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…

Gear analysis: Alesis MMT-8 I’m making an attempt at writing about some of the pieces of gear that I’ve tried over the years in preparation for designing some of my own stuff. It’s worth looking back at what makes a successful tool and why it was great. Music gear is a situation where the old new thing reigns supreme. I…

Gear lore: Yamaha QY-70 I’m playing around a lot more with my live set now. I’m experimenting with streaming on Twitch as well. This all came about after I re-kindled my electronic music muscles with, of all things, the Teenage Engineering OP-Z. In a weird twisted way this all led me back to the OG of my setup, the Octatrack.…

Reverse engineering the Yamaha DTX-Multi 12 I have a Yamaha electronic percussion pad that I’m planning on using as part of one of my drum kits. This means I need to load a lot of custom kits and samples. The factory patches aren’t really going to work for me. Some of them are pretty interesting but they lean toward ethnic…

Hybrid DJ/Live PA setup I just ordered a Pioneer XDJ-1000. I resisted getting any sort of Pioneer deck for the longest time. For doing DJ stuff I really liked my Traktor S2 and the Traktor software ecosystem in general. I used to DJ renegade events with just an old Thinkpad running Traktor and it just slayed. Even if I didn’t…