302 karma · joined March 23, 2021
I was very surprised after doing some mixdowns on the onboard laptop soundcard on my Macbook pro that it sounded AWFUL when pushed to real speakers. Tried it on two other laptops.
Will never use a laptop sound card for real audio work or even listening again
One of the most underrated reasons to go to that site is the solid and extremely supportive community. You can start with any piece of software. I highly recommend https://ableton.com because it is designed to support live performance and has a very strong following
Beyond that, music is the expression of yourself into the outside world through sound. This can mean ANYTHING. The most effective way I've found to start this and pretty much any other creative task is to follow what you find interesting. Self-motivation is the tough part here and you've already started pushing up against that. Great job!
8-bit music is a place to start and given your list of music you really REALLY should avoid making music software (I HATE the word "should" but in this case I have 4 decades of experience so I'm leaning in). You'll feel comfortable doing it and you'll make cool stuff, but in my experience it pulls you away from the emotional connection to the work. The genres you mention are very feeling oriented.
Get yourself a simple MIDI keyboard or pad machine for drums to start. Use your body. Associate yourself with the movements so you can FEEL it as you make the music.
It will take a LONG time to get to a degree of proficiency and every time you make some music in 10 seconds you'll wish it was better. This is a wonderful and fulfilling lifelong practice if you can avoid psyching yourself out before you get rolling!
What would be encouraging is an app that does not REPLACE your note taking but rather amplifies the capabilities.
You must take notes to learn deep. Handwritten is very important.
You will miss some things, which an AI could be tracking and summarize
What I would consider valuable is an app that supplements your notes. It would need two components... the app you have now, and reading in the notes that you have taken. Then if you asked it to go deep on a particular note or section you took notes on, it could add to the notes that you took without stealing the important part of the learning process
The magazine has a narrative it is trying to push. Anyone running a business sees this type of thing quite differently. You have to keep people motivated and pushing themselves. You can do it in such a way that is positive or negative... riding that line is exceptionally difficult and every person is different. It is quite possible that culturally they excel when pushed in such a way. Hard to tell from the bleachers.
Now I design synthesizers for a living. Way happier!
I would be THRILLED to have someone who wanted to explain things like I was 5, lots of people don't
You aren't making a lathe for someone with no experience. Anyone who is a potential customer for a lathe has SOME experience, even if it's just enough to say "I want a lathe" and the amount of effort they will need to go through to onboard to using the lathe properly is directly proportional to the applicable mental models they have for similar tasks. This probably involves hand eye coordination and gestures along with physics and a bunch of other things to onboard quickly.
Intuition is about using the most fundamental mental models that your customer(s) should have and simplifying the connection of those to the new task.
So intuition is contextual. The main goal is to save the user time. The narrow goal is to make the product easier to learn compared to your competitors. The big problem is no matter WHAT you do, the mental model a user will use when they approach a new task for the first time is inevitably different than the one you did.
Or, "You are not your customer" or however you want to phrase it.
What makes the sound? Not needed anymore. So any ADC/DACs, DSP code, analog voice hardware, etc is not needed. The DSP in particular is fairly complex and can be expensive depending on what you're doing
If you take the analog side of things out you don't need as complex power and all sorts of other things, so you may not even need a power supply at all, which is huge! Etc, etc.
Then there are things in the middle, like CVs, which are 'kinda' audio but not really since they are just control voltages. You can run them quite slow and still be useful (like 10kHz even). Or, you can treat them like audio, which is definitely my preference, so it depends on your implementation.
MIDI is a great place to start on a path to developing your own instruments. The amount you can do with a controller is CRAZY when you start to see how far it can go
You have some software experience, this is good. Assuming you have embedded software experience (which is essential for what you are doing and not at all like web programming) you have a foothold to finish this project without going completely insane.
Hardware is a completely different beast. With software everything happens in your head and when you get stuck you can usually think your way out of it. With hardware, you really do need to learn to do things meticulously and step by step. There are many things that can go wrong. You will learn a lot on this journey.
Don't be afraid to ask for help. Finding a hardware community will be essential to do this as you learn the skills you need. You're going to make a lot of mistakes, best to go in embracing it
A good place to start is to join an open source community for MIDI. Two off the top of my head is http://www.ucapps.de/ for MIDI specific hardware and https://www.electro-smith.com/daisy
A large amount of the work you will find yourself doing at the beginning is just figuring out where and who to ask questions about things like the keybed and other hardware issues. None of this is terribly 'hard' but none of it is easy. Most of it comes from experience.
It is almost always best to use someone else's product when you are designing your first. Roger Linn (https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/) gave me some fantastic advice a couple years ago when I was trying to design switch caps: "Do you want to be a company that designs switch caps or one that designs synthesizers?" and that stuck. I don't want to design switch caps, so I bought them off the shelf, contracted someone to design my own, and moved on.
So to that end... just buy a couple keybeds from Fatar or someone else, or just grab a synth you already have or buy one off ebay and harvest the keybed from that (often times much cheaper than buying direct!)
Don't be afraid to spend money on tools. If you find something difficult, like soldering, I have not once regretted spending money on better tools. They grow with you and save you hundreds if not thousands of hours of unnecessary frustration. When you know you need a tool, find a way to get it.
Maybe I should make a blog post about this... hmm
Hope that helps!
Subscriptions increase valuation of companies
Doubly so if their products are still in use after the company goes under. Now who is liable? What protections can one create for this scenario?
Most consumers will never file a lawsuit against such behavior because it is an incredibly uphill battle.
I get the sense that regulation like this will just create a new goalpost that won't ultimately help consumers, we've seen it happen time and time again, but I don't have a better idea. I suspect if you tried to enact real change you'd get too much opposition.
Tricky situation.
If I'm below average at walking, what would it look like to be above the curve? ... at reading? ... at eating? ... at relaxing? ... at sitting or standing?
I've been spending a majority of my time lately re-examining the skills I will rely on for the rest of my life. Been surprisingly helpful so far.
When we design synthesizers, the MAJORITY of the cost is in the UI. People need the UI because our industry is all about gestures and mastery. You cannot master when you have a large screen that is not consistent and requires too much interaction.
Musicians would call this a feeling of 'menu-diving' which is almost the worst thing you can say to describe a synth.
There are actually some technological advances here where you can create buttons in a touch screen (convex or concave) which does help with some of the issues here, but it isn't cheap enough to be an alternative yet. I need to find the links for those
Nowadays assembly is almost never used because it has been abstracted (yes I use it sometimes for DSP, SIMD and processor specific optimizations but it has largely been abstracted)
ChatGPT will likely have a similar switch to new critical skill sets but it will take a while
Oh tons and tons of design ideas... I plan on blogging about them at some point once I am more steadily designing my own instruments, right now it would just help the competition. Been writing out articles. I'll post some here when I do
It depends on the bpm and the intention. A swing for jazz is much different than for house or hip hop.
Feel free to ask questions!
My email is pymento+HN at protonmail dot com
I have never seen a whimsical maggot, nor do I think I want to
Some people do buy synths as sort of an art piece but they are rare
Hardware synths absolutely still do have sonic capabilities that are difficult to emulate in software (we're getting to that crossover point, but it's still some ways away). Let's just assume that you're right and software can do anything hardware can...
Some of the critical factors that make hardware more enjoyable (and thus valuable) for a musician:
You don't HAVE to use your eyes. Don't underestimate what a huge part this plays. The context switch that you go through when switching from the largest part of the brain (visual processing) to audio is substantial. It removes you from flow state. Artists will pay high premiums to stay connected to what they are doing emotionally. Clicking a mouse on a computer is one of the fastest ways to get out of emotional flow. Hardware is one of the easiest to stay in flow.
Physical performance. Just because you can do something with a mouse and values doesn't mean it's easy to do something that you would hear a human doing in a performance. It is far, FAR easier to just... perform it. Eventually we'll have humanization algorithms that blur this but again, we aren't there yet.
Software is also far, FAR too flexible for many musicians. The design of software often times gets you out of the sweet spot of the instrument. Typically when you buy well designed hardware you can't do anything that makes it sound bad. That's a magical thing. Typically in software you can make a sound EXCELLENT (often extremely excellent) but it takes a ton of work to get there. Different ways of doing music.
There are a lot more things I could go into but those are a few of the big ones
Doing that was the single defining moment of my life and the one I am most proud of. Took a MASSIVE pay cut in financial terms but a MASSIVE improvement in my overall well-being and life satisfaction.
It can be done!
And a hypothesis: this should not be because analog/digital modeling is very close in double blind tests
However your hypothesis is already false because the fact exists.
Which means: consumers don't care about double blind tests, there are other things going on here
The value is there, you just don't understand the value proposition
Just because you CAN do something with a product doesn't mean it is easy or obvious to do those things. I could go on for hours about this topic but if you're truly interested in it all I can recommend is make more music!
I have become much more interested in the business and entrepreneur side of things lately... take that as you will ;)