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In praise of the Alesis SR-16

I was somewhat surprised recently to see that some people on the group-buying site Massdrop were attempting to get a group together for the Alesis SR-16 drum machine. At its regular street price, the SR-16 is at the same price point as a lot of other newer, more fashionable machines. The Volca Beats is an insanely fun, great-sounding, compact true analog 808 clone for the same coin. Boss continues to make good drum machines for the same or not much more.

And recently I've been in multiple conversations about how the Alesis brand is mostly garbage. This is a shame, at least for the sake of a few great machines — The Micron/Ion keyboards are among the best synths to come out of the now-passé virtual analog era — but most notably for the SR-16. It's somewhat hard to love, but it's also hard to deny.

HR-16

Alesis produced the very first 16-bit sampling drum machine, the HR-16. Previous sample-based machines, like Oberheim's DMX and the Linn LM-1, were 8 or 12-bit. "HR" stood for high resolution and it really wasn't a pose. The samples were good, they had multiple velocity levels, and they were tunable. But there was, as with all machines of the time, a single kit worth of sounds to choose from. I use one, and I replaced the internal chips with Linn LM-1 sounds.

SR-16

Fast forward to 1993, and the successor to the HR-16 didn't do much for innovation, but it added every feature you might want in a drum machine. There were velocity-dependent samples: if you hit a pad harder you'd hear a sample of a drummer hitting the drum harder, rather than just the same sample at higher volume. There were two drum "fills" for each pattern, so that switching between patterns was less robotic and more realistic. For live standalone users, there were two foot pedal inputs for changing patterns hands-free on stage. But if you wanted to use the unit as a sound module, the MIDI implementation was more complete than anything on the market. Godflesh upgraded their HR-16 to an SR-16, and I started playing fairly Godflesh-like music with one, recording my ideas to 4-track. It also powered my first industrial/experimental band for quite a while before finally giving up the ghost after about 10 years of beats (I still have it and I'm sure it could be made operational again). But as long as it lasted and as useful as it was, I'm surprised that it's still made. More power to it.

DiscussSep 21, 2015
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What are we makin' doodles with?

Khoi Vinh [published the results](http://tools.subtraction.com/index.html) of a pretty interesting survey on the tools that designers are using in various disciplines of website and software creation. No surprises here. Sketch is creeping up on the mighty (and mighty expensive/bloated) Photoshop.

DiscussSep 13, 2015
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Put the "designers should code" debate to rest

Good read. The likelihood of that debate ever ending is small. But the point here is awesome. It's not about your skillset. It's about the fact that you're trying to describe a Picasso by farting.

It took me several years to come to that opinion and it hasn’t changed much, but it wasn’t the coding that was important. It was the movement away from symbolic representations of that which we were designing. It was about not using flat images as a poor proxy for something that’s different for different people on different devices in different browsers.
DiscussSep 4, 2015
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New typography

I've updated the type on the site. Maybe do a hard refresh if you're so inclined. I won't be getting to a redesign any time soon, but I wanted to make things a little more reasonable. Things are now set in Merriweather and Merriweather Sans, which I think are great little fonts.

DiscussSep 1, 2015
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Enhancing Kirby with local workflows

I'm enjoying using Kirby to write my blog. It feels more connected to the rest of the site, more in my control, and more "not $5 a month to operate a separate virtual server running Node to have a Ghost blog." But the Kirby Panel, great for spot changes in your content, is not where you want to live every day for blogging. Fortunately, Kirby is a flat-file system that allows users to add content by simply uploading it. So now I'm blogging locally in my favorite Markdown editor and distraction-free writing tool, Byword. There are two parts to making this work.

Automator

The first half of the solution uses Automator, Mac OS X's super powerful and under-utilized workflow creator. I love it, although it's not always intuitive how to do what you need. Essentially this workflow:

  1. Asks for a name that will eventually be the permalink of the Kirby post
  2. Creates a folder in my local "blog" folder with that title
  3. Copies a text file template into that folder with the name article.txt (which is what Kirby needs to associate it with the "article" template
  4. Opens that file in Byword, where I can fill it out

Once I write the post, the second part comes into play.

Dropzone

Dropzone 3.5 was recently released, and it's a nice update to a super useful program. Imagine internet (not just web) bookmarks, file actions, and shortcuts, all rolled into one simple place. You can click actions or drag files and folders onto them, depending on what they are. So in order to publish a post, I just take the newly created folder and drag it onto an FTP shortcut I made in Dropzone. Bam, blogged. And I never have to write anything into another web interface again if I don't want to. Thanks to Kirby's self-contained content style, I can put any images for the post into that folder and they'll work as well.

As a bonus, I added the Automator action to Dropzone as well so I can both write and upload the post from Dropzone. It's a handy little tool that's a good buy at 5 bucks. Only downside I've encountered so far is that it can't upload folders to an S3 bucket.

DiscussAug 31, 2015
Mike·
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Black metal campaign logos

This is great. Fast Co gets metal logo designer Christophe Szpajdel to redesign the logos of all the bazillion players in the 2016 campaign.

The other interesting thing about this is that one guy designed all those unreadable black metal logos, from Gorgoroth and Emperor to Wolves in the Throne Room.

DiscussJul 17, 2015
Mike·
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Smokin'

Shortly after moving, I realized that despite the often-rainy Oregon weather, I was going to need another grill. We'd given the old gas chugger away back in Texas. It was too small, a little persnickity, and basically had one temperature ("hot as it'll go," which was increasingly "not that hot").

After doing some online reading and talking to a couple people, I came to the Kamado style grill and ended up with the Char-Griller Akorn. Last year's model was dirt cheap on Amazon and Prime-ready, so in a day I was up and running. The chief appeal of a kamado, popularized in the West by the Big Green Egg, is that you can get crazy hot with it but also control super low temperatures for long periods. So it lends itself not only to making a pizza with a super hot fire but smoking a brisket.

For the Fourth, I brought some smoked stuff to the neighbors' party — he's a carne asada connoisseur, but she's a vegetarian. So I took it upon myself to see if Real Texas Flavor could be transferred to a mouth without riding on a dead animal.

I read a bit online but not many people were doing it. This person gave me the marinade idea: basically one part rice wine vinegar to two parts soy sauce. As meat eaters who've tried it will attest, tofu doesn't really have a lot of flavor. So slicing the bricks lengthwise in half then marinating them for about a day in this salty/tangy, vaguely Japanese solution gave it a great savory start before it even hit the wood. After that, I got the hickory going as low as it would go, waited for the good thin blue smoke (you do that, don't you? Don't tell me you cook over that white shit), and sat the half-bricks down for about 2 hours.

True to what I expected, they gained a little more chew. I'm not sure where that comes from, but if you've ever had smoked cheese you know what I'm talking about. A little rind, a little denser texture. In the case of spongey-ass tofu, it worked well. It had the texture of tofu that'd been pressed for weeks, not the couple hours I did it.

Results? I loved it, both neighbors loved it, a few people declared it the best tofu they'd ever had. And it really did have a taste reminiscent of Texas BBQ.

DiscussJul 10, 2015