Hy Slicer VST I’m digging around again to find a slicer plugin for doing drum breaks. In the past I’d use Recycle or something similar to chop my breaks up (and extend the tails) and then use FL Studio or another sampler to sequence them. Later on I discovered Geist and similar apps. FL has a slicer too. I tried…

Choosing a DAW Why are there so many options? Back when I was getting started with electronic music I used Hammerhead. And Rubberduck h3o. These were not VSTs. Steinberg had not invented that yet. In order to create a track you had to export wav files and stitch them together in something like Soundforge. Cakewalk came out with integrated audio…

Grooveboxes I have a soft spot in my heart for groove machines. I have been on a sort of journey over the years trying to find one that is perfect, but I should have known that nothing of the sort exists. I started out with a Yamaha SU-200 with the floppy drive. I got one loop going with that and…

Hardware synths I’m starting to thin the herd of hardware that I have accumulated over the last few years. I started out basically by buying an Elektron Machinedrum back when they first discontinued it. I got one of the last MKII Userwave editions new in I think 2016 or so. After that I got the bug to get some of…

Drum plugins Where to start with this? I’m a fan of synthesized drums. I remember back in the day using Stomper to make my own non-realtime synthesized drum samples. Now we have many more options, although drums seem to still be largely the domain of the sampler. I used to use a plugin called Waldorf Attack VST way back in…

Guitar amp simulation I’m getting back into recording some guitars. It’s been a long time since I did any recording work and I’m digging through my DAW and looking through my different VSTs. I always forget what I was using in the past so I’m going to write a few notes up here. Old school stuff Is the LePou simulation…

State of Audio and Midi APIs I know this is a very general title, but I want to write up a few things about my latest dive into music programming libraries. Every once in a while I get the bug to write a few little utilities for doing audio and midi work and it seems like every time I look…

Reverse engineering old gear I have a lot of random audio gear at this point. Drum machines and USB Midi things. Sometimes I get the crazy idea that it would be sweet to upgrade them with custom firmware. Sometimes I do a little hardware hacking on them to enable foot switches or something similar. I looked into trying to figure…

Streaming performances I’m starting to set up a rig for doing live performance streams. In order to do this I’m feeding the output of my setup to OBS. There are a few tricks for getting this to work the way I wanted it to. The main thing is that I have a multi-channel audio interface (Focusrite Scarlett) and I want…

Thoughts on the Pioneer XDJ-1000 I finally joined the club and bought a Pioneer DJ deck. I avoided this for a long time but here we are. After playing with it for a while there are some good things and bad things about it. However there are also some ideas I’ve had that would be really cool improvements. I’m the…