2020 a year in gear (what have you/are you bought/buying?)

[toonertik]

BTW.. a few weeks ago.. or even a month or two late one night I listened to one of your music post... had 2 tunes.. one beginning with "H" I think.. was late at night so didn't comment... but WOW.. loved it..

gonna see if I can find it again.

thanks
not sure what it was beginning with h?
nothing up on there that does, but i do swap bits out
dont remember posting 2 together in one thread either?
so fraid i cant help at all

hmmm... I'll have a search through my history... but I delete much of that
and just move on...

[foosnark]

I decided to try some other firmware on my Starling Via. First Meta because people kept talking about it. The oscillator and drum modes are honestly pretty good in a "Plaits but more basic" sort of way, plus the weird AM/VCA stuff that the Via platform has. But the envelope and "sequencing" modes (kind of wavetable envelopes that aren't envelope-shaped) are basically "Zadar lite, but hard to use" and I'd rather just get Zadar if I were going that way.

I tried the Osc3 firmware next, and I decided I like it enough to order the faceplate and stick with it a while. It's just simple waveforms, basic quantization and phase modulation... but with some pretty unique detuning options. There's a beat frequency clock output so you can sync envelopes/LFOs to the frequency difference. There's a chord mode with some cool harmonies which works nicely for drones, especially when you AM one of its VCAs and use the S&H to quasi-sync it. There's a mode where the detuning beat frequency is synced to an external clock, which can get trippy when you use ratcheting

[pekbro]

The inbound Electro-Smith stuff looks interesting... C++ mostly I guess.
https://www.electro-smith.com/daisy

The field model looks better to me though.

[jzero]

[edit] oops... I posted a giant batch of text about software in a hardware thread. Deleted.
::facepalm

[whyterabbyt]

The inbound Electro-Smith stuff looks interesting... C++ mostly I guess.
https://www.electro-smith.com/daisy

The field model looks better to me though.

Hmmm. Ive got a Euroshield with a Teensy mounted on it in a similar fashion. For any £80 DIY-ish module to run the risk of a bump, short or damage is one thing, but having the processor board exposed on a £300 module like that is, erm, an interesting choice. I would have kinda preferred something to protect that, even just a bit of acrylic on risers.

[foosnark]

Hmmm. Ive got a Euroshield with a Teensy mounted on it in a similar fashion. For any £80 DIY-ish module to run the risk of a bump, short or damage is one thing, but having the processor board exposed on a £300 module like that is, erm, an interesting choice. I would have kinda preferred something to protect that, even just a bit of acrylic on risers.

The first thing I thought of when I saw it was it needed a plastic flip cover like it's a missile launch button.

[whyterabbyt]

plastic flip cover

I like it. I was thinking maybe game-console style cartridge.

[vurt]

it looks like a sticker in that image

[vurt]

right, now grandpa is sorted, time to add some of my own samples...

ffs, why does my card reader not do micro cards

[pekbro]

The inbound Electro-Smith stuff looks interesting... C++ mostly I guess.
https://www.electro-smith.com/daisy

The field model looks better to me though.

Hmmm. Ive got a Euroshield with a Teensy mounted on it in a similar fashion. For any £80 DIY-ish module to run the risk of a bump, short or damage is one thing, but having the processor board exposed on a £300 module like that is, erm, an interesting choice. I would have kinda preferred something to protect that, even just a bit of acrylic on risers.

Yeah I dunno, a cover would be nice. Anyway,
pretty neat still, make your own module or
desk unit.

Anyway teletype comes today, should be fun

[foosnark]

E520 is here! I spent the last 3.5 hours or so playing with it nonstop, just casually checking it out. I'm going to have to read the manual for some of the algorithms, and I will probably have some questions/feedback for SynthTech on a more detailed dive. Some of the algorithms are a whole playground in themselves and I could get lost for hours there. (About half my time with it so far was spent in Spectral Crusher...)

The screen contrast is so good, it actually makes the E352 look kind of bad.

Navigating and using the thing is a joy -- the menus are mostly for set-and-forget stuff, unless you're planning to use the internal LFOs or saving/loading presets, which honestly you can skip without missing much. (Anything that really needs an LFO, like a phaser, already has one on the main page anyway.) So you can just stay on the main page and use the encoder to choose algorithms.

The delay algorithms are fantastic -- I especially like the Prime Time emulation. None of them will have me selling off my Mimeophon or my Valhalla Delay license, but most of them are going to get used for sure.

Spectral Crusher blows me away. If anyone remembers the experimental, no-GUI VSTs I wrote and then took down because of license agreement stuff and a stubborn refusal to mess with Github , there were a few spectral ones among them. This mode is like the best couple of those, except actually good. Spectral compression, peak hold (making strong frequency bins ring out), low/high level thresholds (e.g. you can cut off the weakest and/or strongest frequency bins) and filtering. With feedback and pitch shifting and spectral blurring.

Looper mode can do lo-fi extremely nicely. It also can act as a dark, dubby delay, though adjusting the loop time after you've punched it in isn't really doable. I kind of wish the downsampling, saturation and EQ effects in this were available in real time.

The Spectral Time Machine looper is kind of like a souped-up Red Panda Tensor -- one fun thing you can do with it is freeze the play head and then pitch-shift it with a sequencer It would have been cool to have a CVable position as well as speed, but that's not in there.

[Silaris]

I purchased an Alesis QuadraVerb at a local music store today. I am a sucker for old rackmount effect units, and the price was good.

[Bombadil]

Sony BT noise canceling headphones. Useless for recording (too much latency) but still very, very, good.

[whyterabbyt]

right, now grandpa is sorted, time to add some of my own samples...

ffs, why does my card reader not do micro cards

Not got any SD->SDmicro adaptors?

[vurt]

right, now grandpa is sorted, time to add some of my own samples...

ffs, why does my card reader not do micro cards

Not got any SD->SDmicro adaptors?

pretty sure i do, somewhere...
must have, because i have one of those micro cards for my ds, with various glitchy music progs on. so its got to be here somewhere.

also pretty sure i got one,when i bought my new phone and bought a card for it.

the search is on! kind of. ive checked the obvious, with no luck.
oh well, probably the least expensive thing aside from a 2 cm cable i could buy for the modular