Small MIDI controllers I have been jamming with grooveboxes and synths for years now. I have been doing the DAW-less jams. I’m one of those people sometimes. Sometimes I use Ableton, which is a sane thing to do. I’m not a purist. Most of my synths are desktop modules without a keyboard. I somehow gravitated toward that kind of setup…

Sound libraries I’m trying to build Seq66 on OSX right now. I figured it would be straightforward since everything is mostly POSIX. Turns out that libasound isn’t really ported to mac. This led me to look into what other libraries are out there right now. http://libsound.io/ I have never heard of libsound. These all have such generic names that it’s…

Recording rig I have been setting up a new recording rack in my studio. It has been a long time since I did any serious recording so I’m kind of re-learning things like patchbay configuration. I have an old M-Audio ProFire 2626 set up on a SFF PC in this old Grundorf rack case. I’m setting up two mic pres…

Alternative education I’m always looking around for new art and many times I come across fringe art schools or interdisciplinary programs at colleges. When I was in Engineering school there really wasn’t this cross-pollination that there is today. Here is one I just found https://sfpc.study/ The School for Poetic Computation – a place for learning and unlearning. So great.

Algorithmic composition I was thinking back to my days of using PD for random glitchy synth things. I was using Markov chains for doing some random scales. I looked around for some other people doing this and lo did I find this guy http://www.algorithmiccomposer.com/2010/05/algorithmic-composition-tutorial-markov.html Algorithmic Composer has not posted in a while but I will be looking at his back…

Trackers I’m a fan of trackers. Mostly out of nostalgia now. I never did get much music written back in the day using trackers but I still liked dabbling. FastTracker 2 was a revelation seeing those oscilloscope displays dancing away. There was something I found called GoatStudio that was a simple curses-based tracker. I have been digging into a few…

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…