one day the owner was in (They lied to my face and said it was just a tempban, too). After asking other admins to deal with it and going through every single process I could to get it resolved. Turns out about 5 people if not many, many more left the community because of that single person.

So my cursory warning about Merveilles: Use the tools, just, don't touch the community with a bargepole.

E: back On Topic - I used VCV Rack a while back? It seemed cool but I had zero idea of what I was doing and felt I needed to learn a lot, lot more. Anyone have any articles on like, synthesizer theory or explanation or something? I didn't find anything worth reading ;-;
This guy's videos are a good intro to vcv rack https://youtu.be/pDmSy3PukTQ

Jimmy Carter
Nov 3, 2005

THIS MOTHERDUCKER
FLIES IN STYLE
hi I have a copy of Logic because the mac I bought off my friend was just bought through the campus bookstore which included the Pro Apps Suite but they never bothered to sign into the App Store to tie the purchase to their account, so it's mine forever now.

I want to make background music for YouTubes that isn't the same stock music that sounds like it came out of a Hyundai ad which has people going 'woooaaaaaaaahhhhhhh' – where do I start learning how to make stuff in here because this poo poo seems cool but there's way too many buttons

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kaboofa
Sep 13, 2004
Kaboofa

alexandriao posted:

Anyone have any articles on like, synthesizer theory or explanation or something? I didn't find anything worth reading ;-;

Andrew Huang has a good 20ish minute video on modular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWslSTTkiFU

Look Mum No Computer But More Serious-Ish has like 2 channels on this stuff; and while the form-factors are different from vcvrack and eurorack the fundamentals are the same https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0-QuVLhCc4hmJaiLSCMwcw

If you're in VCV Rack land it's dope because you don't have to shell out $90 every time you need an envelope generator, you just right click a few times


effortedit:
Modular is all about automation. You often have a bunch of inputs and outputs and can wire things together however you please.

Rack 1.x now ships with a default patch that makes sound. Typically patches have at least:
- a voice (VCO (voltage controlled oscillator))
- an amplifier (VCA)
- some way to get pitch data (control voltage) into your VCO's "tune" parameter
- some way to get "play this note" data (a "gate" or a "trigger") into your VCA's amplitude parameter. Gates sustain over a period of time, while triggers are short blasts.
- a way to turn a gate or trigger into a curve (so you can change the amplitude over time with a gradient, instead of MAX LOUD and MAX QUIET), this duty can be done by an envelope generator or a function generator and even some sequencers.

You'd have a midi keyboard send gates (send a control voltage until i let go of the key), but something like a drum sequencers end up being triggers because you want to play that wicked sweet kick drum sample till the very end once you hit the button

So you might have a patch that's like

MIDI2CV
VCO
ADSR (a type of Envelope Generator)
VCA
Mixer/Speakers

MIDI2CV Gate -> Envelope Generator Trig/Gate input
MIDI2CV Pitch -> VCO Pitch input
VCO Audio Out -> VCA Audio In
EG Output -> VCA Amplitude
VCA Audio Out -> Mixer/Spakers


Pitch in/out is probably going to be labeled V/Oct because in eurorack 1 volt = 1 octave.


kaboofa fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Mar 9, 2020

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