the watmm GAS thread

Reface Acid  Sounds loads better than I expected. 

I got to mess around on a couple of real actual pianos (an upright Steinway and an Estonia concert piano) during vacay time and I am feeling that my Microkey has been blown out of the water badly and I need to get myself some hammer action. But I barely have room for a keyboard with 61 reduced size keys, I don't know where to fit 88 full sized keys even if I did decide to splurge.

 

 

But hey look at that Studiologic SL88... 

yeah I miss having access to a piano, even though my only real experience has been digital pianos. I should actually look out for a real upright piano, especially since my girlfriend said we can get one for the living room.. would be lush

Time to sell a couple of my vintage Model D's.

 

http://www.sonicstate.com/news/2017/10/13/eventide-reveals-h9000-flagship-processor/

I was messing around with the demo of the gorgeous Pianoteq plug-in lately; I'm not normally a VST guy but it's comfortably one of the most beautiful plug-ins I've ever heard, it really made me want to buy it and pair it with something like an SL88. Fortunately I was saved by my own greed by the fact that my computer can't really handle the processing, but still...

  On 10/17/2017 at 2:47 PM, modey said:

yeah I miss having access to a piano, even though my only real experience has been digital pianos. I should actually look out for a real upright piano, especially since my girlfriend said we can get one for the living room.. would be lush

 

Even the beat-up old Soviet-era Krasny Oktyabr upright (which go for less than €100 because of the hassle of transportation) that I fiddled on had crazy nice sustain compared to my Micro-X, but also the key action was way more expressive than any of my synth keyboards at home and this got me thinking. Of course I think I might be biased though because it's the same piano I used to practice on when I was learning music in school. What makes me think that I need a hammer-action is that I constantly find myself trying to play dynamically using different key velocities and it's more difficult to do on a keyboard that doesn't offer almost any physical resistance. Or maybe it's just because I have spent so much more time playing on a piano that it's just what I am used to and I probably also should stop comparing the cheapest Microkey keyboard to a €15k piano.

 

  On 10/17/2017 at 5:16 PM, Leon Sumbitches said:

I was messing around with the demo of the gorgeous Pianoteq plug-in lately; I'm not normally a VST guy but it's comfortably one of the most beautiful plug-ins I've ever heard, it really made me want to buy it and pair it with something like an SL88. Fortunately I was saved by my own greed by the fact that my computer can't really handle the processing, but still...

 

I am thinking that there's certainly some Yamaha or Kawai box made in the late 90s/early 00s that has all the sounds I ever want. There was a Motif rack (with piano expansion module) on local Craigslist that I kept my eyes on for a while, but back then I thought don't need it as I already have the Micro-X. In retrospect I should have just bought it and ditched the Korg because I don't use it at all as a keyboard and I'm pretty sure the rack Motif has better sounds.

Even the grand piano in the original, 8mb Quadrasynth piano (before they replaced it with GM voices and offered it as a qcard) sounds suprprisingly good.  A friend of mine did a film score (for a movie that's actually getting real distribution, the guy who wrote Minority Report directed it and it premiered a couple weeks ago but tbh I forget the title) and he used a QSR with the Classical card (that has that piano on it if I'm not mistaken) for a lot of it.

I kind of believe that if you have a good keyboard and a player who is skilled in dynamic and expressive playing, then the actual sound quality of a piano or whatever analog instrument emulation has a much lower bar to pass to sound great and believable. And since digital synths have had MIDI capability for ages already, any old semi-pro rack module should be good enough if you're not a professional pianist. 

I'm really happy with my gear right now. I still want a BAM but that's it at the moment.

 

The monologue broke some kind of spell. Playing with it not only makes me happy and makes me want to play it all the time, it makes me love the gear I already have more. I think it's really important for me to have something simple, approachable (cheap and cheery), and very tactile, and I had been missing that for a while. It's like I had been shopping for all these car accessories and all I really needed was a bike.

  On 10/18/2017 at 5:26 AM, thawkins said:

I kind of believe that if you have a good keyboard and a player who is skilled in dynamic and expressive playing, then the actual sound quality of a piano or whatever analog instrument emulation has a much lower bar to pass to sound great and believable. And since digital synths have had MIDI capability for ages already, any old semi-pro rack module should be good enough if you're not a professional pianist. 

 

Yeah, definitely.

  On 10/18/2017 at 7:18 AM, sweepstakes said:

I'm really happy with my gear right now. 

yeah same, though the OT mk2 is very tempting. Someday.

 

 

I've actually been sampling my gear for a new duo project I'm starting; the idea is to write everything in Renoise without any external plugins, and do everything with samples. It's an interesting exercise—I spent the other night messing with my nord lead and putting together over 300 samples of it, from lush bell tones to weird squelches and pop sounds. It's somehow making me feel less bad about having all of this gear and not really using it for much lol

  On 10/18/2017 at 7:30 AM, RSP said:

 

  On 10/18/2017 at 5:26 AM, thawkins said:

I kind of believe that if you have a good keyboard and a player who is skilled in dynamic and expressive playing, then the actual sound quality of a piano or whatever analog instrument emulation has a much lower bar to pass to sound great and believable. And since digital synths have had MIDI capability for ages already, any old semi-pro rack module should be good enough if you're not a professional pianist. 

 

Yeah, definitely.

 

my clavinova, a yamaha cpl535, sounds much nicer than any upright piano ive ever owned IMO. i had to spend 10 minutes in the settings adjusting the tone, brightness, key sensitivity, reverb etc, but the fact it stays perfectly in tune forever makes such a huge difference. ive never spent more than 600 on a real piano, but love my digi piano to bits. expensive though, 1350 i think it was. 

 

il make a recording later today

 

it actually sounds much worse on my genelecs than on the inbuilt speakers on the piano strangely. everything seems kind of thin and weedy. the speakers on the piano must boost exactly the right frequencies to make it sound a bit fatter. 

 

 

  On 10/18/2017 at 8:17 AM, modey said:

the idea is to write everything in Renoise without any external plugins, and do everything with samples. It's an interesting exercise—I spent the other night messing with my nord lead and putting together over 300 samples of it, from lush bell tones to weird squelches and pop sounds. It's somehow making me feel less bad about having all of this gear and not really using it for much lol

Hmm, I like this idea.

  On 10/18/2017 at 10:50 AM, messiaen said:

 

  On 10/18/2017 at 7:30 AM, RSP said:

 

  On 10/18/2017 at 5:26 AM, thawkins said:

I kind of believe that if you have a good keyboard and a player who is skilled in dynamic and expressive playing, then the actual sound quality of a piano or whatever analog instrument emulation has a much lower bar to pass to sound great and believable. And since digital synths have had MIDI capability for ages already, any old semi-pro rack module should be good enough if you're not a professional pianist. 

 

Yeah, definitely.

 

my clavinova, a yamaha cpl535, sounds much nicer than any upright piano ive ever owned IMO. i had to spend 10 minutes in the settings adjusting the tone, brightness, key sensitivity, reverb etc, but the fact it stays perfectly in tune forever makes such a huge difference. ive never spent more than 600 on a real piano, but love my digi piano to bits. expensive though, 1350 i think it was. 

 

il make a recording later today

 

 

Yeah, my friend is a professional piano tuner so that helps a lot.  They need to be tuned pretty regularly to sound right.

  On 10/18/2017 at 12:59 PM, messiaen said:

 

it actually sounds much worse on my genelecs than on the inbuilt speakers on the piano strangely. everything seems kind of thin and weedy. the speakers on the piano must boost exactly the right frequencies to make it sound a bit fatter. 

 

they can use a vst and a midi roll with debussy. let them try that on beethoven's hammerklavier. 

 

 

 

The Korg MS20m is fucking phenomenal. I've wanted a MS20 for years and saw it 'cheap' on Ebay so had to go with it. Very fun to jam on but also very nice to hear early Aphex textures like Digeridoo on it. 

Now that the Dreadbox Hades is available as a kit, I'm kind of tempted to pick that up later this winter, convert my Anushri over to Eurorack, and stick both of them in a lunchbox with a shared power supply.  Not as the start of a Eurorack system, just as a really portable way to have two simple, nice sounding monosynths for live use since getting back in to regular live shows is becoming more imminent by the day.

yeah tbh I'm somewhat tempted to get a Make Noise Maths and Morphagene to go with my 0-Coast, in a little box.. but I've seen friends do similar, and it never stays at just a few modules :P

Edited October 20, 2017 by modey

  On 10/20/2017 at 12:17 AM, modey said:

yeah tbh I'm somewhat tempted to get a Make Noise Maths and Morphagene to go with my 0-Coast, in a little box.. but I've seen friends do similar, and it never stays at just a few modules :P

 

Yeah, it sems impossible.

 

One more reason that I'm all about the semimodular stuff - you CAN do some patching between it and other gear, but you don't need to.

 

 

  On 10/18/2017 at 7:18 AM, sweepstakes said:

I'm really happy with my gear right now. I still want a BAM but that's it at the moment.

 

The monologue broke some kind of spell. Playing with it not only makes me happy and makes me want to play it all the time, it makes me love the gear I already have more. I think it's really important for me to have something simple, approachable (cheap and cheery), and very tactile, and I had been missing that for a while. It's like I had been shopping for all these car accessories and all I really needed was a bike.

Same man, I'm waiting on the softPop to tie the bits and bobs I got together, I won't be getting anything else soon I don't think... although reading this thread always makes me think what if...

Got my finger hovering over the Buy button for a rather cheap JV1080. I don't really need it as I've got the JV1010, but programming it is a bit fucked (ie. can only be done through sounddiver). My idea is to sell the 1010 if I get the 1080, that way I'd make up half(ish) the price I'd pay for the 1080.. what could possibly go wrong? :P

 

I'll sleep on it and see if it's gone by the morning..

 

also the other thing holding me back is that the 1010 has the Session expansion built in.. dunno if I'd miss those sounds

Edited October 22, 2017 by modey

If you play out at all, you could keep the1010 for that, since you could load all of your 1080 patches into it (I assume it's easy to do that, I'v never used a 1010 but I thought that was kind of the point - a little box for playing 1080/2080 patches) as long as you don't have any expansions installed in the 1080.

 

The 1080 is pretty easy and fun to program as far as 90s rack gear goes.

Edited October 22, 2017 by RSP

Yeah it's unlikely I'll take the 1010 out; I'd probably just sample it into the octatrack instead.

The 1080 is, as a result, a luxury item, as I'd be basically just using it for recording, but I have a few upcoming projects where it'll come in very handy, especially with the multiple outputs.

Reorganized my studio desk this weekend.

 

Bad: no room for a full sized 88-key hammer-action thing in the foreseeable future.

 

Good: everything besides the Launchpad now neatly fits on a 50x90 cm space, the only thing I'm missing is a control surface for some live mixing in Live. I decided to give TouchOSC a shot and ditch my frankensurface for now to have some visual feedback, less hardware and less software hacks. I basically just replaced the hardware surface with a TouchOSC template sending/receiving the same MIDI. The first attempt worked surprisingly well (even visual feedback worked out of the box!) except the Device mode weirdly gets stuck and locked on devices. So twiddling the EQ on track A, then going to track B EQ, the faders still change values on track A's EQ.

I wish there was some documentation from Ableton for this scripting stuff. I'm sure they have something, but they only give it out to Real Device Manufacturers, and DIY folks are basically stuck reverse engineering the scripts that come with Live.

 

Edit: I know that there's several apps on Android for controlling Live, but at this point they all seem to be aiming for mirroring more or less the full GUI to the tablet screen, while I'm looking for something that's more simpler, like a mixer screen for controlling volume/pan/sends/eq and then a track screen for messing with the device parameters on a given track.

Edited October 23, 2017 by thawkins