David Emm

TBH, I can only hear a wisp of difference between them. That's excellent news for people who don't have $5K for the hardware. Sweetwater is offering the Arturia version for $74. If you have a serious Oberheim jones going, I feel sure you can get over "settling" for a software take on it. Your ears are forgiving. A few days' playing and they'll latch onto the best aspects.

The problem with China is real enough, but the more central issue is, well, US. Social media reflects us back at ourselves and its been pretty gagsome. Even back in my Usenet days, it was prevalent. One reason I gave it up was visiting alt.poetry and seeing people slash at one another as if there was a Sicilian blood debt hanging over the place. The weirdly volcanic signal-to-noise ratio gave me hives. If I had kids, especially a daughter, I'd fight them to a standstill over smart phones. They'd get a simple flip phone and live with it. Part of parenting is steering them away from toxic things. They'd holler about it, you bet, but if you explain that its all calculated to sell you your own left hand and 98% dishonest at its core, they'll at least respect that you drew lines and provided structure. That's a tough hurdle, but their brains deserve your TLC. In Harpo Marx's autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, there is mention of ten permanent house rules being taped to the fridge. #10 tells the tale, I think: "Anyone found guilty of scratching the felt on the pool table or abusing a pet will be docked a month's wages." Some rules rock. We no longer teach civics consistently and even less so, the art of civility & its benefits. There has to be a middle ground between being a puckerbutt & playing a Redd Foxx party record for your Baptist granny's lunch group. The day I can offer a fix, I'll let you know. There's a line between being wryly amusing and just being a blithering drunk. I tend to fall right on it face first, so I can't judge too harshly. 🤨

I think the issue could be summed up by something I heard a short while ago. The statement was that Japanese people are highly fond of puzzles, which shows quite clearly in X number of hardware synth GUIs. Far more people than not see a synth as another piece of consumer tech, whose job is to make fun noises. Those of us who are serious, furrowed-brow keyboard players take a more serious view of it. That's not to say that any given approach is "bad." Variety has several pluses. Some softsynths are breezy and some are Dr. Frankenstein peyote nightmares. There are synths for oscillator-heads and synths for neo-pianists who like synth sounds. That respected, IMO, Yamaha is the most inscrutable, whereas Roland is convoluted but more consistent & ultimately comprehensible. Korg gets the golden spaghetti squash for being the alphanumeric champs. I've always preferred the company's overall sound, but their UIs are the least abbreviated. Its easier to keep track of what you're doing. The Montage will see its due as a solid pro instrument and a few folks will make part of their living programming it for pros. Yamaha's instruments have always been full and crisp. Still, the MODX line seems a lot more pragmatic. The full Montage is partly a case of a synth that's peacockin'. 🦚

"You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person." ~ Kevin Kelly

That was quite useful on several fronts. I get the blockchain deal and I've known about MIDI show control for years, but the rest was a welcome addition to my casual data base. Well rendered!

Ken Nordine once referred to a chord as "a perverted 27th." I'd love to hear that applied to "Crimson & Clover."

I sometimes think Rogan made a very good point, in fine form. Then he says something that should be in an X-rated anime about badgers on crank.

I see it as first-gen, with a serious shakedown cruise ahead. It'll live or die by how inviting the software really is and how many people get vertigo & barf 20 minutes into a session. It has some distance to cover before I'd see it as a practical replacement for Logic, which would be my main consideration. I'm closer to being below the ground than above it, so I'll never see it as a portal for an Only Fans account. We'll surely see things like discreet transport controls on a virtual panel, under your preferred hand and tilted back by 20 degrees. Jean-Michel Jarre has been showing off larger but similar setups. How practical that will be when I'm personally in the zone is still TBD. It'll have to trickle down and be refined by a few more notches. Like MPE, this is a new paradigm that won't solidify overnight.

Its definitely a boomer thing, but I always thought that someone who could play like a boss should do it made up as Lurch from "The Addams Family." It seems so natural.

Holy bleep, shades of Mr. Creosote from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life!" It sounds horrifically delicious, but I can tell that if I chowed down on one, I'd pop before I finished it.

My pal calls it "Soylent Brown." I prefer "Teletubby Turds." We're both amazed not to be on any No Fly lists.

Good points. I'm only reading the libraries of Logic-based instruments, so that's a plus. I may also shift my M-Tron library outside, which is 4.5 GB of skeery. I'm about to do some Autosampling of my Mininova. I'll be tucking the results into Sampler, but that's the only other writing in my future. I should add a couple of Samsung drives. Variety seems like an added safety measure under the new paradigm.

Nah, save yer money! Here are three good resources for newbies, the first of them being the most comprehensive. #2 and #3 cover the same ground more briefly. https://mastering.com/logic-pro-x-tutorial/ https://www.makeuseof.com/logic-pro-beginner-guide/ https://www.soundswow.com/logic-pro-tutorials/ If this is your first DAW, I can understand your confusion. There's a lot to cover, but as complex as it is, be reassured that there's a beginning and an end. You can eventually grasp the whole enchilada. If its not your first DAW, the basics still apply across the board, even if you are only used to Ableton Live. There are exotic approaches if you want them, but click on Show Mixer and then explore the buttons on one track. Poking around there speaks volumes about the potential routings, such as those for effects inserts and sends. I'm no expert, because to me, as an old cassette-gobbling hippie, Logic is a massive tape deck. I cut-&-paste with impunity. I enlarge track sections enough to fix that one occasional pesky bad note and its a breeze. Those reflexes simply come with time. I recommend cross-referencing these sites with the manual. After X numbers of passes, the YT videos will make more sense. Above all, click everything and see what happens. Its not as if the program will explode if you trip over procedures while you're learning. It'll simply go DERP! until you get the right strokes & macros going. You won't learn it overnight, but the drop-down menus are very accomodating. Arm a channel, pick an instrument and tweedle. Everything will grow from there.

When Australian kids cuss, they don't get their filthy $#@! little mouths washed out with soap. Mom just makes 'em eat 3 heaping tablespoons' worth of Vegemite.

Not if they happen at the same time. 😱

Holy bleep, what a Medusa hairdo of cords that generates! My first thought was about the horrific adapters I used to connect things, back before I learned what impedance was. You know how it was at times: you'd use anything you had to cram things together in a pinch. The best effect pedal I had was the noise gate, because things sounded like a windstorm without it. 😆 If it looks like a jungle from the outside, imagine the poor tech who has to trace everything when its opened up. 😬

I have a 500 GB SSD and a 128 GB flash drive holding my Logic libraries, connected via Thunderbolt port extenders. They're getting rather warm. Not hot, but still notable and moreso on the SSD. I'm all about near-OCD backups, but the steady use of outboard storage in real-time is new to me. Thermal buildup can eventually cause a kaboom. If all of this is standard operating procedure, great, but I'd like to feel more certain. Anyone having issues with such things sputtering or even failing? Is the heat issue less of a concern by going with something like an NVMe into USB 3.2 Gen 2 enclosure? I want to set the right standard for configuration.

There was once either a red pill or a blue one. Now, there's also this horrific new PURPLE one. 😬

That's a humbling biography. Anyone would be a real world-beater with even half of that to their credit. He's one of our music tech forefathers.

I had a butt ugly Dodge Dart station wagon for a while, back when I was a butt ugly bionic hippie. Heater (no A/C), AM radio, standard shift and basically a tractor motor as its heart. You could see a lot of the ground under it, because it was the opposite of tricked-out. I all but put butter in the crankcase in a couple of pinches and drove it through deep water a few times, but it soldiered on, regardless. I also kept it decorated in Early White Trash inside, so I was free of worry about anyone stealing it. Cars crammed with high-tech features have commensurate costly problem cycles. The Beluga excelled at its one real purpose: hauling me to & fro. I'd love to have it back again! Craig is right about this being a crossfade. When I let my sci-fi gland wander, its not hard to envision a take-off point where solar panels hit a meaningful peak efficiency and a form of battery based on something utterly mundane & plentiful gives them the right place to funnel the juice. I may not live to see it, but I was a lousy candidate for a rocket pack anyway.

Everything surrounding lithium is nasty. The mining of it is messy and a replacement battery can cost more than the original car price. Repair shops for them command top dollar, because it all but takes a specialized clean room to manage. You can't just roll them into a local garage. Also, where do they get the juice for those charging stations? Why, at least partially from petroleum-fueled power stations. Some may be nuclear or solar/wind based, but that's not likely to cover the majority of the load. It defeats part of the purpose. We need something with better energy density that's more sensibly repairable and which doesn't randomly catch fire like a sumbitch. Firefighters hate those Tesla calls, because they have no ready way of extinguishing the mess. They mostly just guard the perimeter until it sputters out. The technology is still too much in its beta phase, IMO.

That's a lovely setup. It could make for some great contrast with an Eric Whitacre choir. Its far removed from a Mellotron. 🤯

Gotcha. I'm going to re-check my backups and then start fresh. I'm not sure where I first stumbled, but starting from zero is the way of all machine language, even if it has a rainbow GUI. We were on the same page there. I've been shopping for a good powered hub. I just need one or two more slots and I could be where you are, sharing the load across drives. I'll scope out what Sabrent offers. I have a 128 GB SanDisk drive holding my libraries at the moment (those have been rock solid), but I think I'll be cloning that onto an SSD or two. I like having 6 copies of everything. I lost a wad of work many years ago to a sudden brownout, so I Save Early, Save Often!

Um, yes. You can see part of my problem! 😳 It'd be a wild fantasy scenario to need 2 TB of RAM. That's a good idea and moreso while I shift things around and fix the issue.

I did mean "home rig." There's only so much crossover between that and a stage system unless you have Toto's roadies. Zebralette is scary-impressive. If the full instrument is going to be like several of these in a final form, it'll make quite a splash. Urs always has an element of crispness going, so yes, I hear some PM-like movement going on. I'm also fond of Bezier curves, which seem very natural in use, even when the sound at hand is weird. I may not be a candidate for this one, because I basically live in a ring of slab synths and Spitfire sections. I also cheat by tweezing three instances of Logic's Sampler featuring modular sounds that are clearly from the Subotnick end of the pool. Full disclosure. I only rarely sweat bullets over micro-differences in LFO speeds.