The Hardware Megathread

#1664

heres the guy who had to get rid of his sub (@31:10)

#1665

It’s kind of a double edged sword. On the one hand, by using a sub, you can take the most demanding frequencies off your larger driver (8 inch in your case), relegate it to upper bass and mids, and lower distortion in those lowest frequencies some (like why a lot of studio engineers swear by 3-way designs as opposed to 2-way). And, by being able to position your sub freely, you can minimize the impact it has on the sound at the listening position by moving the modes around the room.

OTOH, adding a sub means adding a crossover filter, and that means you need to worry about phase issues at the crossover point. And the crossover has to be usually between 80 and 250 hz, where there’s a lot of important things happening, so you need to get that crossover really, really right. In normal multi-driver speakers, this is taken care of by the manufacturer, but when adding a sub to system after the fact, it’s on you unless they’ve specifically developed the speakers and sub with each other in mind.

#1666

it might have seen some abuse, as the Filter balance is the worst, followed by the program knob and data1.

its fine, will be back to tip top in no time!

#1667

Since you guys are all on about subwoofers, this synchronistically came out today.
Ken Marshall seems super cool and I’ve been a big fan of his works for ever, I love his channel!
You guys should check him out.

#1668

havent watched this yet but as a huge Skinny Puppy and Download fan I’ve been watching this channel closely.

#1669

Oh sweet, I’ve been subbed for a few months. Liked his piece on compression last week, legitly didn’t know there was a difference between FET and VCA compressors.

#1670

I couldn’t help noticing the Electrix Warpfactory vocoder, gutted i sold mine (red module top of his wee rack)

#1671

A few things about automations:

  • At the beginning of a clip automations do not reset so if you switch from a clip with a massive delay feedback to a clip with no automation, ht feedback level will still be where it was at the end of the previous clip. A quick ‘list’ event will sort this,

  • Volume automations: For the same reason above, volume automations can fuck up your mix, so do not automate the mixer volume (at least until song mode arrives) automate the sample or instrument volume

  • Drawing automations with your fingers is fun;

  • Pretty much everything can be automated

  • somewhere in the preferences there’s the option to record automation buy pressing the record button instead of having to go to the mixer page and turn on the automation recording button.This can be a blessing and a curse as I forgot about it and recording a lot of mute/unmute/pan automation…

#1672

Put together a walkthrough and demo of my Eurorack Livecase. First video is the walkthrough and short jam, second video is the jam only should you have no interest in the other stuff. My original goal with the modular was to do a generative ambient setup. I quickly found out, that’s not actually what I want to do. Over the last 5 months the rack has morphed into what you see here. It’s basically a live improv industrial techno rack that I’m super stoked about. Very minimal pre planning with the jam, only basic practice with the patch, pretty much created on the spot with the exception of tuning.

I know we have a eurorack thread but all my peeps are here so, yeah…

Walkthrough & Jam

Jam Only

#1673

you sound so much like me… generative ambient one day, industrial techno the other. love it. great setup sir!

speaking of, do you still rock the nord or has your attention been squarely in modular town?

#1674

^Hey thanks man!

Yeah the generating ambient thing was cool for about 10 min. But then I started seeing guys on line doing more structured dance stuff and I was hooked.

No, don’t have the Nord any longer. Even though it may not look like it by the eurorack setup, I have a very limited budget for hardware. Put myself in the hole on this one actually. That’s okay, long live monthly payments!

Thanks for checking the setup out man! The only thing better than a rack that spits out techno would be a rack that spits out Neon Cities. Seriously, that would be super dope.

#1675

No DAWless jamming for Neon Cities! :wink:

#1676

I only listened to the track and it’s a really good one, will need to find some time to properly watch the overview and look at what you were doing as I’m really curious

#1677

So if I understand that correctly, that’s all one sequence sending different gates to different parts? Very interesting stuff.

#1678

Yeah, so far I haven’t gotten on with the automation. What worked for me in about 5 minutes was going to the project knobs mode and assigning them to the stuff I wanted to automate and just doing that myself. Turns out that’s much more fun and lets me really time the sweeps and such to perfection. Add in a few momentary controls for a hipass and some resonance and I can make 4 scenes go very far all of a sudden.

#1679

Thanks man. Yeah on the overview I really feel I missed some really important points. Especially on more broad issues like why a setup like this makes sense over more traditional groove boxes and such. I really wanted to focus on the benefits of the system for live use. But it took several takes to even get what I have there and by the time I got that last take I just went with it. Maybe I’ll make another one sometime where I discuss some of those points in more detail.

Yes that is correct. It’s basically one gate sequence being multed out in various ways, with a logic type module. The logic module makes copies of the gate pattern and brings variety to the copies so everything isn’t just playing the same pattern. Pitch is just one “track” as well but being shared by all the modules. That way changing the pitch on the main sequencer, the arpitecht, changes the pitch system wide. Just tune the oscillators to one another and it’s good to go and in key with whatever you tell the system to do.

That’s another thing I could have explained better in the demo but explaining things turned out to be harder than I thought it would be going in.

#1680

Really enjoyed both the videos. Loving the synth sounds in particular. Was having a little trouble hearing you over the sequence in the walkthrough video as you added more sounds, but I like hearing about all the modules and routing.

#1681

Ive been in LA for work, spending my days working on Prophet 6’s and X’s, programming the ableton’s… etc. I decided to bring my Roland TB03 with me for this trip. its small, it can be its own interface, is battery operated and is an instantly recognizable sound.

What a fun box. I lent it to a friend 6 months ago or so and sort of forgot, not that i owned it, but that it was so much fun! I brushed up on the manual and discovered a function menu that offers different delay/verb types as well as distortion types. I had mainly used the sequencer in “pitch mode”, which is the sort of easy way of programming it, but watched a couple of tutorials and switched it back over to OG 303 style sequencing. Holy cow, the happy accidents… i punch in a scale or string of notes and then bash those old time mode buttons and hit Run. Its like the lottery, only your odds are better.

I cant wait to get back to use my MPC2500 to fire the sequencer’s “Trigger in” for even more interesting rhythmic manipulation. Motivating to put together a set w the TB03, MS20mini and SQ1 sequencer all driven by the MPC.

#1682

Can sequenced instruments like drum machines and synths sequence more than one bar?

#1683

Depends on the instrument and how precise you want to be with your timing. Most sequencers talk about length in terms of steps, which are usually delineated in 16th or 32nd notes (I think?).

For example, lets say you have a 64 step sequencer with 16th note steps. Normally, you’d think of that as 4 bars (64/16) at 120bpm, but if you wanted 32nd notes, you could also think of that as 2 bars with 32nd note grids (64/32) at 240bpm. Or, if you’re working with super quantized chords that don’t need many changes, you could just have it be qaurter notes at 1/4 the original bpm (64/4 = 16 bars at 30 bpm). Really depends on how you choose to use it and again, what instrument/sequencer we’re talking about.