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Mike

Mike·
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Bob Moog and usability heuristics

Here's a rare intersection of my interests. This is actually a great article for UX folks who don't know anything about synthesizers.

The author makes the (accurate) argument that Bob Moog changed the game by hard-wiring some signal paths and abandoning the fully customizable cable-based routing of modular synths.

This is essentially what Apple did in terms of UI as well that led to their early success:

  1. Preset the red routes.
  2. Enable other routes with some switches that are not part of the main UI.
  3. Just abandon the ability to do some things that most users won't need.

That made Apple popular with artists, designers and musicians, just as the Model D became the first synth truly popular with a wide range of musicians. Sure, the Rick Wakemans (and Linus Torvalds) of the world might want more, but they have their complicated alternatives. For the rest of us, it was finally time to make music with synths. Just watch any gear-focused interview with John Foxx, Gary Numan, George Clinton, Rick Wright, you name it — the Model D hugely influenced their worlds so they could influence the rest of the world.

This philosophy can still be controversial at times, as with GNOME 3 (which, incidentally, has become less loathed in the years since its release), but in general the idea of solving for the 90% of users who don't need 50% of the features is considered an obvious one nowadays.

Of course, modulars have seen a resurgence lately because once you're in deep you inevitably want to start making your own synths. But that hasn't stopped the steady stream of simplistic analog boxes like the Volca series or Behringer's slavish old-school synth imitations. Options are great, but menu diving is no fun and the quickest way to get a musician to love your instrument is to get them creating quickly.

And this, as the article gets across pretty well, is what we should learn from Moog.

Apple would've patented the pitch wheel though.

DiscussAug 10, 2021
Mike·
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A better way to keep notes

I'm definitely not alone here but finding the perfect toolset is a slight neurosis of mine. And I thought I had it with Typora, a flat, local markdown editor with a notebook view and cross-platform access. But along comes a reference to Obsidian — in our local Nextdoor of all places — and I feel finally ready to move things off Notion and out of the cloud.

Obsidian has a lot of great features on top of being a markdown notebook, including:

  • web-less encrypted sync
  • images
  • wiki-style internal linking
  • a nifty graph of all the links
  • mobile version
  • plugin architecture with a very active community
  • CSS-based themes

The one thing it lacks from Notion is a database, but increasingly I find that the kitchen-sink approach isn't working for me. I just want structured text with images, and I can go to LibreOffice Base or Airtable to organize data.

DiscussAug 1, 2021
Mike·
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Figma organization for busy designers

EDIT TO THIS POST: Figma has a much more native way of handling this now. It's pretty rad, try it out.

If you're like a lot of designers, especially young enthusiastic ones or possibly freelancers with time between projects, you love to organize and beautify your systems. I've made a new CSS theme for my markdown editor! I built a home page for my browser that beautifully links to my current projects and most common pages. Etc.

One of the big offenders in the mess of my work life is the list of Figma projects. It'll always be preferable to the classic joke of design_final_final_r2__final.sketch that anyone still in pre-Figma world is probably still dealing with, but it can be rough on the eyes.

I came up with something that works well for me.

  1. Firstly, you have to give files a cover page. Just do it. Mine use a frame that is 1240px x 660px.
  2. Each Figma project is actually a project category: Online banking designs, public web page designs, internal software tools, customer journey maps, and libraries. Within those, each has its own style of cover page. This gives each listing page a unified feel and it's always obvious which list I'm looking at.
  3. I use the default gray background on the cover page, unless it's something I'm actively working on at the moment. Then I change it to green. This gives the cover a green border around it in the listing page.

Create components for those covers in case you feel like you might want to change them down the road. Et voila, you've really simply gone from a mess in your projects list to an organized and legible design portal.

DiscussMay 23, 2021
Mike·
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Typora for Windows

I've now been on Windows at work for 3 years and finally found a notes solution that seems to work. I have a weird set of requirements:

  • I want it to look reasonably good if I'm looking at it all day
  • It has to support Markdown
  • It should support images
  • It should have a "notebook" interface
  • It can't use web sync because I work at a financial institution
  • I can't run installers (unless they're single-user) because my work machine is locked down

Finally, I found Typora. Insanely, it actually meets all these requirements, including a great notebook-style interface when you open an entire folder. Plus it has a few other features:

  • Document outline
  • Multiple themes (most of which aren't super great)
  • Export into HTML, PDF and all kinds of other formats

If you're on Windows or Linux, give it a shot. It's on Mac OS as well, but Mac users have such a glut of great markdown editors and notebooks (Bear and Byword are still among my favorites) that I'm not sure it's worth mentioning for them.

Update: I have moved away from Typora in favor of a complete knowledgebase approach of Obsidian, which is far more of a "notebook." Plus Typora has a cost and I can't buy stuff like this for my work machine.

DiscussMay 5, 2021
Mike·
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The great un-googling

They said it couldn't be done — removing yourself from Amazon. In truth, it mostly can't. If you use almost any web-based service, you're using AWS. And if you're like me, stretched out across multiple different platforms, you probably use some of those. But we stopped shopping there, I got a Kobo, and we're on the way to replacing our smart speaker. Honestly? Not that hard. Prime video is about the only true difficulty, especially since they have Star Trek

So, riding high on this pseudo-victory, I have declared I'm going to remove Google from my life.

Hashtag #goals

Here's the deal, though. I've read posts like this from people more tech-savvy and smarter than myself, and I don't think I can go that hard. It sounds... tough. I just want to stop depending on them, stop letting them see everything I do, and generally stop supporting them. There are so many reasons out there for doing so, but that's not what this is about. This is about a quest for alternatives to the company that practically wrote the book on doing stuff in the browser.

The pieces

Once you start cataloging it, there's a lot. And some are just gonna have to slide, no doubt about it, but I'll get there eventually. Here's where I'm at with alternatives.

  • Gmail. I looked at Proton, which is great if you really want to get into the extremes of privacy, and a few others, before settling on Fastmail. Fastmail won out for its UI, pricing to storage ratio, and inclusion of a calendar. Some friends' recommendations sealed that deal. Fastmail also features alias boxes, which can send or receive mail, and those are helping me get rid of the numerous random Gmail boxes in addition to the main one.
  • Docs. At the end of the day, I so rarely need a word processor and almost any will work. My personal hangup about docs is that I usually want structure rather than WYSIWYG layouts. It's a big part of why I use Notion Obsidian and frankly in most cases I'll just publish a PDF out of there. I write my post drafts in there since it's Markdown. But Apple's Pages online and MS Word online are totally fine, and more recently I found the hosted version of open-source OnlyOffice. As a bonus, it's a great replacement for the aging and frustrating LibreOffice on the Linux desktop.
  • Sheets. When Google Sheets launched, it was insane. Zoho had done it, but not well, and that's about it. There are all kinds of great tools out there now that make a spreadsheet seem quaint, but sometimes you just need a spreadsheet. It's still the "killer app." And the originator is still pretty good at it. Excel online is a little more computer-intensive, but it does the thing well and doesn't get into other stuff. Coda is a possibility, but the learning curve is steep, and I've seen recommendations for Airtable but as cool as it is (I use it for a few things) it's really a different animal. OnlyOffice wins again, for anything that needs more math and fewer relationships than I would handle with Airtable.
  • Drive. My god, it's full of storage. There are so many alternatives out there it's not even worth it. If you want to use the same provider as your docs or sheets, then go with Microsoft or Apple. If privacy is your main value, try pCloud or Mega. I've personally gone with pCloud because of its media capabilities and generous size (not to mention its charmingly rough edges and desktop Linux integration), but my eggs are well distributed among many baskets.
  • Photos. Unlike email, there just aren't a lot of low-cost storage options for photos. Flickr has been so fucked-with for so long since Yahoo! took over that I can't make heads or tails of where they're going with it, and most services (that aren't AMZ) are geared toward photographers, not regular folks backing up their stuff. So for now, I have nothing except redundant external drives and possibly a larger pCloud plan.
  • Chromebook. Obviously Google tracking your entire operating system is not super ideal. However, this was easier to resolve than I expected. Crouton makes it easy to install a Linux environment with xfce. I'm still tweaking but it's working pretty well, especially considering my Chromebook runs on a Rockchip, which I think is like an ARM?

The world of technology used to be this way. We used the best provider for each service or application. The idea of going to a one-stop shop is relatively new. Yeah, it makes things simple, but if the price for turning computing devices into dead-simple consumer electronics is all my privacy, I'm going to try to roll my own life.

DiscussApr 25, 2021
Mike·
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New device: Behringer TD-3

It's pretty safe to call Behringer "much-maligned." Obviously they have a tendency to do the cheap imitation version of gear, and Uli seems like kind of a dick. But rather than Mackie mixers or random pedals, they've set their sights in the past decade on the unobtanium of electronic music stuff. The Minimoog, the ARP 2600, the 808. And one of the recent ones is the Roland TB-303.

I picked one up on Reverb for under $100 shipped, so it's kind of hard to say no. It goes well with my other small, cheap desktop modules like the Volca series and Arturia Microbrute. It is, however, a bit flimsier feeling than the others. But I've been assured by some owners of the original that it was also a plastic box that you wouldn't want to drop from too far up.

Sounds

So how does it sound? There are plenty of YouTube videos at this point, but more than any other piece of synth gear I have, it does One Thing. It does that thing right, though. There are two wave shapes, the saw and square, and simplistic filter controls that were meant for guitarists rather than subtractive synth experts to work. The TB-3 adds a nice distortion option that the 303 lacked, and it really helps the bass cut through a thicker mix. I almost never turn it off, especially on the square wave shape. There's also a little patch bay at the top that lets you do some very basic CV controls. I could probably sync the filter to the kick pattern of the Volca Beats or send gate info to the Microbrute arpeggiator, but I have yet to play with it.

Sequences

The one thing that I almost wish wasn't so authentic is the sequencer. It works by programming notes, then by going back and programming all their lengths, including rests and holds. You really have to plan out your patterns in advance before starting to punch buttons. Fortunately, you can switch the thing into pitch mode and send it notes from somewhere else, like Ableton Live or my Alesis MMT-8 sequencer.

Summary

Those folks who automatically won't buy Behringer aside (I get you), the TB-3 isn't a device for everyone. It only does one thing, and chances are it'll makes you think of acid house as soon as it starts playing. But if you need bass in your setup, you could do a lot worse than around a hundred bucks for something that can shake the floor.

DiscussApr 25, 2021
Mike·
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Cranking the engine back up

I think I'm going to maybe do some blogging again? I've always had trouble with writing in the blog because I feel like it should be about UX. I generally want to write about synths and studio stuff. It is what it is. I'm now officially Too Old to be concerned whether potential employers look at my portfolio, see my blog, and realize that I don't spend every waking hour thinking about designing software. Also, I'm not really looking.

DiscussMar 19, 2021
Mike·
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Creating (more) music during the pandemic

I suppose I was fortunate, really. My band's drummer, who also wrote maybe 70% of the guitar riffs, finished his PhD and left the country to go work in Switzerland. Writing out that sentence makes me realize he was the really fortunate one. But what I mean is, a lot of my musician friends had to deal with the fact that they couldn't get together during the pandemic. For better or worse, I didn't have a band anymore to worry about. Fortunately, prior to 2020 I'd released about a dozen releases (between digital, CD and cassette) over the past 20 years that featured no other musicians but me. So I started to hit the shed.

I've been a process musician for most of that time. Each project, each release, is the result of a way of working. It comes from being in the experimental world for so long. Now, even when I make something that I find enjoyable to listen to, it's still gonna be made via a specific process. And when I make something with that process, I tend to move on. But that kind of indulgence is tough for someone with kids and a day job. Movement doesn't happen quickly enough, and output is minimal.

So I came up with the plan of forcing myself into the shed once a week, and I decided I wasn't going to come out of the shed until I had a finished song. Talking it out with a friend, I realized this accomplishes a few things:

  1. It opens the throttle on that speed of progress. If you just "play around" once a week for a couple hours, you're not going to get anywhere for a long time. Validating an idea once a week gets you through the ruts and the familiar patterns and into new ideas sooner.
  2. It keeps you from being precious about polish and "finish." The dumb truth of a piece of music or art is that it's finished when you say it is. Bee Thousand is just as "finished" as Dark Side of the Moon, and they're both classics of their space. One was made by a group of guys with infinite time and money, and the other was made by a drunk schoolteacher with kids.
  3. It makes you go with your gut. Maybe if I hadn't been doing this for close to 25 years, I wouldn't feel like the gut was a useful thing. But the gut has become experienced.

I'm currently using this process to create new Various Reasons tunes, always with the further constraint that someday they can be recreated live, but the first work I did with a "live band" style and put onto Bandcamp as Mezzo Cortex.

DiscussMar 19, 2021