zeronyne

There are an infinite number of resources to learn the absolute basics of music theory. By basics I mean scales, chords, and rhythm. And there is a smaller but still vast set of resources for advanced concepts and techniques whether you are a jazz pianist or shredding metal guitar player. But it’s really hard to find information in that “early to middle tier”, like for people who are just past the circle of fifths and modes or adults that can get to that tier in a few days. Any suggestions? i’m always at a loss when someone asks.

I leased a space for my studio for two years. I’m in a complicated process of selling my house, moving into a much smaller townhouse that I bought, and building a big beachouse in another state. So I needed some stability for gear. Oh, and I got one of those 360 degree spherical cameras for the studio as well. So much fun.

I’m a year in with my Gen1 Mini (M1, 16gb RAM). I had two major concerns (I had a monster i9 PC with 64gb RAM immediately prior) with switching back to Mac. First was the inability to upgrade the RAM. But with the change in topography, this has been a non-issue in my work (and oddly and happily, at 55 years old, music production is part of my day job again). I have had zero capacity issues even with large numbers of virtual instruments. Second was the early adopter thing. I don’t usually do that (that’s what Craig is for!), but circumstances were beyond my control. And THIS concern WAS well-founded. I still have a few daily-driver applications that are not M1 native, and it sucks. My Presonus mixer software crashing was not fun because a) it’s headless and b) resetting it meant getting behind my rack. But it’s great now. In fact, for the second time in my life, I forget about the computer when I’m really in the zone. That hasn’t happened since my Atari 1040ST. My advice to any power user woild be to splurge and get a true Thunderbolt hub, not a USBc hub.

Are there any a/b comparisons with the Arturia clone?

With the update to the MoDX to a "plus" model, I'm sure there are some 1st gen starting to drop in price. It's the lightest keyboard I have ever owned, and I have the 76 note version. The OS is designed for live applications. You might like it!

ZZ Top's bass tech sitting in. I always wondered when I'd see a Jean Baudin/Bill Dickens/Jared Dynes style ridiculous bass in the wild, and here it is, with ZZ Top no less.

Behringer is practicing what is as close to pure capitalism as you can get in the current global economy. I’m going to let you in on a little unspoken corporate trick that only works if you have deep pockets and are large enough to have an entire department named “corporation counsel”. The trick is not to assess risk…you assess liability. It’s not about whether or not you get sued. It’s about whether getting sued is still worth it compared to not taking a risk at all. I worked at a consulting firm that had a tier of service that guaranteed 100% uptime on any servers hosted by us. The next tier down was 98% uptime, but it was less than half as expensive because obviously you can never have 100% uptime, but the breathtaking cost to the customer basically funded the liability insurance to be able to make that absurd guarantee. And it worked great. In the time I worked there, of the 90 major clients that had paid for 100% uptime, we only had issues with one outage. So with Behringer, it’s not about staying within the law(s), it risk vs reward. Everyone talks about free markets and deregulation, but when someone like Uli pushes the boundaries of the rules, then everyone backpedals. Pure capitalism is much closer to brutal evolution than any other economic system or construct.

I mean, Born in the USA is the classic example of completely misinterpreted lyrics, right? ”She’s only 17” is a bit…dated. Winger now sings it ironically and adds “she’s only 35” now.

I love this subject. I’m a lifelong student of branding and brand entities. I’m going to start with negatives so I can end on a positive note. Samsung. TV was was two weeks from the end of the warranty and it failed. Tech came out three weeks later, said we were out of warranty (it was the earliest he could arrive). After 6 months of back and forth including a trip to small claims court, that was it for me. And I have many relatives who work at Samsung corporate. I have not bought a single Samsung product since except for OEM stuff I have no control over. Verizon. I have had a Verizon phone account for close to twenty years. They have consistently been the most expensive option, but their customer service was top notch. My next phone will not be with them, they must have switched CSA firms, because they are really hard to deal with now. I know Akai has changed hands several times, but their tendency to expire driver support but then also not open source the driver tends to practically brick older devices. I will never buy another Akai product again even though I really like their beige sampler OSes. BMW. I’ve owned half a dozen, including two now. Never again. The dealers in my area are now elitist pricks. Same with Land Rover. Two lemons was enough for me. I will never purchase store brands (Mitchell, Simmons, SR, Acoustic, Samson, etc). There’s something inherently dishonest about how these are presented that personally bother me even though all those products are just rebadged. The most painful for me is Propellerheads/Reason Studios. I’ve been a huge loyal fan since Rebirth, but I’m just sad about the direction they are going. and the pain of Opcode’s demise for me was the loss of that beautiful, non-skeuomorphic interface. THAT was the tragedy of losing that DAW. My expectations for a brand are simple: deliver as advertised, remedy any issues quickly and thoroughly, and at least have a facade of caring about customers. I don’t abide by social media trends, especially cancel culture, so you may be surprised by which brands have my non-emotional loyalty based on my three simple requirements: Amazon Ibanez Behringer (although I’m very selective about what I will buy from them) Electro Harmonix JHS Noise Engineering Mutable Instruments Pepsi Sony Zippo That’s it. Every other brand is case by case.

I hope that at least the ORIGINAL original poster was joking, but I can’t be sure. What is some of the most ridiculous things you’ve read in groups that are presented seriously as expert advice?

I don't use Bitwig, so when a controversy flared up around it, I barely gave it a glance. The last time I checked (and that means I may not have the latest info), Bitwig users (and from the sheer number of outraged people, random trolls) were pissed that they had these all-inclusive "upgrades for a year" licenses but then released an update that they said was outside that upgrade structure. And the VERY last time I checked, there was further outrage that Bitwig had apparently changed their EULA slightly. This last part was not verified by me, but I'm stating that there were many others on Twitter that thought that was what happened. All of this would not be noteworthy to me as crazed masses try to cancel companies and people all the time, but what stunned me is what happened next (that sounds like clickbait, doesn't it?): The crowd turned their pitchforks on two fairly prominent YouTubers. Ben Jordan and Cameron from Venus Theory are hardly controversial personalities, although Ben got into hot water with his viewers for pointing out bugs in Akai's new workstation keyboard. The two of them, in the hopes of being a bridge between Bitwig (they are both prominent users) and the angry consumers, did a livestream a few days ago that went two hours, and they just sort of worked through the whole issue. It was highly UNscripted. The problem was that if you only saw part of the stream, you'd have different takes on how the two of them felt about the issue. And they both realized, shortly after the stream, that unless you watched the whole thing, it was not going to contribute to the discussion in a positive way, so they took it down. You can guess what happened next. Well, everything that could happen happened. They were called shills, elitists, out of touch, egotistical, and I believe I saw the work "evil" in a post or two. And Bitwig did not help things for these two guys who were just trying to resolve this for everyone including themselves. They never responded to Ben or Cameron's queries as of that livestream. Tomorrow (today, technically), Bitwig will make some sort of announcement. I hope they directly address what is happening to those two YouTubers...they put out quality content about gear and production, and they try to do interesting things as well, and it would be a shame if they got burned because of a fucking EULA that they had nothing to do with. So again, is anyone keeping up with this?

Please let me know how you eventually resolve this. I’m considering buying a dual manual keyboard, but not for organ sounds…I just like them from an ergonomic perspective.

Earlier this year, my company explored some solutions for latency in audio for a non-music purpose, and I sort of fell into the Linux audio rabbit hole for a brief moment. Is there some issue in the community about recent (well, I guess it would be earlier this year) incompatibilities with the newest (again at the beginning of the year) Jack and Pipewire? I remember our low level devs grumbling about it.

Yes, it’s racist. Only you and I get a pass on that one. I hate the fonts on these and the random stock footage of an old Asian man…

Those of you with us from days past know how important Jeremy Cohen was to the Lowdown. He argued down trolls, helped in any way possible and had a great collection of blue basses. He personally introduced me to Carol Kaye at a NAMM, and I spent a surreal half hour standing between them as they chatted about everything but bass. I wasn’t even playing bass yet at that point. He was opinionated and funny, and he was such a sweet guy in person. I lost touch with him for the most part when the Lowdown had that bad crash. I will miss him a lot. I JUST heard he died a moment ago, and I have no details. Please consolidate all information here to keep everyone who knew him aware.

Some of you know me quite well, and many of you I have not interacted with at all, so this may either seem weird or familiar, depending… I am making a push into YouTube. I won’t go into the particulars since some of it is well-outside the scope of this board, but I could use some input…I’ve also asked on Facebook, so this may be a repeat for some of you. I’m making an explainer video about customizing an Axe Edge. As you can see, I have the spare plates and all the materials I need ( the tools and space are not pictured). I have experience with making the EVH pattern, so that will be one of them. What about the other three. If you owned one, what would you like to learn how to do? The only think I will not do is vinyl wrapping because there are already a few videos showing that technique. I also had some concepts with the Steve Vai disappearing pyramids and the Journey scarab from Escape, but any suggestions? I’m open to anything that might have a polished outcome and will not damage the keyboard. This is a thoughtful and creative group. What say ye?

I’m starting to sound like a shill, but they are offering $300 off for the October batch right now (just saw the FB announcement). If you’re a gambler like me, you can save some scratch.

Does anyone know how to shut off the annoying preview sequence when you scroll though patches? (In Komplete Kontrol, I mean).

The Jan Hammer model had the pitch and mod wheels repositioned so he could address the controls with his thumb from the back. I though that was pretty cool because it made the signature model actually usefully different. They then made a really cheap one with no breakout box (LN1000). I have a very oddly colored LN4 that has finally been put out of its misery. It sits somewhere between mucus and saliva on the Pantone scale. I think it was called “Pearl white”. It most definitely is not.

That’s a good question. I’ll ask the company. My understanding is that the wireless transmitter is built in, so there may be zero ports on the keyboard. But I don’t know if the receiver is usb only. That would be a bit of a miss. I’ll do a demo on YT as soon as I get one. I preordered against my better judgement…I am NOT an early adopter-type.

I’ve probably jinxed them now, but the new folks making Lyncs are getting much more communicative about a few delays in launching the LN4000, but they’ve added a thumb strip that can send most CCs. This remote keyboard brand’s journey from the 80s to being reborn this year is remarkable, and maybe the new owners will share the tale someday. I’m looking forward to this because the Ax-Edge is meant for someone much taller, stronger and/or cuter than I, and the AX1 with a wireless pack is just janky looking. And obviously, this is not going to be most people’s cup of tea. 49 Full-Sized keys. Carbon Fiber body. (6.4 Pounds) 500 feet Wireless Midi. Midi Receiver and USB cable included. 4 split zones. Assignable touch strip and Mod wheel. Touch strip will be able to become a pitch strip in a future firmware update. Sensitive Pitch wheel. Layer up to 4 sounds at the same time via MIDI. 64 Preset locations. Strap and "Dunlop Strap-Loks" are included. Programmable aftertouch. 6 hour Rechargeable battery life. USB port for firmware and feature updates. Fully licensed copy of UVI Digital Synsations software instrument.

I have 13 Ultimate, and although not Silicon yet, it’s been working fine as standalone, in Reason, and in Ableton Live.

As always, you’ve been a great help. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. I play out once a year, which is why I would like to have onboard sounds. The last one I played was a PC88 back in the day. I need a weighted controller and pitch/mod wheels, and it would be nice if the sounds were editable and usable, which I imagine they are. And I assume the PC4 is current? Their naming convention throws me sometimes. The only I have to think over is aftertouch. It’s a little annoying not having it on the MODx.