Analog For The People: Synth Master Tatsuya Takahashi On Engineering Fun
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https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/12/08/tatssynth_custom...
This is how you get a good engineering job -- show your impressive thing to people as high up as possible (and everyone else). You'll still have to do a whiteboard interview, but it'll be mostly a formality.
How do you even get access to ' people as high up', most programming jobs make you go though "Standardized screening" programming puzzles before they even look at your github, if at all. Many high profile sfo tech companies straight up told me that github is merely a formality in the application and that they don't have time to look at it. Many interviewers get you resume like 5 minutes before the interview and start asking you standard interview questions.
Looking through Github accounts is extremely tedious and boring. On most profiles I’ve seen it‘s hard to tell what all the repos are about, and what the important stuff is.
So if you‘ve made something awesome, you need to market it a bit.
Don‘t point people to your Github account.
Point them to the project website, where they see a screenshot or a demo video, a short, easy to grasp description of your thing, and some impressive stats of your choice that convinces everyone that this project is brilliant.
And make sure the project page also prominently credits you as the author!
Granted, I've actively avoided California, so YMMV.
I think for a reasonable programmer, yes, you are probably going to have to practice your whiteboard interview.[1] But no, it's not that hard, and it's pretty standardized, so you don't have to practice differently at each company you interview.
I personally think that practicing for the programming test is usually way easier than the social test... and I think the programming test is less biased than the social test.
on the other side of the fence, I think it's a good failsafe. Yes, it will fail many qualified people who don't practice, but it will also fail a lot of people who talk a good game but can't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
Overall, I think it's a great counterbalance to how overvalued confidence is at most interviews.
[1]I personally think that you should use one of the screen share programs designed for this; I like https://codepad.remoteinterview.io/ but anything that reduces the amount of handwriting required is going to vastly reduce your false negative ratio without impacting your false positive ratio (unless you code using whiteboards at your company)
I don't. I do R&D for a living and have next to no time to relearn those types of undergrad programming techniques because it doesn't apply to the work I do at all. Ask me to create a model for a system, implement a classifier that hits 90% in a way that no one has ever done before and publish a paper on it, I can do that. Ask me about a breadth first search on some tree and I'll look at you blankly. It seems a bit ridiculous that some of my cookie-cutter engineering colleagues(some that relied on me to help them with homework) can make it into places like Google but I can't make it past the 3rd or 4th interview. I can also assure you that none of my colleagues where I work could make it past that same stage of interviews despite having a PhD and despite them being great researchers.
And yes, turning down people who are unwilling to spend a week practicing is a cost... it could be a very big cost if someone else has a intake filtering procedure that allows them to snatch those people up at a lower cost, but it's also a really effective way of filtering out the people who can't learn those things after a few weeks of practice, which is super important.
Can't. I clearly said can't. It's irrelevant to my work and my work consumes all the time I can give to work before I burnout.
> but it's also a really effective way of filtering out the people who can't learn those things after a few weeks of practice, which is super important.
What's your source on that? Can I see the stats that say neglecting more talented engineers so that you don't have to deal with subpar engineers is better than having a larger amount of more talented engineers while having to intermittently deal with subpar engineers? We have brilliant engineers where I work and the average and subpar engineers are in and out inside of a month or two. Didn't seem to hurt us at all in being the leader in our industry.
Not really a "guide" like you're asking for, but for me these have been the best because they expose a wide array of products and ways of using them.
the long answer: entire genres were built on not knowing music theory or disregarding it (techno, i'm looking at you). most music producers started by turning knobs without knowing what they were doing. most music producers continue to turns knobs just to see what happens, even after learning stuff about synths. the knowledge will come over time ; if you get "the bug" you will inevitably start reading stuff about all this.
of course, there may be exceptions. most "worldwide mainstream" electronic is obeying the usual codes of popular music, so if that's what you want to do, don't listen to me (and maybe produce on a computer).
Thats putting things mildly. The entire electronic music scene was born from experimentation. From the Kraftworks and other synth pioneers, to the beginnings of the dance scene with Chicago house and Detroit techno. From sample heavy genres like Jungle and Hard House, to synth heavy genres like trance. Even IDM was born from producers disregarding popular conventions and look how much that has since bled into the mainstream with tracks incorporating glitchy effects into pop songs.
But it's not just the domain of electronic music either. Prog Rock existed because uni students wanted to push the boundaries. Then Punk came about because they wanted to redefine what it meant to writing music and play an instrument.
So long as music remains an art form, it will be subjected to ignorant hobbyists with a creative flair. And that is what I love most about music; when people say "I have an idea, it might not work but we will have fun trying". But very occasionally, those hobbyists create something so popular they then become trendsetters themselves, like Prodigy, Orbital, Aphex Twin, and the other artists I alluded to above.
If you buy them used, you should be able to sell them for what you bought them used for.
Of course software solutions abound but there is no substitute for knob twiddling, and doing it in software makes it too easy to look without really listening.
As far as reading material goes, this is the best course available: https://web.archive.org/web/20160403115835/http://www.soundo...
Here's a free barebones synth plug-in (you'll need a VST/AU host, for example Garageband that comes bundled with macOS) : https://tal-software.com/products/tal-noisemaker
To be honest many producers in the younger generation haven't ever touched real hardware synths (let alone real analog synths) and do everything "in the box" using software. There's endless debate on whether this sounds the same (it's the "Emacs vs vi" wars of the synth world), but as Tatsuya says in the last paragraph of the interview, you'd be hard pressed to hear any difference once in a mix.
A few of the best sounding classic-analog-emulating software synths would be : Diva, Serum, SynthMaster, Sylenth1, Spire, and the Arturia collection.
Hardware synths are fun though, and most importantly their interface can spark inspiration where technically equivalent but mouse-operated software synths wouldn't.
A small selection of hardware synths, by rough ascending price :
- The cheap and fun Korg Volca range mentioned in the article. - The Boutique range from Roland. Spot-on virtual analog (=DSP-based) reissues of their classics, the JU-06 is probably the easiest to figure out and most faithful to the original Juno 106 (a staple of the 80s), but it's sold out in most places. - The Arturia microBrute and miniBrute. They spearheaded the cheap analog renaissance a few years ago and sound lovely and gnarly - The beautifully designed Korg Minilogue mentioned in the article. - My all-time favourite interface on a synth is the Nord Lead 3's. It's full-featured but especially suited to beginners because of a truly unique feature : endless rotary knobs with LEDs indicating current value. It's virtual analog (DSP-based) with everything you'd expect on the substractive synthesis front, plus the easiest FM synthesis interface you'll find anywhere. It's been discontinued for years (and its successors don't have the LED knobs), but some units pop up on eBay regularly. - At the higher end of the price range, there are also dozens of options : the Prophet 6 and OB-6 by Dave Smith Instruments (the inventor of MIDI) are poised to become modern classics. The DSP-based Virus TI is incredibly versatile (although it's getting long in the tooth, as CPU power has caught up with DSPs meaning a plug-in like Serum is just as good)
https://www.midi.org/articles/microtuning-and-alternative-in...
Also, here's a nice video on 3-Oscillator synths: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7RlLZrnugQ
His good intuition and willingness to disregard tradition seem to be the key to his success. Studying examples of the "right" way to build something might be a useful learning exercise, but it can also be mentally constraining.