Weekly newsletter - 3rd June '23

Apologies for the lack of content recently, I have been busy with various things, been on holiday and we’ve (Wife and I) become grandparents for the third time! I’ve also purchased some new gear, both hardware and software, for which I am doing some “deep dive” content for and takes awhile to put together - the other option is to record video and be done with it.

I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts and watching other creators videos this week, some of it is useful and some of it just rabbit hole time wasting stuff. Sometimes you can just get lost, time whizzes by when you could have created something instead.

Finding balance between idling away the hours, consuming content and creating it can be tricky when the web distracts us so much from doing what we should be doing.

Anyway! Here are some of the things I digested this week and some of the things I purchased this week, two of which will be used for the all important creation of content!

Roland S-1

I have been thinking about buying some hardware gear for awhile, synths with tactile controls for sound design and exploration as opposed to clicking around on screen; you have to experience it for that, “Oh yeah, this is waaaaaaay better” feeling!

Last year I bought a Minifuse 4, Keystep Pro, new monitor speakers, Eris 3.5, a lot of software, a silly amount but those black Friday deals did mean I got them much cheaper than I would have done today.

The Roland S-1 is based on the legendary SH-101 and it sounds like this…

I plugged the S-1 into Ableton to record the above loop, using just one of the standard preset patterns that comes with the device. I then used Send A to route it through some filtering and reverb, didn’t need to but you have to try these ideas out don’t you!

Tonor Q9 microphone

One thing my setup has been missing is a microphone of some kind. The iPhone has a really good microphone it has to be said but I wanted a condenser for podcast, video recordings and so on. It could even come in end for other things too. I tried it out briefly the other day but I am just about to configure it with Ableton and later OBS for producing my content. My deep dive videos will make good use of it and I’ve started scripting those out to make a start on recording quite soon.

So that’s what I’ve purchased this week,lets move on to some of the links…

Cnstruct

Drift is a cool synth and this video walks you through designing a bass sound and working towards a house bassline. There are a tonne of great videos like this across this channel, studying different genres and teaching a lot of Ableton skills along the way.

Magenta Studio

AI is causing a stir in the media all of the time these days, love it, loathe it, fear it or don’t really give much of a damn about it, I am likely to write about it. It’s tech and interesting after all!

https://magenta.tensorflow.org/studio/ableton-live

A MIDI plugin for Live that provides 5 tools, continue, groove, generate, drumify and interpolate which operate from inside Ableton for composing melodies and other elements within your tracks. I downloaded the other day and will share my notes as I learn about the tools.

That’s it for this week. See you all soon.