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In praise (and defense) of the Novation Circuits

Pretty regularly on the Novation Circuit subreddit, a question like this or a comment expressing the same general idea appears. I'm not familiar with any other music gear subs where the users are so often actively trying to get away from their chosen devices.

The Circuit OG/Tracks/Rhythm are very interesting devices. Novation took the success of the Launchpad, an Ableton clip launch controller, and expanded it into a standalone device that really isn't like anything else. There's no screen. The pad grid serves as the user feedback for every function: step sequencing, keyboard, pattern launching, mixing, even the tempo display. That makes it a device that sometimes needs a great deal of memorizing (or RTFM, initially). But it also makes it a device that absolutely nails what it means to be immediate and tactile — attributes that screen-poisoned musicians supposedly crave these days when they step away from the DAW. There's no clicking, no menu diving, no using a scroll wheel to name a pattern. There's you, there's the buttons and knobs, and there's the music. And trust me, it's extremely quick to get to the "music" step. Features of both current-gen Circuits include one-button "scene" launching, sequencer probability and random mutation, pattern chaining for very long variations, and really usable reverb and delay.

So why does everyone think they need to "upgrade" to an Elektron machine, an MPC, or god forbid a Roland MC-707?

Cheap...

Firstly, these things are not expensive. About $350 gets you a new one, and for better or worse this "gotta upgrade" attitude leaves Reverb stocked with them for much less. I think there's an attitude with all kinds of musicians that the more you spend, the better your stuff is. Surprise! That's bullshit. It's not that I'm that old blues lawyer guitarist insisting that "tone is in the fingers" — after all, these same people are connecting 1958 Les Pauls to Dumble amps via Monster cables.

What I mean is electronic musical instruments are very rarely apples-to-apples comparisons. They all have their strengths and their frustrations. And good stuff has never been cheaper than it is right now.

And unspecialized...

The second thing is that, possibly because of said price, no pros have decided that these things have a certain space. If you want to make hard techno or dancey industrial, people like NIN and Richard Devine have sold you on Elektron machines and their hyped, exciter-pumped sounds. If you make lo-fi or boom bap, you want an SP-404 because Madlib, J Dilla, Flying Lotus, and who knows who else used one to make their iconic material. Even doofy gear gets this treatment at times, like the really uninspiring Microkorg being anointed the "synth for an indie rock band that has a synth."

What is the Circuit's space? It doesn't have one. I wouldn't say it's a "master of none" because it's quite good at plenty of things, but looking at it you don't say "ah yes, this thing is for X."

First composition with both Tracks and Rhythm
by u/vrsrsns in novationcircuit

Just like me.

What I can say about the Circuits, especially the Circuit Tracks, is that they are now my centerpiece for both performing and composing, and in 20+ years of making live electronic music I have not owned another machine that enabled my way of working so thoroughly.

Would I like more precise sample cutting onboard? Yeah probably. What about separate outputs? Always want those. But "missing" features like these imply that the very purposeful design of these devices somehow includes more mistakes than it actually does. And the sum of the features versus tradeoffs is unlike anything else out there for both utility and (gasp) fun. So I'm not sure that an upgrade would actually be one at all.

DiscussDec 12, 2022
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Witchin'

Partially because there have been vast swathes of my life that went un-gamed, and partially because I have only kept a nintendo console around for quite a few years now, I tend to get into games late. My latest to finally add to the pile was The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, the main storyline of which I finished today, probably prematurely due to a week of being sick.

Openness

Holy shit it's a lot of game. And unlike Skyrim, you can go just about anywhere. Nobody climbs like Link, but Geralt does a good job of getting around territory. At least until he dies of falling from any height greater than 6 feet.

Combat

Like most 3d action RPGs, you can either parry or dodge-and-roll your way through combat. And as with all the rest, I take the latter path (arguably blocking is better since a perfect parry almost always gets you a nice opening — probably just one of the many reasons I'm shit at Souls). But either way the combat is a lot of fun. Much like Link's runes or a weapon/destruction hybrid build in Skyrim, the weapon and magic combo is really satisfying and gives combat a lot of variety. Geralt is a little slower to act than say, Link, but you get his timing down and you feel unstoppable.

Using mechanics to tell the story

I really think one the bar to hit here is Nier: Automata, but W3 does a great job sporadically. Playing as Ciri in flashback (or her supremely overpowered moment near the end, one-hitting wild hunt warriors) is a fun mix-up that lets you "live" the story a bit more. With a few exceptions, I have very little idea what the dialog options did to my playthrough and that's kinda cool. I guess it's a choice-mechanic equivalent of the open world.

Bummers

Like I said, something about the linear story that's very cleverly woven into an open-world game left me feeling "done" when it resolved. And I know there's a lot more there I haven't done.

Load times are really unfortunate, at least on the Switch. In story-heavy sections, there's a lot of it. Fast travel feels not all that fast when you can sometimes ride your horse there faster.

Frame rate is not great. Automata is a newer game that feels really intensive, but it rarely got herky-jerky. When it rains in a busy place like Novigrad (which is often), Geralt starts doing the robot. Weirder and more distracting is the crappy framerate in some cut scenes. In a game with so many of them, it's unfortunate.

None of this impeding me enjoying the shit out of it. Even the fall damage thing, because I laughed my ass off every time Geralt died by tripping over a rock.

DiscussDec 7, 2022
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Is this really it?

The number of occasions I've heard masses of people say they're going to walk away from Twitter now numbers in the dozens over the years. The company has demonstrated contempt for the users that can be rivaled only by Meta, having pivoted many years ago from adding features based on usage (Retweets) to generally delivering weird non-features that even the advertisers don't really want (Blue).

But now it's being bought by a guy who has latched onto the "free speech brigade" not because he's particularly pro-free-speech (he's not), or because his politics align with those kinds of people (they do), but because he seems dumb enough to believe their spiel (he might be). A union-buster, an apartheid-profiter, and a guy who has used the platform that will soon be his to:

  • Get yelled at by a Wachowski
  • Libel the guy who saved that Thai sports team after nobody liked his coffin submarine idea
  • Predict the end of COVID-19 with the accuracy of Nate Silver picking numbers out of a hat
  • Generally sound like a dumbass who'd be cringey and goofy if he wasn't so simultaneously powerful

Anyway. Doesn't bode all that well. Maybe it's time.

What is Cohost? I dunno. Probably another thing that'll come and go quickly. I still get spam emails from Ello, the supposed Facebook-killer that was all in black-and-white Courier font and whose name I had to look up.

I don't know how to Mastodon despite being acquainted with its founder and signing up for many servers over the years. Somehow the email model of "different servers but everyone can talk" fails to make sense to me in a social media context.

But I use Twitter less and less every year, and these days even the months show decline. And maybe it's time for us all to stop trying to post through it anyway.

DiscussOct 27, 2022
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One year with Obsidian

It occurs to me that I wrote this post about trying Obsidian about a year ago. In that time, I have not really strayed from it, which is pretty unusual for me. I get really restless with tools. Thanks to a very active plugin community, theme ecosystem, and subreddit, it's become a great tool that is super customizable. I adapted a few times and that was no biggie at all thanks to the fact that Obsidian is based entirely around discrete files, stored in your file system, with their own regular ol' file names.

My current way of operating is shamefully trendy; I'm using Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain as the methodology. One reason is that it works reasonably well with other tools including paper journaling and Raindrop bookmarks. Though he apparently uses Evernote and swears by its search (which is still quite good despite Evernote's many problems), I think the linking features in Obsidian are really what makes it good for this system. Knowledge doesn't just go in a filing cabinet and get dusty. You can always see it thanks to links and unlinked mentions.

I'm still not interested in changing, and as long as I am still locked into the old $5 rate for syncing, I will keep that as well.

DiscussAug 9, 2022
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Whoops

When moving site hosts to save a buck I seem to have screwed some things up. I'm not interested in paying for a new Kirby license so I'm trying a static site generator (Eleventy). Unfortunately, as much as I was able to do some bulk text conversion, I'm just not an expert at that stuff. For everything I love about Kirby, it unfortunately does not store all the page data in frontmatter like almost every other CMS or site generator. So it's been a bit of a pain.

The upshot: even compared to Kirby or Grav or whatever, this thing should be fast.

DiscussAug 8, 2022
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"Disappointing"

At least once a year we try to get out to Cape Disappointment on Washington's Long Beach Peninsula. It's a beautiful state park where the Columbia meets the ocean. Good to get that sea air.

DiscussJul 26, 2022
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RIP Dave Smith

Less than 3 weeks after making an appearance at Superbooth and looking healthy and enthusiastic, Dave Smith is dead at 72.

If you don't know who he is, Smith is a synth pioneer who founded Sequential Circuits in the 70s. They made a lot of iconic synths but were most famous for the Prophet 5, pretty much the first programmable polyphonic synth. It really has yet to be topped, which is probably why the re-built company is still making a Prophet 5.

Then, in the early 80s he conceived of and developed a universal interface for synthesizers from different manufacturers to talk to each other. Whether the fact that it's still in use today is evidence of its effectiveness or of how out-of-date it is now, you can't argue that MIDI is one of the most important things to happen in the world of music since the development of the synthesizer itself. He and Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi (also sadly no longer with us) even received a Grammy for the development of MIDI.

For those of us who might never afford a Prophet, MIDI is the great unifier. Since its inception, it has allowed the fanciest Oberheim, the lowliest Volca, your SP-404 loaded with samples of farts, whatever it is, to talk to each other. The standard even continues into the computer, where I can download MIDI files of Clyde Stubblefield playing drums and replace all the hits with sounds of dogs barking or car crashes. I'm sure that's exactly what Smith had in mind.

And speaking of that, one of Smith's other ventures was the first real software synth, Reality. Though he didn't ultimately care for making music inside a computer, it's another project he spearheaded that pretty much changed music forever.

So the only thing left to say is thanks. You'll be missed.

DiscussJun 2, 2022
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Yes, Virginia, there is a Microsoft version of that

It can be tough when you're stuck in Windows world, with security lockdowns on your computer and a ban on most cloud services. With the notable exceptions of UserZoom, Figma, and Overflow, I'm in MS world and that's been an adjustment after the world of Google Apps and other lightweight, web-based tools.

There's a benefit to being entirely in Microsoftland, or at least in theory there is. Kinda looks like with the advent of Loop they are trying to make good on that theory and put it into real practice.

So to say that Loop is a Notion ripoff seems partially true. But for those of us stuck here in Office 365 with no hope of using the real thing, that's totally fine. Just like Planner is not Trello and Todo isn't quite what Wunderlist was, and Power Automate is far from being as easy to work as IFTTT or Zapier — but they exist. I can imagine a lightweight database table like what Notion employs would be so much easier for many of the small tasks where I'm using SharePoint Lists. But the "components" feature of Loop seems to be where MS are really trying to take it a bit further.

The idea behind components seems to be that the pieces of functionality (like Notion blocks?) are available elsewhere in the Office ecosystem: Teams chats, Word docs, email messages. And that's the kind of interoperability that we really don't enjoy today, even though that should be a prime selling point of Microsoftland. Mail Merge isn't exactly the future. But maybe Loop will be?

DiscussMay 8, 2022