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…

Setting up the Octatrack as a looper/mixer I’m messing around with my synth gear again in the new year. I recently traveled with the OP-Z and that got me thinking about the workflow of the Syntakt. So I dug the Syntakt out and jammed around with it for a while. I’m starting to get pretty quick with the Elektron workflow…

Digging into the Elektron Syntakt I bought a Syntakt when they first came out. I reserved my pre-order at Robotspeak here in San Francisco (thanks guys!). I took it home and unboxed it and jammed around. First impressions were good. It had the classic Elektron feel (I have a Machinedrum and the Octatrack). It sounds great. It has interesting synth…

Comments on the OP-Z I did some traveling to Southeast Asia recently and I took along a few diversions for the long flights. One was my Kindle and the other was the Teenage Engineering OP-Z. I bought the OP-Z a while ago used from Reverb as I was kind of curious about the OP-1 but didn’t want to drop the…

Running Reaper in Headless Mode I’ve recently needed to run a headless mixer on my machine. I spent a lot of time looking into various things like trying to use Non mixer and a few other things like python libraries to build a virtual mixing console in code. This stuff all kind of either got too involved and complex or…

Strange Loops There’s a concept in cognitive science called “Strange Loops”. This is the idea that any system of sufficient complexity can’t help but become self-referential in a way that precludes making absolute statements about the system in logically airtight ways. I’m thinking about this as sort of a double entendre in relation to making music. Music consists of some…

Live Music Coding I’m interested in getting back into live audio coding. I have done a lot of stuff in Pure Data, which might be apparent given the header image on my blog here. I’m not fully sold on dataflow programming languages but they are a fun unique challenge and they look pretty cool up on the screen. I’ve been…