A reboot from first principles

Yesterday was the first stream after a 6 months hiatus. I had some tech issues but the overall feeling was very good.

I presented the first principles that I will use as a guidance in this long quest.

Since the beginning, portability has always been an issue to me. I have always tried to stay 100% digital with only DAW, VSTs and some midi controllers. After 10 years of loosing VSTs because of OSX and Windows compatibility and other hard drive failures, I ditched most of the VSTs altogether and settled for just a DAW and its internal components. But we aren’t there yet.

I summarize minimalism as “Less is more”. It is something hard to pursue as an artist, because it’s very easy to add something, a new gear, a new track, a new FX; but it’s very hard to remove anything. Yet it took me time to realize that maybe the DAW was something to remove, or at least to replace with simpler components.

  1. MIDI live looping
    1. usb MIDI input
    2. clips records and overdub
    3. tempo tap and follow
  2. synthesizer
    1. chiptune
    2. basic sampler
    3. resampler (with audio input from a mic, or another synth)
  3. audio fx
    1. reverb/delay
    2. compression/sidechain
    3. decimate/bit redux
    4. saturation/overdrive

With this list of features, and the will of DIY, where can we start ?!

I understand brutalism as “exposing the fundament structure with no decoration”, and it translates to music practice as 1 button = 1 effect, or data = visual = sound. With this definition, any acoustic band is brutal, and I believe that’s what helps the most understandability.

There is device that I never used before called a tracker. It looks like an excel sheet, filed with musical instructions: start note for instrument, end note for instrument, set vibrato to X, etc. It’s very brutal in the sense that it is very close to what the computer will compute to create music. So yesterday we tried to use a tracker called OpemMpt to see if it’s even possible to output music from it. And the answer is YES! For the time and energy invested, the result is super RAW, but it’s clearly feasible.

What’s next? We will probably try to craft a DIY MIDI live looping desktop software, from first principles.

Until then, take care!

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