15 August 1996

Bleeps on tape, bleeps on tape

I recorded a rough mix of a piece this morning. This is the one I've been working on for a bit. I threw out half the tracks I'd written and replaced them with a new track using the Nord. I use a randomly arpeggiated bell voice. The rough mix has some problems. The arrangement has problems. I will fix them this weekend, make a final mix, and move on. Sometimes you just have to throw pieces out the window. No work is ever finished; it is merely abandoned. It's time for this piece to be abandoned.

"The History of Rocketry" is an example of something I had to abandon. There are a million little things I could fix about it: some of the samples are mixed in awkwardly; the bit where Cronkite repeats "the flaming power" is pretty clumsy; and the mix itself needs more movement. (If you want to hear the whole piece, fire up an MPEG converter and download the large sample.) Close, but not quite, is how I feel about it. I feel that about nearly everything I've done. It's all half-good, but not all the way good. And I just have to stop working on things and move one. Each piece teaches me something new. Each drawing teaches me something new. To learn more, I must move on mercilessly. It hurts, though. Nothing is good enough.

It's really awful to have people listening to a rough mix of something and commenting on it. I keep wanting to stamp disclaimers all over it. "I don't really like the way the bell voice conflicts a bit with the ping-ponged scritchy percussive thing." "I don't like the bass voice really." "Whatever it is that you're not liking 100%, I already plan on fixing."

The Nord is a pleasure to use, though. The arpeggiator can be tricky to synch to midi, but the midi implementation as a whole is good. It'll take me a long time to figure out how deep this instrument is. It's a more complex two-oscillator synth than the BassStation is.

Enough geeking.

No, screw that. Here's some more geeking.

Have I held forth recently about how awful MIDI is? No? Brace yourselves. MIDI sucks. Of course, since MIDI is computer-related, you might have guessed already that it sucks. But it sucks in its own remarkably charmless and annoying unique way. I will rant on this in a moment. First I must remind the blissedly un-MIDIed in my audience of what this horrible thing is. MIDI is a standard way for synthesizers to communicate with each other and with sequencers. You can send note on events and patch change events and controller data events. This lets me, a normal two-handed homo sap, play ten synths at once, one of them being an entire drum kit. This is good. The intent is good. Unfortunately, the design is utter crap.

First on the list of its suckitudinality is this: every MIDI connection requires two cables. One to send data, and one to receive data. Every midi box has three slots for cables: in, out, and thru. Well, actually, lots of them omit the "thru" slot. The thru is there so you can chain synths. Of course, you can only chain synths in one direction since every damn connection needs one cable per communication direction and there's only at most one damn thru plug per bleepy box.

Next on its list of suckitudinality is the scaling problem. Back in 1982 or whenever this horrible thing was proposed, nobody though anybody would need more than 16 MIDI channels total. Ever. One instrument, they thought, eats one channel. And who'd have more than 16? The first synth I ever bought, a really cheap Yamaha digital synth, used 16 channels all on its lonesome. The second one I bought, an Emu Procussion, used another 16. Luckily, the clever people who make Opcode's Macintosh MIDI interfaces have found a way for you to run 8 totally separate MIDI data streams from one box. Otherwise there'd be a bit of a problem.

Another scaling problem: continuous controllers have values from 0 to 255. So you get 256 nice audible steps when you sweep your filter open via MIDI controller data, or shift your pitch. And we're not talking "audible only to golden-eared audiophiles who bleat about how great vinyl sounds", either. That kind of stair-stepping is audible to just about anybody.

Then there's the bank changing problem. Every moronic synth manufacturer in the world has a different way to change banks. (A bank is a group of patches. A patch is a voice. "Patch" refers to the days when you used to use patch cords to wire up your modular analog Moog synth to make it make noises.) I have to jump through some really bizarre hoops to get my Oberheim Matrix-1000 to switch banks.

Then there's the utter fragility of the whole thing. Opcode's software makes this more tolerable, but it's still weird. Sometimes I hit a patch change button on a synth and every single single synth in my rack agreeably changes patches too. AIGH! AIGH! It sucks! It should be a billion times faster and more expandable and it should require only one cable per connection

Okay. I feel better now. MIDI is nothing, really, in the grand scheme of my home studio. It's the audio connections that are the real problem. Patch bays with switchable normalling! Those words mean nothing to you, but to me they mean four times the number of cables per item. Four times! Wee ha! Cables everywhere! Ratsnests of audio cables! Spiderwebs of audio cables! Dust all over the place! Extra cables coiled over every chair back!

And now I've had enough of jargon-spewing nerdisms.

Work: The x file linker linked, finally. Then, of course, the standard ld link phase blew core all over the place. I haven't got a clue how to debug this one, especially because this version of the gcc linker hasn't really been tested in our build system yet. So my job now is to find somebody who does know the tool.

Current listening: The piece I recorded this morning, over and over. I just this second decided to call it "Avocet". Something about the jumpy arpeggiation reminds me of stilty bird motion.

Current reading: Nothing much. James's RNC reports in t.b (with a killfile that nuked everything else, just to make sure I avoid temptation). The Well.

Bicycling progress: Absolutely none. I am a loser.