So I’m helping the farmers, helping the environment, getting paid and making music. What’s not to like?
The part where you murder the dogs.
The part where you murder the dogs.
I agree. I mean, in principle I’d never point a gun at a living being, ever, but in practice there are problems.
I’m not running around looking for people’s pet dogs to shoot. Instead, there are actual packs of very dangerous, very destructive feral dogs. They kill livestock, they attack people, and they’re really bad for the environment. They’re not native animals which might be protected as part of the environment, but a problem which human beings brought.
In fact very often they’re dogs which were deliberately released by people who wanted to get rid of them without giving them to a shelter. There’s some kind of weird delusion that little Rover can run around the countryside like a sort of doggy heaven, and the farmers will take care of him.
So farmers pay guys like me to solve the problem. And because I take the ethics of hunting seriously, I only take head shots and chest shots. Dogs I shoot die very quickly.
Do I feel sorry for the dogs? Sure, they’re just being dogs. I also feel sorry for the cow, bellowing in pain and fear who is under attack, or who is sniffing at the remains of what was once her calf. I feel sorry for the chickens in the chicken run where the dogs broke in. I feel sorry for the ground nesting birds, the ducks and geese and so on who get exterminated by those dogs.
I would really prefer to get people to stop releasing dogs into the wild, but the law says I can’t do much about that. So I shoot feral dogs and get paid.
My MIDI controller is a Novation Launchkey 25, which cost me about €108. I like it because it has eight knob dials, I like them so much I forget all about the keyboard keys while tweaking my acid basslines 
So basically get one with knobs! Otherwise I’m not sure if it’s really the best for what I’m using it for, I can’t get some of the special keys to work with Renoise (I tried fiddling with Duplex, no luck), or get the coloured lights on the 16 drumpad buttons to do anything but light up red when I press them. They do emit MIDI commands on their own separate channel (10) so I can use them to play a drumkit while the keyboard keys play some other instrument. I don’t really like their “feel” though, rubber and you have to hit them pretty hard. They are velocity-sensitive, but I usually disable that because it seems to improve the overall sensitivity. And it turns out I suck at playing drums live on buttons, because I can’t keep tempo for shit. It’s also got BCK/FWD/STOP/PLAY/LOOP/REC buttons which emit MIDI commands, so you can key them to the relevant commands in Renoise, which is nice. I keyed the one main slider to the Master Volume, useful if your sound is suddenly a lot louder than expected
Hey while on the topic, little question about the knob dials. I find if I turn them carefully, sometimes they don’t fully cover the 0-127 range and skip one or two values. Twiddling the knob a bit more forcefully seems to fix this problem, but temporarily. It’s not really a big problem, since it’s just a one or two values over the 0-127 range. But I kinda wonder, is this expected for a MIDI controller? Could it be a manufacturing error that might be under warranty? Because otherwise the knobs and keys are really solid and seem of sturdy quality. Thoughts?
I’m not really knowledgeable on computer hardware apart from suggesting to get a big ass monitor for €150-200 or so.
My experience with super-cheap USB-hubs (in the €4 range) is not good at all. They suck. Spend a few more bucks on getting a slightly nicer one
Also with the sort of thing I want to do (personal opinion!), I don’t yet see the need to spend money on commercial VST plugins. But then, I like to dive into the low-level DSP of things, and am planning to pick up writing my own VSTs again (I’ve made one so far, before I started using Renoise, a sort of combined random-sample&hold-bitcrusher plus a “Fold” sinusoidal distortion waveshaper–it’s not terribly interesting Renoise can do most of it natively, but I have loads of ideas, I just hate coding in C++, which is necessary for VSTs…).
My laptop is genuinely dying, and I had some cash so I bought parts and built a new sound creation computer.
I maybe went a bit over the top.
I shelled out for 16G of RAM, 4xHDD in RAID 10, and an 8-core AMD CPU because I figured that I’d rather have extra power to carry me through the next five years than get frustrated by a song stuttering while I’m trying to create.
However, because I used a bunch of stuff which I already had, including MIDI devices, old monitors, speakers and so on, I still came in well under $1000.
I guess the lesson is that re-use is better than recycling.
Hey while on the topic, little question about the knob dials. I find if I turn them carefully, sometimes they don’t fully cover the 0-127 range and skip one or two values. Twiddling the knob a bit more forcefully seems to fix this problem, but temporarily. It’s not really a big problem, since it’s just a one or two values over the 0-127 range. But I kinda wonder, is this expected for a MIDI controller? Could it be a manufacturing error that might be under warranty?
It could be. It’s a sensitivity and registration issue, by the sound of it. It’s also possible there’s some kind of grit or particle on it which screws it up. One source of problems in that kind of thing is actually smoking. So, if you’re a smoker, consider converting to snuff or something else. Usually the more forceful twist scrubs things a bit, or moves the grit around at least.