Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

While I have used modern DAWs in recent years, the music making tool I've used the most was Jeskola Buzz[1], it's a weird mix of music tracker[1] and modular setup[2] (but not modular in the same way a modular synth works, you connect "machines" such as sequencer->generator->effect->[more effects]->mixer).

This was when I was a "poor" student and I couldn't spend money on music.

Later I could afford real modular/semi-modular synths and I enjoy them a lot but I still appreciate being able to connect cables on a screen where you can save the state and rapidly recall it, rather than having to free up a table, setup all the modular synths, connect them together etc. - So I think I'm going to enjoy Bespoke Synth a lot.

Another alternative that I have enjoyed is VCV Rack[3] and its little brother for iPad/iPhone miRack[4].

PS I loved the "Feature Matrix" on the Bespoke home page ahah :-D

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeskola_Buzz

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

[3] https://vcvrack.com/

[4] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mirack/id1468259834

There's also NerdSEQ: https://xor-electronics.com/nerdseq/ + actual Eurorack modules! :D I like the Ableton clip style main view in NerdSEQ which allows you to live mix and match patterns, haven't come across as good a flow for that in regular software sequencers, especially ones that let you do chains of patterns of different lengths and polyrhythm them, while having some of them be automation parameters for some part of the DSP and others notes for other parts of the same chain (Buzz, Buze, SunVox kind of let you do that).

Yes! Thank you for reminding me how it's called! I remember seeing it some time ago and it's absolutely in my wish list!

Yes Buzz! Absolutely loved that software. So powerful and esoteric yet fairly easy to use (if you were familiar with trackers at least).

It was a shame there was the whole thing of losing the source code that killed development for years, and that it never made the leap to cross platform, otherwise I’m sure I’d still use it today!

Have you tried Drambo on iOS? I guess in some ways it’s the closest thing I’ve found to Buzz, in that it operates at the same level of “granularity” in terms of the modules, and in that it has sequencing (step based in this case, though piano roll is coming) built in. It’s easily my most used iOS music making app these days, really brilliant bit of software.

MiRack is also really fun, although I find dealing with the myriad UIs for each module a bit challenging sometimes (though it is a fun touch!) - Drambo has a much more standardised layout for each module (like how Buzz was just sliders IIRC).

> It was a shame there was the whole thing of losing the source code

Yes, I can remember that very well! Eventually Oskari rebuilt the app basically from scratch, using .NET (at least IIRC) and that's what you get today if you go to the site and download it. It's not the original app but it maintains the same API for modules. Oskari nowadays is a researcher and he published some interesting articles: https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.5042

> Have you tried Drambo on iOS?

Nice, thank you! I had never heard of it but after watching a couple of YouTube videos I decided I'm going to download it

Ah interesting! I think I had moved away from Buzz by the time it was rebuilt but have very fond memories of the software and the community around it.

I hope you enjoy Drambo! It can take a little while to get into the swing of it but if you used to use Buzz I really think you’ll enjoy it. There are a tonne of tutorials on YouTube about it to get going. Being able to host AUv3 plugins is awesome too!

Buzz was my first "DAW" too. I immediately thought this kinda looked like what the buzz patching area might look like had development continued to now. I'm on mac now, but the thing that reminds me of Buzz the most currently is SunVox which is free. I haven't played with it in ages, mainly b/c I use live now. Did you spend any time in the tracker communities when Buzz was around? I was on em411 in various guises. Nothing like that community online now - too much noise everywhere.

I have tried SunVox on the iPad, it's a very nice application.

On tracker websites I used to be mastazi just like my HN username, but I never released my own music I think. However I made a CD and gave it to friends, I might still have a copy somewhere at my parents' home in Italy. That's the only memory I have, because I lost all of my Buzz project files in a HD failure many years ago.

The modern web is different from what we have back then, but if you look hard enough you can still find corners of the web that look familiar :-)

Wow, talk about a flash from the past! I was super-into jeskola buzz, I also worked with game development of very small games (<400KiB) and we wanted better sound effects in those, so I basically developed a softsynth that was very similar to jeskola buzz! I mean, it was sort-of horrible but it did produce some very interesting sounds with tens or hundreds of bytes in data size, which was a hugh improvement.

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