Studio Pics

God, every time I read this thread it reminds me how much I'm looking forward to getting a place of my own so I can actually set my gear up rather than having it stuck away in a drawer. Need to take a picture of the various cheap crappy kit I've picked up second hand and been gifted over the years.

  On 5/12/2021 at 1:15 AM, purlieu said:

God, every time I read this thread it reminds me how much I'm looking forward to getting a place of my own so I can actually set my gear up rather than having it stuck away in a drawer. Need to take a picture of the various cheap crappy kit I've picked up second hand and been gifted over the years.

Haha, do it!

  On 5/12/2021 at 1:15 AM, purlieu said:

God, every time I read this thread it reminds me how much I'm looking forward to getting a place of my own so I can actually set my gear up rather than having it stuck away in a drawer. Need to take a picture of the various cheap crappy kit I've picked up second hand and been gifted over the years.

Post pics of the drawer. Not even joking, my biggest respect goes to people who post a pic of their janky cheapo laptop or some small setup that looks like you can't really do much with it until you check out their bandcamp/soundcloud and go "huh I have all this gear and how come my stuff sounds so boring and bad compared to theirs".

IMO you think "yeah when I have a Proper Studio all will be cool", but honestly it never fucking ends. Whatever gear you get, however nice the space is, there is always something missing. It still sucks; highs are too aggressive on your $texas monitors; if you have a view to something nice - people/dogs/birds/trees/the sun will come and make noise and piss you off because you can not concentrate while making music; if you don't have a view, you can't concentrate because you are going insane staring at a dumb wall.

At least that is how I have discovered my brain works - no matter how good I have it, I guarantee I will find a way to make myself think it sucks.

WIndows PC running Ableton Live 10 Standard

Zoom H4n Microphone

SM 58

Vibraphone

Trombone

Homemade instruments

^^ this mf making Christmaswave

  On 5/12/2021 at 10:39 AM, thawkins said:

Post pics of the drawer. Not even joking, my biggest respect goes to people who post a pic of their janky cheapo laptop or some small setup that looks like you can't really do much with it until you check out their bandcamp/soundcloud and go "huh I have all this gear and how come my stuff sounds so boring and bad compared to theirs".

IMO you think "yeah when I have a Proper Studio all will be cool", but honestly it never fucking ends. Whatever gear you get, however nice the space is, there is always something missing. It still sucks; highs are too aggressive on your $texas monitors; if you have a view to something nice - people/dogs/birds/trees/the sun will come and make noise and piss you off because you can not concentrate while making music; if you don't have a view, you can't concentrate because you are going insane staring at a dumb wall.

At least that is how I have discovered my brain works - no matter how good I have it, I guarantee I will find a way to make myself think it sucks.

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Oh yeah, as someone with OCD and ADHD, my brain will never tire of telling me "all you need is this one change and then everything will be perfect". Continual goalpost shifting. 

This is the drawer content:

The Volcas, the three Boss pedals and the SM58s are the only proper kit I've bought new, everything else is either charity shop stuff, gifts, or cheap crap from toy shops and hippie stores. The pile of mangled tape is all raw material for making tape loops. I've got a Behringer X1222, a second hand MicroKorg and four cheap guitars which would all ideally be set up alongside these little boxes in a corner of a room. 

I've been mostly doing music on my computer for the past few years, but even though my skills have been continually improving, I've just found the whole process less and less fun as time goes by. I think when I was first doing computer music, kind of 2002-2011, I really enjoyed it because it was new and exciting, but since then the only time I seem to actually have fun is when I've got some kit out and I'm recording to 4-track. 

This is the last 100% hardware thing I did, almost five years ago. It's very lo-fi but I had a lot of fun doing it:

FSOL

  On 5/12/2021 at 7:01 PM, Alcofribas said:

FSOL

That's a Pocket Operator PO-20 they sent me as a birthday present a few years back. 

imagine having vibraphones instead of parquet floors in your apartment! ...producing (shitty) music just by walking around

or you wake up late for work and your neighbors are having rave party

or getting up at night for a secret snack, walking slowly to kitchen bc you don't want to wake up your partner to know that you're eating sweets in the middle of the night and all that would probably sound something like like late morton feldman 

or running to the toilet but always stepping the same bars to inform everybody around that you're having a massive no.2, which means not to disturb you and to avoid the toilet for the next 2 days, minimum

  On 5/12/2021 at 7:00 PM, purlieu said:

 

 

 

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That portastudio was the first 4 track I ever saw as a kid, so I'm always kind of nostalgic about them even though I never had one and didn't even really get to use one.

Also, excellent choice on the Behringer Space-C.

  On 5/12/2021 at 7:00 PM, purlieu said:

Oh yeah, as someone with OCD and ADHD, my brain will never tire of telling me "all you need is this one change and then everything will be perfect". Continual goalpost shifting. 

 

This is the drawer content:

The Volcas, the three Boss pedals and the SM58s are the only proper kit I've bought new, everything else is either charity shop stuff, gifts, or cheap crap from toy shops and hippie stores. The pile of mangled tape is all raw material for making tape loops. I've got a Behringer X1222, a second hand MicroKorg and four cheap guitars which would all ideally be set up alongside these little boxes in a corner of a room. 

I've been mostly doing music on my computer for the past few years, but even though my skills have been continually improving, I've just found the whole process less and less fun as time goes by. I think when I was first doing computer music, kind of 2002-2011, I really enjoyed it because it was new and exciting, but since then the only time I seem to actually have fun is when I've got some kit out and I'm recording to 4-track. 

This is the last 100% hardware thing I did, almost five years ago. It's very lo-fi but I had a lot of fun doing it:

 

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Well that's a pretty bad-ass drawer. You ever thought of getting a central MIDI sequencer for controlling all that stuff?

  On 5/12/2021 at 7:10 PM, xox said:

imagine having vibraphones instead of parquet floors in your apartment! ...producing (shitty) music just by walking around

or you wake up late for work and your neighbors are having rave party

or getting up at night for a secret snack, walking slowly to kitchen bc you don't want to wake up your partner to know that you're eating sweets in the middle of the night and all that would probably sound something like like late morton feldman 

or running to the toilet but always stepping the same bars to inform everybody around that you're having a massive no.2, which means not to disturb you and to avoid the toilet for the next 2 days, minimum

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This post reads like a cool modern outsider art concept album?

  On 5/12/2021 at 10:36 PM, thawkins said:

Well that's a pretty bad-ass drawer. You ever thought of getting a central MIDI sequencer for controlling all that stuff?

Yeah, once I get my own place and have some dedicated space to set it up I'm going to try and work out a way to have it all properly linked up. Be nice to have it as a permanent thing that I can switch on and go rather than random bits just stuck together... fingers crossed that'll be later this year.

  On 5/12/2021 at 7:00 PM, purlieu said:

Oh yeah, as someone with OCD and ADHD, my brain will never tire of telling me "all you need is this one change and then everything will be perfect". Continual goalpost shifting. 

 

This is the drawer content:

The Volcas, the three Boss pedals and the SM58s are the only proper kit I've bought new, everything else is either charity shop stuff, gifts, or cheap crap from toy shops and hippie stores. The pile of mangled tape is all raw material for making tape loops. I've got a Behringer X1222, a second hand MicroKorg and four cheap guitars which would all ideally be set up alongside these little boxes in a corner of a room. 

I've been mostly doing music on my computer for the past few years, but even though my skills have been continually improving, I've just found the whole process less and less fun as time goes by. I think when I was first doing computer music, kind of 2002-2011, I really enjoyed it because it was new and exciting, but since then the only time I seem to actually have fun is when I've got some kit out and I'm recording to 4-track. 

This is the last 100% hardware thing I did, almost five years ago. It's very lo-fi but I had a lot of fun doing it:

 

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how's that DOD unit? anything interesting to it?

I haven't even used it yet as I don't have a power cable yet. I've been assured it works. 

Mostly done with an over-layered, too dense album from last year and getting ready to start something more lo-fi and minimal.

  On 5/30/2021 at 4:14 PM, TubularCorporation said:

 

Mostly done with an over-layered, too dense album from last year and getting ready to start something more lo-fi and minimal.

 

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What’s that digitech?

VTP1 preamp, got it as part of the big haul of free gear a couple years ago.  They're pretty cheap and are decent.  Not amazing not bad.  Gearslutz hates them but they're OK. Full plate voltage tube pres but with an op amp boost in the signal path for overdriving the tubes.  I haven't tried putting different tubes in.

4 band semiparametric EQ, line and mic in, XLR and 1/4" i/o, and inserts.  it's a great frontend for the portastudio, but I haven't used it much for anything else. Tried it as a bass DI and didn't like it at all.

Also has a 20/48 or maybe 18/48) stereo ADC in it that I've never used.

Nobody wants them, they're pretty cheap and you could do a lot worse.

I guess there was a transformer option (inputs and/or outputs?) and I bet that would make it sound nicer, but I have no idea how you'd actually find a pair of them since I'm pretty sure they were something you had to have a dealer get installed and couldn't buy directly for DIY installation, and probably not many of them are out there. Mine doesn't have them, but based on adding the transformer option to my Klark Technic DN410 EQ last year I'd be really interested.  The DN410 is pretty much known for being "too transparent to be useful in the digital era" but with the transformers it's still super clean but does a nice thing to transients that makes me like to record through it with the EQ completely bypassed now.

When can we expect the album?

Well, I still have to master it and make some little bits to use as segues between tracks, come up with the rest of the titles, finish the artwork, and then figure out what the fuck a person even does with an album in 2021. 

  On 5/30/2021 at 6:08 PM, TubularCorporation said:

…and then figure out what the fuck a person even does with an album in 2021. 

Lol good point! good question! 
Music lost its value imo, probably bc the market is overinflated. I mean, it’s impossible to even know let alone to follow everything that’s being released, even in a single day, and i doubt that everything is good enough to justify its existence in the public space, statistically speaking cant be! Something always is, and sometimes you maybe need to listen to it 10 times before realizing it’s good enough, bc it’s that kind of music and I don’t have the time; who does?

  On 5/30/2021 at 6:08 PM, TubularCorporation said:

and then figure out what the fuck a person even does with an album in 2021. 

  On 5/30/2021 at 6:57 PM, xox said:

Lol good point! good question! 
Music lost its value imo, probably bc the market is overinflated. I mean, it’s impossible to even know let alone to follow everything that’s being released, even in a single day, and i doubt that everything is good enough to justify its existence in the public space, statistically speaking cant be! Something always is, and sometimes you maybe need to listen to it 10 times before realizing it’s good enough, bc it’s that kind of music and I don’t have the time; who does?

Yeah, I was saying to a friend earlier today that putting something up on Bandcamp seems slightly less viable than leaving it on a hard drive and hoping someone finds it in a few decades.  At least with the second thing you might build some kind of mystique if it ever gets found.

Yeah, unless you've got an already established fanbase, self-releasing on Bandcamp is kind of useless these days. I often see idiots saying things like "people will discover it if it's good!", so I sacrificed* an EP to an anonymous Bandcamp page and literally nobody has listened to it. There are so many releases these days, especially electronic stuff, that it's next-to-impossible to get your stuff heard.

*I wasn't going to release it anyway because it was so heavily sample-based and I got in trouble for sampling earlier this year.

  On 6/13/2021 at 1:14 PM, purlieu said:

Yeah, unless you've got an already established fanbase, self-releasing on Bandcamp is kind of useless these days. I often see idiots saying things like "people will discover it if it's good!", so I sacrificed* an EP to an anonymous Bandcamp page and literally nobody has listened to it. There are so many releases these days, especially electronic stuff, that it's next-to-impossible to get your stuff heard.

*I wasn't going to release it anyway because it was so heavily sample-based and I got in trouble for sampling earlier this year.

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What's the alternative though? I am never getting an established fanbase if I do not put my things on somewhere. And I don't think I will ever have any success sending my material to a label or something, although honestly I don't really try to send any demos anywhere either...

Putting stuff on bandcamp is more like "yeah milestone achieved, I finished some tracks", which is a nice thing that happens once a year maybe.

  On 6/13/2021 at 1:14 PM, purlieu said:

so I sacrificed* an EP to an anonymous Bandcamp page and literally nobody has listened to it.

i mean, you've gotta tell people about it. and if those people really like it, they'll tell others...that's the idea behind 'people will discover it if it's good' ...but of course that's not a 100% thing or whatever. 

  On 6/13/2021 at 1:14 PM, purlieu said:

There are so many releases these days, especially electronic stuff, that it's next-to-impossible to get your stuff heard.

this is very true. unless you've got professional spammers a decent label behind you (or you want to go deep in on personal branding/spamming/whatever) then it's very difficult to get many ears on your stuff. but honestly, half the people who buy any new Kranky or Illian Tapes or whatever Boomkat is promoting don't have much ability to listen to 'new' artists unless some label/influencer is telling them they basically have to like it. tapping into that 'larger' market means money yeah, but it comes with tradeoffs i'm sure.