Some thoughts on the Ableton Move I’ve been using the Move in various situations over the last week. I have traveled with it and used it in my studio. Battery: this thing charges a little bit slowly for my taste. I can’t imagine that the battery is really all that big. I’m using a 60w charger so I know it’s…

Little Sound DJ I was pretty intrigued by this a few years ago and then again when Trash80 released the Dirtywave M8. I have a Nintendo DS that I have had forever to play Mario Kart on with my wife while sitting on the couch (we each have one). In order to load ROMs on the NDS I have a…

Ableton Note is great Before I bought the Ableton Move I was looking at reviews that mentioned that it might share some code with the iOS app, Ableton Note. I was intrigued so I bought the app for $8.99. After playing around with it a while I think it’s amazing. Initially I thought it was cool but limited. It’s only…

Moog Slim Phatty I’m still digging though my analog synth collection and just writing some notes. I have owned the Slim Phatty for a few years now. I went through a period of buying synths on Craigslist for a while an this is one that I picked up here in San Francisco. I wanted a Moog synth for a while…

DSI Tetr4 synth I’m digging through my analog synths right now and taking stock of stuff. I have a bunch of boxes that I bought four tabletop/live pa use. I’m getting kind of philosophical about the things that I own right now and trying to find the reasons that I should have them. I don’t generally sell anything. I usually…

Octatrack MIDI multi I’m still jamming on my Octatrack today. I hooked up my Waldorf Blofeld to the mix. Same kind of setup where I have MIDI going out of the OT and into the Blofeld. I chose the Blofeld for this experiment because it’s 16 part multitimbral and I can trigger a few different sounds at once from different…

Octatrack as an arpeggiator I was digging through Octatrack settings and realized that the “plays free” feature is pretty useful as an arpeggiator. I never used this feature much and thought it was more for people who did ambient music to just fire off something that plays for like a half hour. There are some things that make it pretty…

Audio file format conversion I’m digging through some AKAI format sample CDs that I have in my collection. I converted some things in the past but I’m getting back into the process now. I don’t think I ever wrote anything down before so it feels like I’m starting over now. The CDs are image files of varying formats. Some are…

Octatrack re-learnings I’m digging back into using my Octatrack and I’m finding that I have to re-learn a bunch of things about how it works. Saying that it’s a quirky machine is an understatement. There are some guides like Merlin’s OT manual that go into the philosophy of the machine, but I’m writing things here with my own live use…

Live PA with just two boxes I’m calling DAWless Live PA from now on. That’s what it used to be called and I was on livepa.org way back. It’s funny how things progressed. It’s great actually, it’s no longer a fringe thing and honestly everyone’s game really improved. Back then it was people with a bunch of keyboards on a…