Underwaterbob

Surely, this can't be a coincidence.

With all the talk of samplers since TE decided to release the ridiculously hyped K.O. II, I decided to finally pick up Koala Sampler. I've heard many good things about it, and for good reason. It's amazing! It's so immediate and fun and actually stupid powerful if you shell out (~$15 for everything) for the mixer, effects, and time stretch extras.

I dusted off my ancient sample collection and plopped them on my phone (Galaxy S23 Ultra) and am putting finishing touches on 3 tracks in just a few days, and just hauling it out to play with my daughter who gets a kick out of it. I even found a new use for my Samson Go mic which works with Android and has a headphone jack. It's perfect since the S23 Ultra doesn't have a headphone jack (fuck you very much Apple, Google, and Samsung) and the Samson mic is obviously much better quality than the (actually not that bad) internal mic.

My phone battery hates me. Though I don't really notice Koala being any more demanding than anything else. I'm just using my phone so much more.

The base version is ~$5 and very much worth it to check out if phone sampling is for you. I really recommend at least the mixer upgrade. It really adds a lot of functionality for another $5. The time stretch stuff that comes with Samurai (the name of the other upgrade) is decent as well, though certainly not as necessary if you mostly use one-shots instead of loops.

Namely the new EP-133. TBF, it's the cheapest thing they've made besides the POs. It's really the first thing they've made that's genuinely got me excited. I don't even have a sampler. I mean, besides a PC which is arguably the most powerful sampler in existence.

Cuckoo's demo on YouTube is pretty good, but I wish Loopop would get his hands on one. I prefer his manner of stoic tutorial-review over Cuckoo's also-OK giddy enthusiasm.

The title's a bit dramatic, but I was having trouble coming up with a good pun or otherwise.

Hot on the heels of his Daemon and Freedom duology, Suarez cranked out this near-future, techno-thriller in 2012. Which I'm sure made a lot of sense given his success with the former. Unfortunately, it fails to live to up to the non-stop, dumb fun of his first couple of releases.

Where Daemon and Freedom found glee in speculation of near future tech changing the face of the planet, this one is dour to the core. Some shady operation is making drones that kill people autonomously. Some other shady operation sets out to stop them. It's hardly spoiling much to say they (at least partially) succeed in spectacular fashion through a series of larger-than-life set pieces involving copious gunfire and car/plane/drone/boat chases. There's no comedy to be found here, intentional or otherwise. D&F at least had the utter ridiculousness of its happenings to alleviate the constant severity. This one ain't got that.

The characters are as cliche as they come. Hyper-competent super secret agents, scientists, engineers, and shady business people. A couple of them even fall in love, though thankfully the sex is limited to a line of text: "They made love." I really wouldn't want Suarez to push his writing chops too far in that direction given his proclivity for over-the-top action and technological exposition. Both of which are here in quantity.

Overall, I wouldn't call it a bad book. Just an entirely predictable, fairly mediocre one. It comes in pretty short around 300 pages or so I'd imagine if I had a hard copy. The technological stuff is dry, plausible, and not poorly written if you're into that. The action is well done, if somewhat less plausible, and keeps things moving.

3/5 autonomous killer drones

If someone asked me to guess what Korg was going to do next, I would not have said a full-sized, 61-key update to the Wavestate. Well, that's what they did.

I don't know how I feel about it. I like the synthesis engine: it's unique and versatile. It really nails those ethereal 90s digital tones with more modern modulation capabilities and sound quality, but it seems like such a niche thing, I don't know if it warranted a full-sized version.

Also, what's with the UI? They took almost the exact same layout as the original, and plopped a gigantic keyboard on the bottom. Now, there are huge blank spaces on both sides of the knobs and tiny screen. Korg really ought to have made the whole thing less deep and spread the UI out across the length of it. I guess they save on R&D by this route anyway.

Personally, I'd say spend the money on a decent MIDI controller, and just buy the VST if you really want those sounds. The hardware here doesn't seem like anything special, and the UI, frankly, looks awful.

I wonder if the Opsix or Modwave are going to get the same treatment.

Csound is my passion! I've been programming bleeps and bloops with it for nearly 25 years now. Short of one of the other synthesis languages (I've been meaning to check out Supercollider for years) no software, VST, or hardware synth can do a fraction of what's possible with Csound.

Lately, I've been playing with wavetable synthesis in Csound. The cool thing about using Csound for wavetables, is that there are very few limits of what you can do with those wavetables.

For instance, a piece I recently worked on I wrote an instrument that used a sin wave from a table with 16384 points between -1 and 1 for its single wavelength.

Inside the instrument, I made an if statement that ran once per cycle and randomly either squared the value of a random point or took the square root of the value of a random point (and made them negative again if they were initially negative.) Since all the values are between -1 and 1, this means they never go outside of that range, but they do either get closer to zero if squared, or closer to -1/1 if rooted.

In the end, it means the harmonic spectrum slowly changes in an odd and random manner. The change could be sped up or slowed down by using fewer or more points since the randomization is happening once per wavecycle. I tried some other values, but settled on 16384 because 8192 was a little too quick, and 32768 was a bit sluggish. (Csound likes its powers-of-2, which isn't a strict rule since there are oscillators that will use tables with lengths that aren't such, but I kept it simple.)

Unfortunately, for all its complexity, the end result doesn't really sound too dissimilar to a plain old filter sweep on a harmonically rich waveform. You never know until you try I guess. Ha!

Mine is without a doubt Loopop.

I get none of them are truly non-partisan since their livelihood depends on synth sales, but I feel like he truly leaves commercialism at the door in all his videos.

He has a very matter-of-fact quality to his videos. He tells you what a piece of gear can do, and shows you how to do it. He's always very subtly enthusiastic about interesting features, but never tries to sell you hype. It's like a manual in video form. Which is very much appreciated. I can form my own opinions thank you very much.

I wiffle-waffled over calling this post a "review" for some time since I'm hesitant to put much stock in other people's opinions on subjective matter: like whether or not something sounds good or has an intuitive interface, but in the end, if it quacks likes a Moog ladder filter, it's likely a Moog. Thus "Review".

Recently, I really wanted a Pulsar-23. Given that thing costs a whole lot (and is most likely worth it, it's an inspiring piece of technology/musical instrument) and music has never been more than a hobby for me, I ended up with an LXR-02 instead. I've had it for a few months now and have quite thoroughly put it through its paces. I do not regret my purchase.

It's an entirely digital, drum synthesizer. Six voices that you manipulate with encoders, and volume sliders. I/O is impressive for such a small box: four mono outs that can be assigned to specific voices in various patterns. Five pin MIDI in and out. Clock in/out for Eurorack, and a very, very loud headphone jack.

The voices are divided into three "drum" voices that do a good job on kicks, toms, snares, and cymbals if you really push them. Then there are a snare, clap/cymbal, closed hi-hat, and open hi-hat that add (and remove) some parameters to better imitate their namesakes.

it's in the editing possibilities of the voices that I find most of the value in this box. Oscillators, envelopes, modulation, FM (none on the snare engine), click (transient generator), filter, LFO, and mix controls are present for all voices. I'm honestly hard-pressed to think of a more versatile hardware drum synth on the market. I've heard convincing emulations of just about every famous drum machine that people have whipped up on the Elektronauts forums. That's good news. If you want traditional electronic drum sounds out of it anyway.

Luckily for outre me, it goes super weird too! The per-voice LFOs can be routed to any parameter on any voice. You can have an LFO modulating an LFO, modulating an LFO, modulating hi-hat decay for some mind-altering patterns. Yeessshhh. Melt my brain

The sequencer is no Elektron sequencer, but it's almost there. As of firmware 1.6 (the latest as of this posting) it's got most of the usual suspects of modern drum sequencing: per-step parameter locks, swing, ratchets, up to 64 steps including every step in between and per-voice for polyrhythms, and a few extras like Euclidean sequence generation (that I have actually never used.) What the sequencer does not do is let you change the timing of the steps for triplets. Every beat of the clock is always four sixteenths. Which was a minor disappointment given I like to make things in less popular time signatures. Thankfully, I can just sequence via PC, which is how I typically do things anyway.

Performance options are typical as well, except for a couple of exceptions. You can change the sample rate of a pattern, and the bigger one: the morph function. What this lets you do is seamlessly morph between two separate kits. It's as nuts as it sounds. It's pretty neat to have a kick slowly turn into a bell. I have heard the complaint that the roll function is limited to max 16th notes. Not an issue for my style, but it might be for others.

This is getting way too long, and I haven't even mentioned the effects yet. They're there. They do what they're supposed to do. Some are more useful than others. Unfortunately, you can only use one at a time.

There is a disgusting amount of drive. Each voice's filter has drive, there is drive in the mixer section, and finally, there are a few different flavors of drive in the effects section. For a digital synth, it can really get nasty. In fact, I'd say it excels at the harder side of things. Which isn't to say it can't get subtle, because it certainly can, despite the majority of YouTube demos being 140bpm banging techno.

I might miss the inspiring interface and ridiculous amount of performance options on the Pulsar-23 that I'll probably never be able to afford, but I really think the LXR-02 was a good compromise for me. Realistically, it does more than the Pulsar in terms of sound design. The inspiring sequencing part not so much though. At least I have PC for that end.

To cut this short with some shameless self-promotion here's a track I made that is 50% LXR-02, and 50% Twisted Electrons' MEGAfm.