yolo in moderation

@alphachromeyayo.com so I'm in this cocktail bar in Shoreditch playing Japanese jazz on vinyl and thought of you

To the tune of "There Was an Old Lady":

We built the resistance to fight the robots
We built the robots to fix the AI
I don't know why we built the AI

Perhaps we'll die?

252: Acid Party! YouTube video by Benn [LIVE]

The stream: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc0b.... The track: depthbuffer.bandcamp.com/track/reflux.

If you aren't aware of Benn Jordan, I suggest you become so. If you are, but didn't know about the monthly streams of themed community-submitted tracks, become a patron & join his Discord. It's worth it.

An image of an eclectic gallery wall, densely packed with framed photos and illustrations spanning birds, nudes, horses, butterflies, ladies, and gentlemen. In the centre is a framed photo of a toddler with a potato for a head, lying on some grass.

An "informative" graph from a 1950s instructional film entitled Are You Ready For Marriage? The X axis represents age in years, and the unlabelled Y axis represents the "chance for happiness". Allegedly, women's chances of happiness peak if they marry at ages 25 or 33.

A scuffed, scratched biohazard warning sign on a brightly-coloured red/brown wall, with colours processed artificially to add sickly yellow highlights. English text in capitals reads "CLINICAL WASTE". Below, the same is presumably written in Japanese, but I cannot read Japanese.

Happy late 303 day!

Memento Potato's cover is now made entirely in GIMP; no AI. It also has two more tracks: I finally uploaded Halcyon Days, and added Reflux, a gnarly, nasty little acid track, a rough mix of which debuted on Benn Jordan's 303 day acid stream.

#acid #303day #tb303

Korg Volca FM2 - Polyphonic Digital Synthesizer Add the Korg Volca FM2 Polyphonic Digital Synthesizer to your Volca collection. Great for the Stage and the Studio. Order today at Andertons Music with Free UK Delivery

Six voices of polyphony, DX7 patch compatibility, runs off a guitar pedal PSU (*technically. If you add a polarity inverter and barrel jack size adapter, which having splurged on a nice clean multi pedal PSU, I'd be tempted to do), for under £120? Tempting...

I didn't know Volcas had this power

I love all the sounds of the M:C and the FX of the 404 (and its sound is... well, it's a sampler, so whatever I load onto it), but both of their built in sequencers pale in comparison to the workflow of the Hapax, and it has FOUR. MIDI. OUTPUTS.

If I can figure out how the hell MIDI works on the SP404 MKII, I should be able to sequence that from the Hapax as well. I really want to try sending the audio from M:C into the 404 then have its mix of drums, samples, and FX all sequenced from one surface and recorded together.

With a few mults, I can have DAW audio going out to be monitored, and route up to 4 channels of audio simultaneously back into the DAW for recording, AND into the monitoring mix with zero latency. So I can grab takes from the modular, drum machine, SP404 etc whilst hearing what's already laid down.

Switch from Renoise to Reaper + Hapax is going well so far. Rebuilt a WIP track; getting external gear going. MIDI clock routed DAW - Hapax - MIDI Thing V2 - Model:Cycles. Audio from M:C and DAW into the modular, where headphones live, so I can sequence modular & drums on Hapax and monitor the lot.

oh and I have a Hapax now, because I got tired of how buggy the Keystep Pro is, and wanted a sequencer that isn't rigidly grid-locked without just going back to sequencing everything in-the-box.

haven't had it long, but so far I love it

two drugs

TBH this album was always supposed to comprise whatever I manage to record whilst building up my external gear collection & figuring out how to work with it, so that part is arguably going according to plan

next one should hopefully be an Album, but might also be a year or two out at this point.

yes, I'm still alive; yes I'm still "working" on the "album". both in scare quotes because either myself or my toddler have been ill since October (the two not being mutually exclusive), and coherency won't be its strong point given all the workflow changes and breaks I've had to take

what I had planned: start learning Reaper, rebuilding a WIP track from Renoise, because I think that'll make it much easier to work with externally-recorded audio (I now have quite a lot of physical gear)

what I actually did: re-organise modules so that one row of my case isn't dead

Talkbox 😉 (I tried having the vocals pre-recorded, but trying to manage everything and "sing" with a PVC tube stuck in my mouth at the same time was too much).

And FWIW, I don't think the ES-8 was involved here; I have a Zoom H6 that I realized my phone sees as a USB mic! Straight rack to video

... routed to a stereo pair of outs when it's configured with a multi channel ASIO device, and it has a great stereo sampler built in for recording. On the rare occasions I do more than two channel simultaneous recording I use the Melda MRecorder VST.

Renoise... Not exactly industry standard, and actually tracker-style interfaces are arguably the worst UIs when working with long recorded stretches of audio... But I'm a nerd, I like modular, I like trackers, and it's what I'm used to 😅 each tracker track (and the master) can be individually...

Though it's worth noting I haven't so far used it to try and output at v/Oct signals, so haven't been though any kind of calibration process. TBH 99% of the time I've been routing straight audio with it (but haven't felt that's a waste, the reduced faff & cabling to go to/from DAW/modular is great).

I wound up getting the simpler es-8... And so far haven't needed to use any dedicated software other than the Expert Sleepers ASIO drivers. It just shows straight up as a multichannel audio device, I can route DAW channels to its outs (including slow moving "DC" waveforms) and record from its ins

Oil painting of a house with bay windows, wobbly and lively and vibrant

Electric green inflected vaguely holographic looking pained Minotaur ink and pastel drawing

A grasshopper, multi hued and with in and pastel textures yellows, reds, blues

An oil pastel drawing of a strange house with prominent pinks and warm browns. Scribbly but solid and striking

Hi, Chloe here, these aren’t newly added but they’re artworks that are still available. Sales have slowed. Just thought I’d mention these as people seemed to like them. Reposts are much appreciated as ever.

www.chloecumming.com

Halcyon Days - live Eurorack + SP404 music YouTube video by depthbuffer

how do i love thee?
let me count the ways
let's live forever in these
halcyon days

#eurorack #sp404mk2 #modular #synth #music #jamming

The compressor is sitting atop the shed's heater, for extra analogue warmth

"Analogue mastering". Run the recording through a combo exciter & stereo widener (Minsk to Stereo Dipole acting as saturated bandpass, adding some additional, moving mid-high harmonics, mixed with the dry signal), through an FNR RNC1773, recorded with a digital limiter shaving that last peak dB.

A home studio setup including two 6U 104HP cases full of Eurorack modules; a three-tier wooden stand housing a half-constructed Erica Synths/MKI DIY edu synth, a Moog Werkstatt-01, and a Korg SQ-1 sequencer; a Keystep Pro, a Behringer Solina, and a Behringer Model D.

Two Tiptop Mantis 6U 104HP cases full of modules. The layout is baffling, with the master clock on the left as is tradition, but external audio input/output also mostly on the left, except for the conspicuous six-channel mixer in the top right, as far away from any output as it can get. There is no rhyme or reason to the positioning of the rest of the modules, with oscillators, filters, effects, envelopes, VCAs, and other utilities sprinkled around seemingly at random. Spoiler: the main driver of this layout was purchase order.

Now there's a sight I haven't seen in far too long - everything's unpatched! Yes, this means I finally recorded the piece.

Yes, my rack layout sucks.

Yes, having it all on such a low table with two of the synths underneath is really bad for my back.

I kind of forgot my actual point there. It's not meant to be about comparing artforms, my poorly-expressed intent is just to remind you to feel proud of yourself.

... relative to the rewards... The idea of ever profiting from it is just an absolute pipe dream, and it's absolutely saturated as a market. Those not doing it for their own enrichment usually quit when they realise that.

As for not feeling like a real artist - you absolutely are, no question!

Music as a "serious hobby" is brutal. I've had people buy my music; one stranger (as in, not a biased friend/family) said they hope one of my albums becomes a cult classic. But the amounts of time and money required...

It's beautiful. If my walls weren't already so full and I hadn't already bought from you so recently, I'd be eyeing this one.