Things Are Coming Together

Digging Out The Stuff

A few years back, I got myself a Moog Mother-32 analog synthesizer with step sequencer as a Good Job gift for busting my ass for capitalism. The synth is great! But I didn’t have much time to play with it, so it sat on a shelf until this past weekend. Something in my head flipped a switch. I’d been back to messing with Csound and it struck me that twisting knobs to make cool sounds was more fun than thinking about it, typing it up, and running a preview in a Python test harness every time I wanted to make an instrument. I moved the Moog to my desk and plugged in some headphones. 3 hours later, I looked up and was inspired!

I went into the basement and pulled out a bunch of cables and my Dave Smith Instruments Evolver table top synth. This thing? I bought this decades ago when it was new and mentioned on a mailing list by Dave himself. Yeah. That Dave Smith. One of the originals who banged out the MIDI standard. Dude knew something about synthesizers. The Evolver is fantastic. Great for wild pads and was always a blast to play with. In my current state of mind, it made a natural complement to the Moog.

I got them both set up, ran MIDI cables where they needed to go, and started to make sounds. Again, with a stretch of time to myself and some PDFs that I had been moving from computer to computer for 20 years, I had some real fun!

Simplifying

I could use Logic to do a lot of things. But Logic does a lot of things. It has a million menus and a million options and a trillion potential configurations. That’s not the requirement for this new studio and new approach. Simplicity is everything. Friction where it makes the working interesting. Keeping troubleshooting and screwing around to a minimum. And yet… I’m back on my PureData nonsense.

From The Past

I wanted a MIDI step sequencer and I thought I’d build one out in PureData. As it turns out, the reason I had such a great idea of how to do it was that I’d done it already back in 2007. In my utilities folder I had my personal library of PD abstractions and objects and patches. One of them was a 32 step sequencer. Saves and loads sequences and the whole deal. Look at it in all its glory!

There is something beautiful about the brutal simplicity of PD’s UI. So chunky and lo-fi. Everything about it makes me happy. Seeing that interface took me back all the way to a time when I was first introduced to MAX. Damn. Just cool stuff!

And ya know what? I built it all with PD primatives so it still worked when I ran it! No modifications or updates required! Imagine trying to open a Logic project from 2007. Or any other system for that matter. I’m still smiling.

Side Note: Cheap Gear

I have a really nice 16 channel Mackie Mixer from 1996. It’s great. It still sounds good and is in good repair. I do NOT have space for it in my office right now. And I don’t need 16 channels. I need 4. I found a $25 mixer that takes stereo or mono in and mixes it to a stereo or mono out and plugged it into my Volt 276 sound brick. Mono out of the Moog goes in one channed. The Evolver goes in another. I’ve got a third channed just hanging out for me to use with the Minidisc player. Seriously? It sounds good. Really good. Doesn’t have any noise. It’s powered by a USB-C connection and is incredibly functional and SMALL. The kinds of gear we can get now for seriously small amounts of cash boggles the mind.

Now…

PureData is running the show. I’m putting together a bunch of sounds and having a blast with programming the synths. The Evolver has a sysex editor now that is implemented in Python because the manual came with all of the required documentation. I’ll do another post on that, but let’s just say that finding an instrument editor for a synth from 20+ years ago wasn’t going to happen. Now I have one in Python and another put together in PureData that I’m still tweaking. Good documentation is worth as much as the gear in the box.

There’s a lot going on in this little studio. Csound, PureData, Hardware Synths, and Field Recordings. I feel something of significant scale coming on.