AROIOS
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Posts posted by AROIOS
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3 hours ago, obxa said:
I'll be the crabby boomer... he had these guys on a similar Wurli shootout, to which I wasn't impressed. Got the feeling neither of them has every spent any real time with actual Ob's, Wurlis or older gear. Jack on the other hand always gets my full respect.
Regardless, liked the Arturia (which I own) better too. The patches were indeed bit brighter- which I guess could fool you the same way if something is louder. They also had a tad more release on the envelopes in some patches.. Blindfolded I'd be fooled too except for bass patches.
For virtual , I think the Gforce OBX is worth a serious look. For what it's worth, also has Tom Oberheim and Marcus Ryle's blessing. Gforce just did the OB -EZ which is absolutely superb. Before you plunk down on the Arturia, try the OBEZ demo. Or just buy it. Though based on the 8 voice SEM's, it's got the OB mojo. Simple interface, but enough to do plenty. The price is a no-brainer.
Been considering downsizing the studio, and Gforce's synths have made me feel I could live without hardware.
This coming from owner of Obxa, OB1k, and a Matrix 6.
SonicProject's OP-X and Synapse Audio's Obsession are two other excellent contenders for the Oberheim sound.-
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I found myself preferring Arturia in 3 out of the 5 patches (#1, #2, #4).
That said, I'd choose Oberheim just for the last patch alone.
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11 hours ago, konaboy said:
Indeed, the mousewheel never works great in my experience for plugin control. for some synths the knob moves too much for each wheel increment, and for others it's painfully slow so you have to spin the mousewheel for ages just to get a small parameter change. and the software vendors of the plugins have yet to make that a preference setting.
and let's be honest, rolling a mouse wheel is not the same satisfying experience as turning a quality knob. That's how we are used to editing synths, hence my original proposal for the Woody "Hover Knob" .
The frustration you mentioned with mouse wheels is not a problem of "wheels" per se. We are gonna run into exactly the same experience if a "knob" alternative has the same low-resolution encoders.
Wheels and knobs are both rotary controls and share most of the same benefits of easy acceleration/deceleration and fine adjustments.
Advantages of wheels are: 1) concealment, most wheel controls only expose a small portion of their perimeters to engage finger tips; 2) needing only 1 finger to control;
The advantage of knobs is the slightly finer control offered by the coordination among more than 1 finger. It's basically the same kind of difference between calligraphy with pen attached to one finger vs. pen controlled by three fingers plus a bit of help from the wrist.
None of my synth tweaking require calligraphy-level finesse. The current problems with mouse wheels, are low resolution and inconsistent response curve across apps, as we both noted.
If you are geeky enough, there's a PC software called ScrollNavigator that tries to address the response/acceleration curve problem. I find it helpful in scrolling through long web pages/documents. But garbage in garbage out, there's only so much magic we can squeeze out of the roughly 7 clicks/pulses generated by a full mouse wheel push/pull.
What we need, well, what I need, as I mentioned above, are 1) higher resolution on the mouse wheel encoder, 2) consistent or adjustable acceleration response curves across apps. These two simple improvements would greatly increase productivity across tons of areas.
BTW, you can Shift+Scroll for increments of 10 on most Roland soft synths. That should really become industry standard.
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<Merged with post above>
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14 hours ago, CyberGene said:
I think it was @konaboy who had the idea of having a big hardware knob (encoder) connected to your computer and then use it to control software synths by turning it when hovering the cursor over the various on-screen controls. I think it’s a great idea, not sure why nobody has implemented it yet.
11 hours ago, konaboy said:because pointing, clicking and then dragging the mouse up and dow with wrist is fatiguing, inaccurate and tedious compared with pointing and turning a knob.
A lot of synths support "hover and scroll" with mouse wheels. So clicking and dragging aren't really necessary.
What we really need, BADLY, are mouse wheels with finer increments (more clicks per inch). And better yet, UI code libraries that incorporate good mouse wheel acceleration algorithms (similar to what Microsoft does in Windows for low-res mouse movements).
Logitech's Infinite-Scroll is a nice design, but it only solved the problem of scrolling through long documents, and don't work well with sliders and knobs in apps like Photoshop, DAWs, VSTs etc.-
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12 hours ago, JoJoB3 said:
It's not usually 'snobbery' but artistic decision to work within the medium (to meet the intention, whatever it may be. That's up to the artist). There are techniques and decisions to be made in working with film medium. This usually affords unique results when in the right hands/mind.
* That and it's fun. CGI will never scare me, there's no weight. Practical fx will always reign supreme!!!
Also, 16:9 anamorphic film is a powerful force...like a fine McIntosh with matched quad 6550 paired with quality vinyl! We need more Rob Bottins in the world!
All the power to you, brother, if you know what you are after.-
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19 hours ago, Tusker said:
...The most intuitive interface I have ever seen is for a recently released beta version of a free synth. For me it's better than knobs, because you can actually see sound and shape it. On an analog synth (and I love analog synths!) I have to imagine things...
It gets exponentially more complicated and unintuitive when we bring in envelope_depth, key/velocity_dependent_cutoff/resonance, LFO_destinations...
And then let's add two more layers... 😃
I love the possibilities offered by the infinite amount of combinations with these controls, but often find myself on a journey driven by serendipity rather than intention. Well, there's a good reason I'm not John "Skippy" Lehmkuhl, Howard Scarr or Eric Persing.-
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1 minute ago, jazzpiano88 said:
...They think that a computer program minimizing millions of variables to an objective function via a well known algorithm that maximizes the slope (gradient descent), that your can write down, makes it "Intelligent". Jesus!!!! It's in a textbook -- been there for 50 years. ...
At the risk of repeating myself, there's the possibility that those simple math turn out to be how our brains work, just at a massively larger scale. -
On 3/4/2024 at 1:59 PM, jazzpiano88 said:
I was surprised that photographic film is making a comeback. The only thing is, the first thing people do after processing their analog film is they digitize it to show it to someone. It's kind of along the lines of digitizing the output of your Vinyl. Digital Vinyl is better than (or equal to) Vinyl.
It's part nostalgia, part snobbism, and part simple human nature.
I look at film snobs and their "wine critic" style language with cringe, as I do most self-claimed audiophiles. But what they see and hear, are often more than just imagined fair dust.
A key aesthetic of films is their luminance response curve, which elevates the darkest pixels and compresses the brightest ones.
My hypothesis of why that's pleasing is simple: extreme darkness or brightness reduce our ancestors' chances of survival.-
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On 3/4/2024 at 1:21 PM, jazzpiano88 said:
The topic of the video is an interesting one: Digital is better at Analog than Analog.
He argues it from a Signal to Noise and Dynamic Range argument. To boil it down in simple terms, a digital synth has a reconstruction filter to convert the digital representation into an analog waveform that theoretically can be as accurate as you want it to be. (it's an infinite series of sinc functions for those who know Oppenheim and Schafer). What his means is that, for example, a digital synth can produce a sine wave that is more accurate (less distortion and noise) than an analog synth. Extend that to more complex waveforms, filters, etc....
From a practical point of view he said he's never released a soft synth until it could pass a double blind comparison with analog.
Anthony basically agrees but argues that the unpredictability and imperfect nature of analog sometimes produces something desirable that can't be replicated by digital.
99.9% of audio laymen know nothing about Fourier Transform or Nyquist–Shannon Theorem, yet love to blame the "jagged edges of digital waveform" that only exist in their vivid imagination.-
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11 hours ago, Reezekeys said:
"If anyone can click on a few buttons and get a Mona Lisa or a Coltrane soundalike track, what does that say about our capacity to honor or enjoy human creative work? It's gonna be a boring world. Am I imagining it or are some folks actually excited about this prospect?"
Apples to oranges, but I'd pick Calculus and Quantum Physics over Mona Lisa and Giant Steps any given day, as our species' "capacity to honor".
And A.I. is already churning out new math and physics rules that used to take humans centuries, if not millennia, to discover.
That's the kind of stuff the keeps me up at night. Mona Lisa and Giant Steps? Nice to have, but won't do a thing to cure cancer or generate free energy. -
12 hours ago, Reezekeys said:
...How does an AI decide which ideas "sound good" or not?...
It sends bots to capture and force humans to grade its output...
That's actually not too far from what actually happens. There are huge teams of humans grading and labeling training data and A.I. outputs both here in the US and in outsourcing destinations like India.
Remember the online Captcha challenges ? That's us labeling data for A.I. training (and feeding Skynet 😃)
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15 hours ago, jazzpiano88 said:
One of the major things that sparked the AI, or Machine Learning, revolution was the plethora of training data, namely image data. Large (Deep) Neural Nets capable of doing amazing things were not practical without enough data to train them without overfitting.
So with a large image data set available called imagenet the researchers toiled away with various network topologies, training techniques and hyper parameters to see who could achieve the best image classification accuracy on millions of images for object recognition. It was literally a completion.
Along the way, they started using the networks to do other things, like generate continuous outputs to steer a car. And here we are. I prefer the term Machine Learning over AI because I think it’s more descriptive. We’re not really mimicking “intelligence” IMO.
It's mostly marketing. Even the term "Machine Learning" itself is largely just CS guys re-branding good ole "Statistical Learning". -
14 hours ago, Theo Verelst said:
...Digital recording still generally sound pretty awful unfortunately...
Pseudo-Science -
20 hours ago, Shamanzarek said:
There is light classical and then there is impossibly demanding concert classical piano. I was watching Lang Lang on PBS last night and he falls into the impossible category while doing the European-style facial expressions.
LangLang epitomizes the fetish in Classical circles that worship "fast/hard" for the sake of "fast/hard". Throw him a Jazz Swing piece and wait for a cringy disaster.
1/128th notes at 240 BPM are "impossibly demanding". But what's the point? That a human can catch up with a MIDI sequencer? -
20 hours ago, CyberGene said:
Schumann is not my cup of tea either. If it’s keyboard/piano music I love Scriabin most, there’s a lot of jazz-like harmony there, of course Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy.
It’s also symphonic/orchestral music that I adore, especially the Russian composers: Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff. I also love Bruckner, Mahler, Sibelius, baroque composers… Well, anyway, as I said classical is my thing ❤️
Count me as another big fan of Tchaikovsky. 🤝-
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9 hours ago, CyberGene said:
...I don’t buy the idea of how art and creativity is something coming from some metaphysical space, divine, etc...
Yup, and you can't have an informed conversation about A.I. with folks who don't even understand Gradient Descent and believe "if/then statements" are all there is to it. -
8 hours ago, jazzpiano88 said:
...it's just a Python program executing a series of weights through matrix multiplies on a GPU...
How do we know human brain isn't just that, except scaled by 100000X? 😃
Even some of my friends in High Performance Computing throw around comments about the "divine human ingenuity" with wild abandon.
I just find it amusing how little difference there is between their blind faith in the human mind, and the religious fervor of rednecks they look down upon. 😆 -
16 hours ago, nursers said:
[Verse] Come on down to The Keyboard Corner Where the ivories play all day and night (ooh-yeah) A forum for players, beginners and pros We gather 'round, sharing our delight
[Chorus] At The Keyboard Corner, we find our melody From bebop to swing, improvising in harmony Together we create, a magical sound At The Keyboard Corner, where jazz is found (ooh-yeah)
This is showing potential. Give it a few years and the stock music industry will be f***ed like ProfD and CHarrell mentioned. -
12 hours ago, ProfD said:
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Creativity and orginality in music is divine....
10 hours ago, CyberGene said:Yes. Again, only a few of the most famous classical composers and jazz musicians are in that category. Everything else is just a bit less divine 😉 IMO 😀
And once again, what I’m saying is, AI will be good enough to pass as “great”. Maybe just not divine. That’s what I said, just re-read it.
Yup, "originality" only describes 0.01% of what happens in music or any artistic pursuit.
The rest 99.99%, are just regurgitation and imitation. -
8 hours ago, stoken6 said:
I can see AI Jazz (at least a generative pre-trained form of it, incorporating some of the convolution-like feature detection I mentioned earlier) being able to achieve in the future what ChatGPT and the like can do today with natural language. It will be derivative, not innovative, but it will be passable.
We are not there today.
Cheers, Mike.
I suspect artistic "creativity/innovation" is little more than 'hallucinations" displayed by the LLMs and Multi-Modal Models right now. Maybe they are just "tasteful" random mutation that happened to tickle us "the right way" and dwarf in comparison to "creativity/innovation" in STEM, the kind that brought us Calculus and Relativity.-
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12 hours ago, MathOfInsects said:
If someone's music is truly in danger of being replaced by AI, then AI isn't the problem.
Until A.I. passes a Turing's test for the particular musical task it's asked to fulfill.
In other words, as soon as A.I.-generated content become indistinguishable from that from a human counterpart, at similar cost, Mr./Ms. human becomes "useless" for that task. -
21 hours ago, CyberGene said:
... jazz is the easiest task for a proper generative model. Jazz is so formalized with all possible devices of improvisation, (re)harmonization, voicing and rhythm structures described and taught to death in any possible online or academia courses, that it’s actually a wonder to me why it hasn’t been done earlier...
Yup, PG Music already attempted it 25 years ago with their "Soloist" and "Melodist" features in Band-In-A-Box. 95% of what it generated were insipid and sometimes outright jarring results. But for a songwriter, the 5% usable ideas more than make up for the fluff.
As I've said before, improvisation is mostly just a form of mental masturbation, enjoyed only by the performer and a few spectators. To most casual observers, it bears little difference from the output of a computer arpeggiator with a bit of pre-programmed randomness. Human intelligence is vastly more powerful than those simple neural-logical algorithms that churn out "Jazz Improvisation".
But we artists are a notoriously self-important bunch, so thumbs-down from the non-techies among us is hardly surprising. 😃-
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6 hours ago, CyberGene said:
Classical music is more of a European thing 😀 I really can’t say if it’s nature vs nurture but classical is what I feel like my natural habitat. I appreciate almost any music on earth, even the most repetitive EDM, cheesy pop or brutal death-metal, however classical is like going home ❤️
But "Classical" is such a giant umbrella. When my friends make similar comments about how much they love "Classical music", I find it as descriptive as "loving Pop music".
If we break music down by 1) Melody; 2) Harmony; 3) Timbre; 4) Rhythm; 5) Articulation, the only thing Classical music have in common is 3).
Case in point, I love the works of Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Liszt and can enjoy some Bach on a good day, but the Schumann Sonata above just bores the shit out of me. 😃-
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How do you play outside?
in The Keyboard Corner
Posted
MicroRhythms?