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…

Slicer Plugins Long ago I was a Drum and Bass producer. I used FL Studio (then Fruityloops) to produce my tracks. One mainstay of DnB was chopping up breakbeat samples to use sped up. Tools like Recycle came out to slice and chop drum break wav files into separate beats to re-sequence and add effects to. Back then I had…

DAWlish Jamming I’m digging back into making music with computers. I went “DAW-less” without really realizing it was a thing until later on when I got invited to the dawless jamming Facebook channel by someone I knew. I used to run a music production meetup called Laptop Music Production Workshop while at the same time jamming with a group of…

Reaper extensions I’m a huge fan of Reaper for recording audio. I’ve been using it now for years and there’s always more I’m learning about it. It’s probably the most flexible audio app in terms of patching and routing, but I’ve always found the routing system a little on the complex side mostly owing to the way the little pop-out…

Headless DAWs I’m interested in getting something working headless for a project. I did some research and found the Non mixer stuff. I looked like what I wanted since it’s a way of decoupling the parts of a DAW and using them independently. I’m interested mostly in the mixer. However it looks like these are still UI-based components that can’t…