I said a clever phrase to Raquel this morning and meant to use it as a title here. My ability to commit details to memory wanders unfaithfully. I remember being clever, then thinking of my future self here writing, wanting to give myself a chuckle.
Also, the boy's birthday was months ago. I must have forgotten.
We were just buying R a birthday gift, a day which she shares with St. Patty, and I asked the boy when her birthday and mine are. He was close.
I will instead write today concerning what I think I came in here for looking for.
I need to learn to stop deriving pleasure from buying new or used audio gear. I have spent a fair amount of money recently. Some would say too much. Though, I do have a functional studio now, one that combines a modest selection between the old and the new, the analog and the digital, the virtual and the actual. I can do all of the things that I like to do, both within and outside of the computer, which has returned to being the central device in almost everything. I attempted to reconstruct a studio environment using only hardware sequencers, with no "computers" as most people know them to be. Almost every electronic instrument is a computer of sorts. There is no reasonable escape from them if you wish to do anything with music beyond playing an acoustic instrument. Even those tend to rely on electronic tuners.
The newest problem is this: my MPC3000 will need to go back to the repair guy in Oakland to get some more work done. I'm not able to effectively use it because two of the most important keys are giving out on the front panel. More money must be spent. While it's there I will bring several other devices to be looked at. The other important unit being the Tascam 4-track tape recorder that CS sent back to me. I am getting high hopes for what it might be able to do if it proves to be functional or even salvageable.
I have listened to a tremendous amount of electronic music in the last forty years or so, and one thing that stands out almost more than any other quality about it is its warmth or lack of same. I'm convinced that a significant portion of that mysterious and mercurial quality is achieved by traditional means - using analog devices (synths, filters, effects) and recording onto (or through) analog tape. The Four Ts: tubes, transistors, transformers, tape. There should be as many of those as possible in every signal chain. Even a signal that begins digitally seems improved by being passed through a device with analog components.
Well, most of the time it does. Some gear just sounds broken. I seek out more of that as I get older also - an old man tinkering in a broken workshop, cobbling together decades of broken devices.
Most people, I am certain, would choose an amateur digital recording over an amateur analog one every time if asked which one sounded better, and they wouldn't be wrong. But amplify that same recording and listen to it next to a good recording done with analog gear and you hear something over time that is, to me, surprising and pleasant: your ears don't get fatigued at the analog sound quite as quickly. This happens without amplification also, it's just not nearly as noticeable. But if you pay close attention to how you and others respond to sounds then you start to gain an affinity for certain kinds.
Here is an example of the recording sound I hope to be able to emulate (ignore the era and of course the "visuals"). It sounds like they might have also used a hardware sequencer, at least with the arpeggiated riff that comes in at 2:07, and in the general mute/unmute feel of the arrangement - dubby German techno.
That's my music recording and listening lesson for the day. I spent two decades doing hard drugs in various nightclub's bass bins to develop and gather first-hand evidence to support this elaborate yet incomplete theory.
GoFundMe, etc.
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