A place for the discussion of all things related to the electronic synthesis of sound.
Made a place to jam and have fun while I learn piano and finger drumming in the office. Separating learning from playing has been awesome to have.
Edit: I promise I’ll post the music that I make here! Pictures are good, but I need to back it up with music.
Nice Neutron! I'd skin mine if I cared that much about it being so butt ugly.
If you're into finger drumming, you might want to check out Yamaha's recent FGDP-30 and FGDP-50. They look pretty slick and the price is right. I'm pretty tempted even though I'm not really a finger drummer at all.
Honestly I just signed up for Melodics to learn finger drumming. I’ve played drums for so long I had to talk myself of getting an electronic drum set to just track drums fully.
I’m glad the guy I bought the neutron from threw in the skin and a deck saver. The red is.. a bit much.
How do you like your neutron? I’m having a very hard time finding its “voice”, it just clashes against the other synths.
I love the Neutron. It's stupid versatile for the price. I don't find it too hard to fit it into a mix. No harder than any other analog mono anyway. They're always a bit inherently spectrum hogging. I made this track with nothing but the Neutron.
I think the issue is I just haven’t figured out how to interact with it yet. I won’t fault the instrument.
Yeah, it's certainly janky. Have you found out you can lock tuning to midi notes yet? I was tuning it every time I played it. With the big knobs and the huge range, it was a huge PITA. Finding out it could be locked was a big "doh" moment.
So it is 100% me and not knowing how to sequence it with the Beatstep. I moved it to the office and hooked it up to Maschine. Ran some midi clips through and it sounded fantastic.
Having it plugged into a PC, the built in tuners are a godsend as well.
I wish my office had a Maschine.
So far just have the software version. Told myself I needed to master the software and navigating the hardware before buying the standalone Maschine+.
For perspective, I’m barely over “what even is a splice, I just want to play clips” level of Maschine understanding.
Haha! Truthfully, I'm not in on the Maschine workflow at all. I use Csound and Reaper to sequence external hardware and use no software synths at all.
Can I ask how do record each part individually and then layer everything and if so how do you normally work through it all in your head?
I've got everything going through a patch bay, into a couple of mixers that go into my interface. If I want to rearrange hardware effects (I was a guitarist primarily for many years and have a stack of pedals), I've got the most useful ones in the patch bay, so there is minimal plugging and unplugging at the beginning of a session.
I use a load of different compositional methodologies, but these days, I mostly start with a single idea like an arpeggio, or chord progression, some serial process, or even just a snippet of lyrics that I then build around by adding percussion, harmony, form, etc. etc. I'm a big fan of twentieth century serial, conceptual, minimal, and electronic music like that of Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, Steve Reich, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, so I definitely tend towards the outre, though I don't turn my nose up at a good banger and a lot of my older output was just me trying to make weird and badass sounding electronic music.
The cable rack above the DFAM is a nice touch 🤌