Disqus - Latest Comments for chaircrusher

Re: Tim Exile built an experimental modular system, all about playability

Kent Williams — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:11:34 -0000

Please share your experience with us. I wonder how seamlessly you can switch patches. Possibly if you can have 2 of his devices in an Ensemble as instruments,
you could load a new instrument while the old one plays, and hopefully it doesn't glitch.

I imagine Exile could explain how best to use this as a live performance tool. Everything he does is something he's used himself live.

I would buy it, but I already spend most my time with a software modular. I know where everything is in VCVRack and I can patch interesting patches pretty quick.

I hope it's successful enough that he keeps making it better. He more than anyone else has understood and mastered Reaktor as a visual programming language. I spent a lot of time in it, even played live with a homemade multitrack looper and synth voices.

But I wasn't diligent enough to really dig in and master it. There's something about event handling that could really make simple patches act crazy and I was too impatient to sort it out.

Re: Tim Exile built an experimental modular system, all about playability

Kent Williams — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:08:33 -0000

I sometimes think NI keeps Reaktor as a product just for Tim.

On a marketing note: You can get modular software for free, or pay any of a number of vendors also doing modular, and they don't require a Reaktor setup.

So his total market is people with Reaktor (a lot of people have Komplete and never opened Reaktor, so there's them) who won't mind fiddling around editing Reaktor patches.

This looks pretty cool, and I hope the ecosystem of patches for it develops.

Re: OHYUNG’s IOWA on Trans Music Archive is as powerful as a glacier

Kent Williams — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:15:45 -0000

I was unaware of Ohyung's time in Iowa but the mention of Chris Wiersema locates her. Chris was a relentless champion of the avant garde in Iowa City, responsible for many unique events in Iowa City, including his own "Feed Me Weird Things" concert series. As this post shows, the ripples of his advocacy and love still abide.

Re: Bandcamp is taking a stand against generative AI; will it work?

Kent Williams — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:04:58 -0000

Stopping people from flooding the site with AI Slop is a good plan. But there's always issues of corporate scale at play: If 10,000 people worldwide start bandcamp accounts and upload AISlop, they really won't have the staff or infrastructure to stop them all.

As for less egregious uses of AI - like stem separation - there's a close parallel with sampling. Bandcamp's user agreement is that if you use uncleared samples, and someone catches you at it, you lose your bandcamp account.

That doesn't mean there are no uncleared samples on Bandcamp. I could probably find a few just browsing through the site. But you're fine if you use uncleared samples if you use them creatively enough that they're no longer recognizable. Or if they're so obscure that no one cares.

In other words, this is an aspirational ban. Anyone can use AI if they do so in ways where it's not easily recognized. Unless they hire a lot of people there's no way they can completely eliminate it, even in egregious cases.

Re: Motherly, sequencer percussion synth, is pure rhythmic happiness

Kent Williams — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 20:27:02 -0000

I bought this on your recommendation. It has cool possibilities but
1. I'd love a MIDI mode where instead of stepping through 8 steps, you could trigger steps by midi notes. In other words, externalize the sequencing.
2. More sequencer steps == mo better.
3. I wish they exposed more of the FM engine. Like you can control operator output level but not the input level into the algorithm.
4. The step pitch control is weird, it's very hard to dial in frequencies between 1000 and 100,000hz. Why not have the option of MIDI pitches?

I think limitations are good but this feels like AudioDamage Axon. You can tweak its programming endlessly but its difficult to make two patches that sound radically different. The quirks of both make them feel limited.

Re: USA tariffs update: Bandcamp and Discogs issue warnings, options

Kent Williams — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 12:55:05 -0000

I just had an album come out and the label set up on-demand vinyl. I've no idea if it would actually get shipped, or I'd order one. Even though it's like $60 shipped to the US

Re: Trump tariffs bring chaos, as shipments halted from Europe, Asia

Kent Williams — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:36:20 -0000

The Scheißkopf in the White House just does things, and the more painful the consequences, the better as far as he's concerned. I guarantee he paid someone to take macroeconomics at Wharton for him. He thinks tarriffs are good even though any economist could explain in 3 minutes why, but that would mean learning things. He's about as astute as the man on the street in the Monty Python skit who says "I believe we should tax all foreigners in other countries."

Re: The best of Universal Audio’s native plug-ins, in Spark or standalone

Kent Williams — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 08:36:22 -0000

I have a UAD-2 solo and a collection of UAD plugs going back to the UAD-1 PCI card. The UAD-2 plugins work in realtime in Live and other DAWs.

The tape emulations (I only own the Oxide tape plugin) work best if you treat them like we used to treat cassette and reel to real recorders: tune the input level to where you meter goes into the red briefly just on peaks. Get too aggressive and it sounds over-compressed and fuzzy. There's a sweet spot where you can hear a positive difference but you avoid over-saturation. They faithfully model that annoying "bad distortion" breakup if you hit it too hard.

Subscription models are a business model that works better for companies offering them than their customers. There's a reason that subscriptions are launched after companies get bought by investors.

Re: TROVARSI x ALX-106 deliver brutal techno fed by serious live chops

Kent Williams — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 21:33:07 -0000

A decade ago I saw Pete Swanson do a live modular set of absolutely face-melting industrial techno, and it made me realize that modular is really made for techno - all the classic Detroit techno production techniques map onto modular perfectly.

The Detroit method back in the early 1990s was to record tracks live to DAT. A lot of classic stuff was made live in studio with 2 or 3 people manning the machines - tapping mixer mutes, effect sends, pattern swapping, knob twiddling all happening in the moment. People were making tracks that way before it was easy to dump to computer for editing, so you recorded takes until you got one that worked.

Playing live is actually the most visceral immediate way to make techno. To really do it right you have to be willing to take risks, like switching up a sequencer when it's muted, in faith that what you did will work in the mix.

Shawn Rudiman is of course the past master. A peak experience back in the day is to see him play live, and Claude Young unfolding his laptop and plugging in to add live loops.

And speaking for myself, arranging things on the fly live frees you from the grid. You don't change up like clockwork every 16 measures, you go by feel.

Re: BOSS DR-55 drum machine from 1979, now a free plug-in

Kent Williams — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 08:47:26 -0000

I had one of those. You could almost get to sync. Ironically had it before I had the technology to record it as a loop. It was the before-DAW times.

Re: At last, the meeting of a snooker champion, Eurorack, and a cathedral

Kent Williams — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 19:03:47 -0000

I linked this on X, and Joe Mugford said "I tag teamed with Davis!"

Re: Ableton Move review: “baby Push” is sampler, mobile Live hardware

Kent Williams — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 10:45:36 -0000

This is intriguing. Maybe not for my workflow, because I'm on a mission to destroy the grid -- i.e. work in patterns that don't fit evenly into 4/4 bars.

How long can patterns be? Can I do what I do in Live all the time, playing clips of different lengths against each other?

A perceptual limit of mine is that I use audio visually; cutting up samples by eye as much as by ear. A teeny display means you're not seeing INTO the audio. That's not always bad but it's a choice.

The best - for me - would be a way to actually work on the computer and transfer sessions into the Move. Would there be a desktop version of Ableton Note? Or a way to constrain Live to generate Move sessions?

Ableton is fighting the good fight IMO by developing products like this. As much as a violin, the Move is an instrument, with a similar learning curve to achieve fluency. Push is as well, but my (perhaps unfair) impression is that Push is more complicated than a normal musical instrument, more difficult to achieve intuitive muscle memory, the way you might with a guitar or saxophone.

Re: Roland is celebrating Bandcamp Friday with 3 months free Ultimate Studio

Kent Williams — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 15:16:04 -0000

The end game here is people die and they keep paying subscription fees until the bank account is closed.

I think really all these companies using a subscription model are trying to exploit the dead people demographic. They keep paying and never contact tech support.

Re: Ableton Move is coming October 8 (teaser)

Kent Williams — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 15:49:05 -0000

Or maybe a VR headset (Stable Diffusion again)
https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

Re: Ableton Move is coming October 8 (teaser)

Kent Williams — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 15:47:33 -0000

Stable diffusion made a picture of it.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

Re: Ableton Move is coming October 8 (teaser)

Kent Williams — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 15:41:07 -0000

It's a new version of Push that shocks you when never resolve to the tonic

Re: Ableton Move is coming October 8 (teaser)

Kent Williams — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 15:37:29 -0000

It's a special studio chair the collapses in a heap if you tweak your Live session for more than 2 hours. It slowly reassembles while it forces you to walk around and touch grass.

Re: OCD, techno producer and DJ, is fighting cancer and raising awareness

Kent Williams — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 12:09:25 -0000

I wasn't aware of OCD's work, so thanks for that, and I'm hoping she gets through treatment and is healthy for a long time.

You didn't mention this EP, which is brilliant. As an old school techno head, hating trance is an article of faith, but OCD incorporates trance ideas into hard techno in a way that avoids being as obvious and hackneyed. When someone makes me love something I dislike, it's because they found something hidden in it that I do like. If that makes sense.

At any rate it's clear OCD is talented, and I hope she gets to do her thing for many years to come.

https://ocdberlin.bandcamp.com/album/oasis

Re: Robert Henke free track of the month – enjoy Monolake, Venice Beach

Kent Williams — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 20:46:36 -0000

As someone with a foot in both classical and electronic music, I find his work brilliant in any genre. His tracks are very consciously and painstakingly structured, and spends more time than most getting them exactly right sonically.

There's something to be said for turning on the machines going and screwing around until something interesting happens. I'm sure Herr Henke does plenty of that too. But that's as far some producers go. Henke really finishes his works.

I also loved that he generated graphics live with old CBM Z80 computers. Not everyone can learn assembly language in order to realize their art!

Re: This site will help you sort out what’s up with minijack MIDI (PSA – reminder)

Kent Williams — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 18:43:23 -0000

The way those plugs & connections work, it reminds me of the old electrical engineering joke that we'll make the circuit board more efficient if we multiplex power and ground.

Re: Creature from the ID lets you live your 50s sci-fi soundtrack fantasies

Kent Williams — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 16:57:39 -0000

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

Re: Op-ed: Generative AI should be stopped for the good of autistic people

Kent Williams — Wed, 15 May 2024 17:15:20 -0000

If ever you want to confuse a LLM image generator, give it this prompt: "A fairy princess with 7 fingers on one hand and 4 on the other"

What are the chances the LLM will get it right? Not so good.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

Re: Op-ed: Generative AI should be stopped for the good of autistic people

Kent Williams — Mon, 13 May 2024 10:45:05 -0000

Wow, all the rancor in the comment section.

Neither Paulee nor any of his detractors have addressed what, for me is the central issue of AI: Capitalism.

All of the techniques of "AI" (which is a misnomer) that people are using now grew out of techniques that go back to the 1990s and probably before that. The reason it's a thing NOW is that the hardware has improved to where those techniques can be scaled up to generate LLM generative solvers.

Technological progress makes it happen, but money makes the technology happen. Big corporations are spending billions of dollars, building modeling systems so large they take over whole data centers. They use almost as much electricity as crypto-currency mining.

Those billions aren't being spent out of altruism. It's to enhance shareholder value. The goal was never to make something better. It's to make something good enough to increase the bottom line by eliminating the greatest expense of being in business: paying human beings for their labor.

People seem to think that "AI" (again, a complete misnomer, it's dumb as rock) will keep improving until it's an indispensable part of life, as we march into our shining future hand in hand. No, the current shitty state of the art is as good as it gets. It's 13-fingered supermodels in dogfood commercials forever.

The people who control the capital are not looking to create Beethoven and Einstein. They're looking to make more money with less human labor. "AI" (again...etc) will only ever be good enough to enhance the bottom line for corporations and their wealthy owners. It won't be good for anyone else, ever, because making things better is NOT WHAT IT IS FOR.

"AI" (...) is the finale of end stage capitalism: It automates the enshittification of everything. The people who control capital don't even want to bother paying PEOPLE to make things terrible in the name of profit.

To get back to the original post, it's no doubt terrible for autistic people, but it's a side effect. It's terrible for EVERYONE.

Re: VCV Rack 2.5: powerful stackable inputs, cable color customization

Kent Williams — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 20:49:48 -0000

There was one of those decisions at Rack Towers that confused me until a discussion on the Rack community site.

Before 2.5.x, if you Ctrl-Click-N-Drag a wired input, it clones the connection to a new cable you can drop on another input.

It has a new behavior now: It makes a new cable from the input you clicked on, and you can drag it to a source jack, to add a new CV to the input.

You can get the old behavior with Shift-Ctrl-Click-N-Drag.

And now I want to form a trio called Control, Click, and Drag.

Re: VCV Rack 2.5: powerful stackable inputs, cable color customization

Kent Williams — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 09:36:51 -0000

I've never had this problem. Try logging into the VCVRack website, then going here to choose a download:
https://vcvrack.com/Rack#get