Studio Pics

Yeah, the rs

Ah ok fnx

  On 5/7/2018 at 3:10 AM, thawkins said:

 

  On 5/6/2018 at 11:16 PM, hello spiral said:

 

I think some of my favorite pictures in this thread are like this - just a laptop (or a picture of a laptop) somewhere. While I do get GAS out of looking at people's spacious gear-filled (but tasteful) rooms, I am even more jealous of people who can make all their amazing music just on a laptop without all that pesky audiophile infrastructure.

 

Partly why i'm not posting mine. I don't want to spark people thinking along those lines. It's true, people don't need loads of gear to make good music, a laptop is enough and more. Having a load of gear and barely any music to show for it kinda looks twattish and hopefully i'm not a twat.

^ I was watching that before I put Day Today on :^)

  On 5/8/2018 at 11:05 AM, Chesney said:

 

  On 5/7/2018 at 3:10 AM, thawkins said:

 

  On 5/6/2018 at 11:16 PM, hello spiral said:

 

I think some of my favorite pictures in this thread are like this - just a laptop (or a picture of a laptop) somewhere. While I do get GAS out of looking at people's spacious gear-filled (but tasteful) rooms, I am even more jealous of people who can make all their amazing music just on a laptop without all that pesky audiophile infrastructure.

 

Partly why i'm not posting mine. I don't want to spark people thinking along those lines. It's true, people don't need loads of gear to make good music, a laptop is enough and more. Having a load of gear and barely any music to show for it kinda looks twattish and hopefully i'm not a twat.

 

 

Yeah, I always feel weird about posting stuff because even though most of my gear is old, used and was cheap or free, and I actually make a lot of music with it most of the time (if I'm feeling blocked I'll usually devote music time to building things - I'd say I spend about 15 hours a week on average doing at least one of those things, more if I can manage it), I hardly share any of it on here and even if I did I generally feel weird about being like "look at all this crap" as if I'm somehow bragging rather than just being enthusiastic about tools.

It feels kind of like credentialism except even shallower.

I don't really see that happening here, though, and that's part of what I like about this place.  But I still feel a sort of twinge any time I post about something I own, like I'm participating in some horrible Gearslutz thread or something.

EDIT: yeah, I hadn't actually seen that show before but that clip is basically my life.

  On 5/6/2018 at 11:16 PM, hello spiral said:

level or organization: psychotic

I used this one weird trick to get Ikea tablet stands and now my desk looks like I could produce all the minimal techno in the world.

  On 5/8/2018 at 8:04 PM, xox said:

 

  On 5/6/2018 at 11:16 PM, hello spiral said:

 

level or organization: psychotic

 

Toy Machine figure and The Day Today - you seem like an interesting dude

Mad nuttah!

I like the assorted garbage.

  On 6/12/2018 at 3:36 PM, joshuatx said:

 

  On 5/8/2018 at 8:04 PM, xox said:

 

  On 5/6/2018 at 11:16 PM, hello spiral said:

 

level or organization: psychotic

 

 

Toy Machine figure and The Day Today - you seem like an interesting dude

 

The only thing that desk is missing is a fleshlight.

  On 6/12/2018 at 10:10 PM, Squee said:

 

  On 6/12/2018 at 3:36 PM, joshuatx said:

 

  On 5/8/2018 at 8:04 PM, xox said:

 

  On 5/6/2018 at 11:16 PM, hello spiral said:

 

level or organization: psychotic

 

 

Toy Machine figure and The Day Today - you seem like an interesting dude

 

 

The only thing that desk is missing is the fleshlight flashbulb

 

  On 5/8/2018 at 8:04 PM, xox said:

 

  On 5/6/2018 at 11:16 PM, hello spiral said:

level or organization: psychotic

  On 5/6/2018 at 6:48 PM, Nil said:

Moved in with Madame, so my studio's now in the living room. I wanted to find an elegant and convinient way to have my gear, so I built myself that desk. I'm also building a few acoustic panels I can move around when/if needed:

That desk is lush!

Man, I need a new desk. I have some vague vision of making my studio feel/look nice with a good optimal desk but can't seem to figure out what won't be annoying or uncomfortable after a few months.

Thank you! I just wish I could have afforded firmer/denser wood... but pine is cheap and easy to work with.

Modey, just go for it, build something simple at first and then modify it to your needs. At first, I just had a simple pine board... but 1) it was to low and it hurt my back and wrist 2) everything looked messy and I needed something to protect the monitors amp (they're passive). So I sketched a few different desk, trying to keep it simple and affordable, et voilà.

If you make a desk, try putting it all together with large carriage bolts, that way it's easy to take it apart if you have to move.

This is the way I built the stand for my drillpress, really simple but it has held up for years, including through a move, and I roll it to the middle of the room almost every time I use it so it gets some stress.  Takes about an hour to build with hand tools - drill, saw, screwdriver, and a pair of wrenches to get the bolts really tight.  Haven't had to retighten them once in 5 years.

EDIT: notice that the screws holding the short pieces of the frame go into the verticals, this i so that there's nothing screwed into endgrain.  The one screw that goes parallel to the bolts into the endgrain of the short piece of the frame was just there to get the pieces in position while I was assembling it.  If you wanted to get fancier there are other ways you could do this with bolts instead of screws but it isn't really necessary.

The top is an identical frame to the bottom, but with a piece of MDF (a cabinet door from the surplus bins near the cash registers at the local Ikea, which is THE best way to get finished MDF if you can find a useful size, pennies on the dollar) attached semi-permanently with a bunch of screws.

Finally caved and got a fancy laptop stand to make room so I could actually plug in everything at the same time, so the current live rig is finished.  Got a show offer about 20 minutes after the stand arrived so next up is actually writing some new material I guess.

  On 7/4/2018 at 6:14 PM, RSP said:

Finally caved and got a fancy laptop stand to make room so I could actually plug in everything at the same time, so the current live rig is finished.  Got a show offer about 20 minutes after the stand arrived so next up is actually writing some new material I guess.

 

July 2018 live setup 01.jpg

That looks like a really fun and simple live setup. I'd totally jam on that.

  On 7/4/2018 at 6:14 PM, RSP said:

Finally caved and got a fancy laptop stand to make room so I could actually plug in everything at the same time, so the current live rig is finished. Got a show offer about 20 minutes after the stand arrived so next up is actually writing some new material I guess.

 

July 2018 live setup 01.jpg

Didnt realize the tg33 is so big.

Nice setup btw

This is really loose and basic (and there are some clicks because I expected to overdub on it so I was using my DAW as the master and the Octatrack doesn't like that, too much clock jitter makes the loops click sometimes when you're live-sampling) but this is a recording I made half an hour after the first time I hooked the k1m up to the Octatrack a few weeks ago, and just uploaded for the person who's organizing a show they were interested in having me play, so demo what I'm working on right now.  Just messing about with one patch, a few scenes in the OT and 5 or 6 MIDI tracks in a single pattern, nothing fancy at all but even that sounds pretty good to me.  You can squeeze a lot of variety out of just the crossfader, a joystick, and a it of muting and unmuting MIDI tracks.  It's not even a proper track, just a recording of me practicing with one pattern and one patch, but I like it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/92zz2aco4kzcbs3/20180611%20practice%201b%20quick%20master.mp3?dl=1

The main hurdle right now is that the TG-33's biggest strength is long, evolving, polyphonic pads and one of the Octatrack's biggest weaknesses is that its sequencer is almost useless for long, evolving, polyphonic pads. It can be done but it's not exactly spontaneous and there are some serious limitations, but it'll be a good challenge.

The TG33 isn't as big as i looks there, it's a little smaller than an Atari ST, if that means anything anymore.  It's a 19" rack unit, really, although the rack mounting brackets seem to be more or less unfindable on their own (and kind of defeat the purpose).  The thing that surprised me when I finally got it is the weight, the K1m is literally lighter than most Casio keyboards and the TG33 looks just as plasticy in pictures, so I wasn't prepared for it to be a really solid, mostly steel box that weighs a couple of pounds.  Definitely heavier than the Octatrack (and actually feels more solid, too).  Not bad for something that even at the time was a budget synth.

The k1m is one of my favorite synths ever at this point, I'm really glad I gambled on it when they were still cheap because on paper and even in demos it doesn't seem that exciting, and there's no way I'd have considered it for $150 or whatever they cost now, but it's just SO GOOD for certain kinds of sounds, and really easy to program. I'm really glad that I'm finally making it the centerpiece of a project.

Honestly I'm not sure I'll use the Tanzmaus for this, it might be too analog. I mainly put it out there because I figured if I'm going to be playing out with this in a couple weeks I should have a few more knobs to turn so the audience has something to look at, but I haven't actually decided if I want drums at all, much less analog drums.

^yeah the TG33 is kinda huge, it surprised me when I first got it too. Old tech :)

RSP that set up looks very straightforward and hands on...are you controlling parameters on the k1m and TG33 via the OT, or just sequencing?

So far I've jsut been sequencing and using the joysticks, but I might start controlling parameters from the OT too.  I haven't gotten very far yet, I was jsut getting started with the OT + K1m when I got a bad cold, then had a really serious family emergency, then got another bad cold, then got hit by a heat wave that's making it hard to motivate myself to even eat much less work on music, but having a likely show now is a good motivator.

I'm more interested in retriggering snipets from the inputs in real time on the OT and manipulating them with the crossfader than I am in directly manipulating parameters of the hardware from the OT, that's part of the reason I'm in to the joysticks on the two digital modules - you can squeeze quite a bit of variety out of not very much movement with those (stuff like assigning different transpose values to different tones/whatever in the patches and then getting all kinds f harmonic variation by crossfading between them), and that goes well with the Octatrac's crossfader - as long as all of the scenes I'm using are saved where I can reach the with one hand, I could probably do a whole show worth of stuff like the thing I linked (but with more variety since that's just a single k1m patch) with just the crossfader and the two joysticks.

I probably won't do much CC control for this show, since it's going to be on the 16th if not a few days sooner and I've hardly started to prepare, so I'll be keeping things simple.

The original point of this setup was actually for livestreaming, and when I've got to the point where I start doing that I expect I'll be doing some more sophisticated stuff than I'll do in a couple weeks.

Cool cool, hope to hear a snippet of the output eventually livestreaming or however :)

Definitely, I'll probably try livestreaming sometime in late August.  I've tested evrything and it's all working, the main thing now is actually coming up with the material.

Spent a few hours messing with some simple sequences and writing patches that fit the type of stuff I was coming up with.

The TG33 is really good at sounds that are kind of like the alert sound malfunctioning when a subway door opens. Modulating the amplitude of the four different tones tuned to 5ths and octaves with LFOs that are subdivisions of each other but not actually related to the tempo of the music and then recording a looping level vector to crossfade between them rhythmically at a speed that's not related to the LFO rates OR the tempo, and then adding a ping pong delay that's synced to the tempo in tripets sounds great.

Damn, that setup looks good and the recording you posted sounds good too. I hope everything falls into place and you have a great performance.