the watmm GAS thread

Yeah, to be fair, the Melbourne chip scene is heading more towards "chill" gigs where it really does feel like what you described—quiet, seated gigs at a small bar where the performers aren't under any pressure to play dance bangerz. Those are the gigs I do still love playing! 

But I also love having one or two people over and doing a live stream, or putting jam videos up on youtube. And given my recent experiments with selling sample packs, it's a good way to demo what I'm selling. Plus I don't have to take my gear out of the studio and risk someone (other than me lol) spilling a beer on it :P

Yeah I get what you mean with having people over to do a jam session - I would just be sitting alone in the darkness illuminated by the LEDs on my gear (and christmas lights), and no matter how popular the streaming thing can become I still would prefer real people and real presence.

I am a drummer so I usually can spill the beer anywhere I want, acoustic drums don't run on magic smoke. For electronic gigs I do see the point in taking care of your expensive boxes (that's why the drinks are stored on the floor, not next to or not even close to anything that can't take a spill). Bonus points if you hook yourself up to a CamelBak for these long long house sets.

  On 1/9/2019 at 3:15 AM, thawkins said:

... Previously I though it wasn't so good for live experimentation because you had to load all the stuff onto the SD card before or something. ...

Re: drink spills... no fakn way id allow drinks to be less than 3 meters away from my gear! Mine or anybody’S, being in my home or at gigs.

  On 1/9/2019 at 10:16 AM, xox said:

 

  On 1/9/2019 at 3:15 AM, thawkins said:

... Previously I though it wasn't so good for live experimentation because you had to load all the stuff onto the SD card before or something. ...

As oppose to recoding from inputs in real time?

 

Re: drink spills... no fakn way id allow drinks to be less than 3 meters away from my gear! Mine or anybody’S, being in my home or at gigs.

 

I think I didn't really register the sampling capability of octatrack because everyone always mentioned that they "load stuff in octatrack" and then play a set. I had no idea it's actually good for live recordings. In retrospect this sounds really stupid I know. :)

Nah, you're alright!

Roland d110 arrived yesterday.

Was bubblewrapped but without a box.

Postman hermes had real fun with it.

Must have dropped from a great height.

The back outputs are fucked, one broke completely.

Guy gave me a full refund.

Found another one also 85 quid, should arrive in good condition.

Also arrived today, roland r8m, roland ddr 30, kawai k1r.

That's pretty bad.  I've had things arrive loose in a box with maybe a handful of packing peanuts (I got a pedal a little while back that had rattled around so much in shipping components had actually been knocked off of the board inside!) but I've never had anything show up without a box at all!

The guy simply didn’t give a fuck.

A friend of mine got a 16 channel mixer shipped to him loose in a box a couple weeks ago. It did not work on arrival, needless to say.

Over the years I've worked at places that shipped all kinds of stuff, so I've packed everything from records to giant 16mm Steenbeck editing machines to 17th century violins worth more than I'll make in my life - and none of them were that hard to pack correctly, even the violins (those were the hardest but it was still pretty simple, just put them in a hard case with some extra padding, make sure the bow is really secure, and then pack it all TIGHT in a fedex box with packing peanuts, takes maybe 5 minutes tops, usually less).  I really don't understand how it's even possible to pack something badly, all you need to do is stuff some old newspaper in there and it's usually more than enough for most things.

It's like people who grossly misgrade vinyl LPs - it offends my professional pride, haha.

Went for the K1r over the K1m, eh?

You might miss having the joystick (although I think I read someplace that the K1r has the same motherboard as the K1m with the solder pads for the joystick, so you could wire up CV inputs easily if you wanted to).

EDIT: when you have a D110 I'd be interested to hear if the drum sounds in it are the R8 sounds or the 707 sounds, I always assumed it was the R8 sample set but I've heard 707 claimed more than once.

Yeah the k1r was 75 quid, couldn’t resist at that price. I haven’t got room for the keyboard version. The module I saw for 125 on ebay recently. I need to get my atari st fixed. There’s great editing software for ataris.

I think the d110 drums are unique and not sampled from other machines. The pitch envelope in theory can make bass drums on the synth engine. We’ll see.

Ok! Ill buy the octatrack but can someone just tell me if i do is there a chance i could release a record on a known label? Just be straight up with me... Is there a chance?!

  On 1/9/2019 at 7:02 PM, xox said:

Ok! Ill buy the octatrack but can someone just tell me if i do is there a chance i could release a record on a known label? Just be straight up with me... Is there a chance?!

if no existing labels release your stuff, just start a bandcamp called "a known label"

Also, on the subject of shipping horrors:

1. I supported the first Field Kit Kickstarter, and USPS lost the package in transit. After months fighting with them, they flat out told me I was SOL. I was so frustrated I didn't even reach out to Koma (also, it wasn't their fault and I didn't want them to incur the charge).

2. I had a Strymon Mobius shipped to me recently. USPS guy actually shows up at my door all smiles (rather than delivering to the Amazon hub like the other 99% of the time). The box is half crumpled like it got saved from a compactor at the last second. Luckily the Mobius was fine but that delivery guy's smile was one of the most pointed "Fuck you"s I've received in a long time, even if unintentional.

i would definitely contact Koma..dunno if it was shipped from Germany or China,.and remember

It was shipped from Germany but this was over 18 months ago. I've probably let the reasonable contact time lapse. And also, it really wasn't Koma's fault (DHS/USPS confirmed the location of the item all the way from Germany to Dallas, and then it went into the ether). 

Ironically, I wound up getting a Field Kit FX second-hand recently and am very satisfied with it. I think it's more useful to me than the original Field Kit would have been (I don't have enough space to really setup all the crazy experimentation available to max out the Field Kit). The Freq. Shift on the Field Kit FX is really cool to have on hardware (if a bit noisy). As an aside, for iOS users, VirSyn's BandShift app is a really good alternative.

  On 1/9/2019 at 6:37 PM, worms said:

Yeah the k1r was 75 quid, couldn’t resist at that price. I haven’t got room for the keyboard version. The module I saw for 125 on ebay recently. I need to get my atari st fixed. There’s great editing software for ataris.

 

I think the d110 drums are unique and not sampled from other machines. The pitch envelope in theory can make bass drums on the synth engine. We’ll see.

Everything I've read says the MT-32 and D110 both use the 707 samples.  I have an MT32 and the samples definitely sound similar to the D110 but I've never compared them side by side.  I actually prefer the  drum sounds from the MT32 because the cheap reverb and bad DAC/analog signal path give it a really nice, gritty warmth.  I bet there's a bunch of lowpassing on the outputs to hide noise and distortion and aliasing, just like on the Yamaha FB01 where the outputs are lowpassed at like 4k because the cheap op amps distort so easily.  The D110 drums sound almost to crisp and snappy for me.

Roland mks 7 is the one with 707 samples

I knew one of the MKS synths had samples from the 707 but I've heard the same thing about the D series (at least D10/D110/MT-32) for years and never really bothered to prove or disprove it.  I guess I could dig up some 707 samples and compare.

The D10/110 have a lot more samples than the 707 did, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't some 707 samples reused in there (one of the snares sounds almost identical to my old 505, and the 505 used samples that were also in the 707 and 727).

Doesn't really matter to me personally, but it's an interesting puzzle.  The D-10/D-110 isn't popular enough for the Roland purists to obsess over I guess.  Maybe after dinner I'll compare the 110 with those old 707 samples that have been floating around since the 90s, I'm sure I have them someplace since they're in every giant, free drum machine samples torrent that ever existed.

At any rate, wherever they come from, using LFOs in the Octatrack sequencer to modulate the pitch bend on the drum channel of the D-110 is a ton of fun.

Imagine I posted one of those videos where airline baggage personnel are seen tossing around cardboard boxes without giving even an ounce of a shit about something breaking. This is just the result of capitalist profit min-maxing - it's not that people do not give a damn about doing their jobs properly, but rather they get paid fuck all and are pushed to the limits of their productivity. I think it's quite literally a choice between pissing your pants because you spent all that time packing properly or doing the minimum possible to keep what is left of your human dignity to match your Amazon quotas so you don't become unemployed and homeless.

Edit: sorry if this sounds mean, I been reading John Brunner recently... :)

  On 1/9/2019 at 7:02 PM, xox said:

Ok! Ill buy the octatrack but can someone just tell me if i do is there a chance i could release a record on a known label? Just be straight up with me... Is there a chance?!

Of all the “known” people and labels in business now, most are completely petrified that their small little shares of fame are going to disappear, and thus don’t invest themselves in anyone unless they are guaranteed something in return. Almost no one does anything based on merit right now. Hopefully this storm will pass over.

Also, you better be paying hundreds a month in PR.

  On 1/10/2019 at 2:58 AM, thawkins said:

Imagine I posted one of those videos where airline baggage personnel are seen tossing around cardboard boxes without giving even an ounce of a shit about something breaking. This is just the result of capitalist profit min-maxing - it's not that people do not give a damn about doing their jobs properly, but rather they get paid fuck all and are pushed to the limits of their productivity. I think it's quite literally a choice between pissing your pants because you spent all that time packing properly or doing the minimum possible to keep what is left of your human dignity to match your Amazon quotas so you don't become unemployed and homeless.

 

Edit: sorry if this sounds mean, I been reading John Brunner recently... :)

Years ago I knew someone who had worked at one of the main FedEx (or maybe UPS, it's been so long I forget) routing facilities where most of the packages going between the east half and west half of the country get sorted.  He said the way it works is there are three or four levels of conveyor belts running the length of a warehouse, with sorters seated along them.  Packages that reach the end of one belt without being sorted drop about 4 feet down onto the next one and keep going in the opposite direction, until hopefully by the time the belt system has snaked around to the lowest level everything has been sorted.  He said that because of this you should assume that anything you ship through their service will be dropped about 4 feet onto a hard surface at least once and you should pack accordingly - he double boxed EVERYTHING, with the actual thing being shipped packed securely in an inner box that was then put into an outer box with a few inches of well packed styrofoam peanuts all around it.  I've never gone that far and it's always been fine, but I do use the "expect at least one 4 foot drop" thing as a general rule of thumb, even if the story isn't true it seems like a good plan.

My biggest shipping problem is that I live in a poor neighborhood where it's an open secret (the post office clerk herself told me and a few carriers have also complained about it over the years) that the main office transfers carriers who are either really inexperienced or who are problematic but not bad enough to be fired.  Between that and the Republicans making the USPS fully fun all retirement benefits 80 years in advance because there's a decades long war of attrition to bankrupt the post office so the private carriers can take over (it's happening in Canada too, since at least the late 90s), which has left them underfunded enough that they're forced to hire temps to do some routes a day or two a week (Fridays my mail is delivered by trainees or contractors, so that's when stuff usually goes wrong), mail gets delivered to the wrong addresses quite a bit.  I don't even have anything sent here if it cost more than a few dollars at this point, especially if it won't fit through the mail slot since we also have one or two mail theft rings doing the rounds.  I have everything sent to work.

Damn this story sounds really dire. I have read about the USPS being starved to death too, it's really sad. I hope your country gets better soon.

Living in Japan now the mail service is first class - if you miss the first delivery time you can reschedule for when you are home or select a post office where you can go get it by yourself. I do remember back in my home country (which probably does count as poor on a global scale) I never got anything delivered at home because the post office didn't really offer this service - all you got was a slip telling that you have a package, now go get it from the fulfillment center on the bumfuck edge of town. Maybe there was a way you could get it delivered at home but I think it cost 10-20 bucks extra so I almost never used it.