Selecting different effect paths in an Ableton Live MIDI Effects Rack...

The 'Racks' in Ableton Live are very neat solutions that contain a lot more functionality than you might think at first glance. The obvious application for the Audio or MIDI Racks is to put several effects in series into a rack, and then assign Macro Controls to specific important parameters in those effects, and then hide the effects leaving just the macro panel visible.

A simple example first...

Here's exactly this process for a very common set of MIDI Effects. 

The first effect is the 'Random' MIDI effect, which is being used to add an offset of -12 or +12 semitones to the incoming MIDI note number, with a 50% probability (so half of the time, the incoming note will be unchanged, and half of the time it will be transposed up or down by 1 octave). 

This is followed by the 'Velocity' MIDI effect, which is adding a random number (up to 29) to the MIDI velocity of the incoming MIDI note. 

The overall result of these two MIDI effects is to produce random inversions of chords (or transpositions of individual notes), with random 'voicing' (relative differences in timbre or volume caused by the velocity). This is very useful for string or synth pads, making it sound like the part, and the playing of that part, is much more complex than the contents of the source clip! 

To store these two MIDI effects as a single device, you just insert a blank MIDI Effect Rack into the track strip:

The MIDI Effect Rack will initially have no effects in it (just a grey bit in the middle), so you just add the two effects to the empty 'Drop MIDI Effects Here' area in the middle.:

Which gives us a neatly encapsulated effects 'chain' that can be named and saved, and re-used whenever pad 'sweetening' is needed. 

On the left hand side, there are some button that control which parts of the MIDI Effect Rack are visible. If we turn on the top button:

...then the left hand side opens up and we see the Macro Controls:

The Macro Controls have all been mapped here. So let's look at how that works. Some of the controls in the effects on the right hand side have a small green dot, and this means that they are actually controlled by one of the Macro Controls. 

All that you do ito set this up s click on the control on the right hand side (four little corners appear around the control) and then right-click on it. A pop-up menu appears, and you just select the appropriate Macro Control:

Because the mapping to the Macro Control is already set up, the highlighted option here says: 'Unpam from Chance'. If you were doing this from scratch, then it would say 'Map to Macro 1', much like some of the other menu options shown.

Once you have mapped the effects controls to Macro Controls, you can colour and name the Macros. If  you click on the middle button on the left hand side, you will see this:

The middle button unhides the middle section of the window, and it contains some buttons, then a large box called 'Chain', which represents the chain of effects over to the right, and then another empty grey space with 'Drop MIDI Effect Here' - just like where we added the two MIDI Effects right at the beginning of this blog post. Clicking on the middle button again will hide this centre section.

Finally, you can click on the lowest little button on the left hand side, and the effects will be hidden:

(You can see that the lowest button on the left hand side is no longer yellow!). 

And that's it! Two MIDI Effects turned into a useful composite effect that you can grab from Live's browser and insert on any pad track that needs inversions and velocity processing.

There's more...

But there are more advanced ways to use Racks, and this is where people seem to have problems. The metaphors used in the Racks appear to have been strongly influenced by the way that samplers manage samples: velocity switching ('Vel'), and the note range that a sample is assigned to ('Key'). But the 'Chain' button uses a different mind-set - kind of like multiple Racks that you can switch between. 

Now I have already used the word 'chain' to describe those two MIDI effects placed one after the other in the Rack - 'in series' is how techies describe this arrangement. But MIDI Effect Racks allow you to have more than one chain inside them...

Remember how the middle section had a 'Drop MIDI Effects Here' underneath the large 'Chain' box? Let's see what happens when we do that...

I'm not going to repeat the previous effects. Instead let's start by just making some chords:

This chain of two MIDI Effects uses the 'Chord' MIDI effect to generate a triad of three notes to make a Major chord based on the root note input from the Clip, followed by the same 'inversion generator' effect as before, using the 'Random' MIDI Effect. The 'Random' MIDI Effect is polyphonic, so when you pass the three note from the chord through it, it will apply the random inversion to each of the three notes separately. After the Rack, there's one of my MaxForLive note monitors, showing an inverted C Major chord, and then a Collision Instrument to make a sound.  

If we now click on that middle button, the middle section unhides, and we get the 'Chain' box with the 'Drop MIDI Effects Here' grey area underneath:

I have renamed 'Chain' to 'Major' because that box represents those two MIDI Effects that are producing inverted Major chords.

Next let's alter one of the MIDI Effects:

Above is another chain showing the same two MIDI Effects, but this time with the 'Chord' MIDI Effect set so that it produces a Minor chord. If we drop these two MIDI Effects into the grey 'Drop MIDI Effects Here' area, then we get this:

A second large box appears underneath the 'Major' box that used to be called just 'Chain'. I have renamed this new box 'Minor' because it contains the 'Chord' MIDI Effect that creates minor chords. I have also mapped across the Chance and Sign controls to Macro Controls on the left, and aded some colour. I have also added a 'Chord Maj Min' control because that seems like what we want to end up with... but what do we map to it?

Before we look at that, let's see what is happening inside this MIDI Effect Rack... 

In the above diagram, I have shown the two large chain boxes (Major and Minor) and how they map to the two chains of MIDI Effects. You don't actually ever see a view like this, but it shows how there are two chains in parallel.

What do those two chains do, and what are those controls to the right of the large boxes with 'Major' and 'Minor' in? There seems to be a loudspeaker button, a 'Solo' button, a 'Refresh' button, and a bar-graph like the ones in MIDI tracks. If the Major chain is soloed:

Then the output of the Rack is Major chords.

If the Minor chain is soloed:

Then the output of the Rack is Minor chords.

So only one chain can be active at any one time, which makes sense! But how do we control these two chains. Mapping the solo buttons doesn't work, of course!

The answer lies in the 'Chain' button. As I noted earlier, the 'Key' and 'Vel' buttons seem to be influenced by samplers, since in other Racks they deal with key ranges and velocity switching, but clicking on the 'Chain' button opens a similar looking section to the ones for 'Key' and 'Vel'...

Now it isn't immediately obvious what to do, but it looks a lot like the 'Key' range control, so if we assign the two ranges to 'Major' and 'Minor' then it looks like this:

Unlike the 'Key' section, the numbers at the top go from 0 to 127, which looks like a MIDI range, and there's a light blue highlighted box for the '0' (zero) position. If you right-click on this box then you get  a pop-up:

'Chain Selection Filters MIDI Ctrl' tells us that this is a control for that 0-127 range. Also notice the 'Distribute Ranges Equally' - you can use this to set the ranges like this if you want... If we map this to that pre-defined Macro Control (Macro 5), then we get a result that looks like this:

Here are the mappings that have been added:

So the 0-127 horizontal bar in the 'Chain' view is for a 'Chain Selector', which means that when the value is from 0-63, then the Major MIDI Effect chain is active (soloed), and when the value is from 64-127 then the Minor MIDI Effect chain is active (soloed!).

So now we have a MIDI Effect rack which produces Major or Minor chords, with random inversions. But how can we automate the Major/Minor selection? You could map an LFO to Macro 5, but another way is to use a Clip Envelope (My Favourite!):

This Clip Envelope is mapped to 'Chord Major Minor', which is the mapping name for Macro 5, that controls the Chain Selector. So this clip envelope plays a Major chord first, then a Minor chord. You can, of course, change the clip envelope to suit when you want the chord type...

More chains!

Adding more chains just requires more dropping of MIDI Effects in the 'Drop MIDI Effect Here' area, and the setting of separate ranges in the 'Chain' view. Here's an example I prepared earlier:

Again, this isn't what you would actually see on screen!

Files

Downloads for the example Racks featured in this blog post (plus previous Racks) are available here.

---

If you find my writing helpful, informative or entertaining, then please consider visiting this link:

Buy me a coffee

Synthesizerwriter's Store (New 'Modular thinking' designs now available!)

USB to 9V 'Pedal' Cable

Histories of Electronic Music often  concentrate on hardware, in an 'insider' code: TR-808, DX7, MPC, D-50, RC-505, EIV, etc., or on bands/perfortmers/artists, again very 'insider' in nature: NIN, Erasure, Daft Punk, Deadmau5, Kraftwerk, Bassnectar, BT, Mili, Fluke, etc. Another possible method of categorisation might be recording technology, wire, tape, multi-track, portastudio, DAT, CD, mp3, SD card, etc. 

But there's one pivotal hardware technology that most people assign to the sidelines...

Power cables. Yep, those IEC mains leads, USB cables, the often-unloved wall-wart adapters and their captive leads, and... guitar pedal cables. At the risk of sounding like a movie trailer (remember going to the movies pre-lockdown?): 

In a world where data seems to be going wireless and enabled by lithium-ion batteries, distributing power to gear is still physical wires. 

Allegedly, the world nearly had wireless power via Nikolai Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower experiments funded by J.P.Morgan (yes, that J.P.Morgan!), and magnetic induction on the grand scale may now be impossible because of the way we have developed electronics, but applications like mobile phone charging are viable, albeit over very short distances. Instead, we have mains electricity, or batteries. Batteries are increasingly not the throw-away zinc-carbon et al cells, but rechargeable lithium-ion et al, and the current knowledge of physics suggests that there aren't any huge leaps in energy density - so significantly smaller/lighter batteries with huge power storage will require huge advances in physics. Lithium-ion batteries are increasingly used in power-banks that can power more than just phones, and USB has become a pretty ubiquitous delivery mechanism.

However, guitar pedals are different...

Unfortunately, guitar pedals come from an era of 9V batteries made up of stacks of six 1.5 Volt cells: PP9s as they were called before the modern obsession with renaming battery sizes every few years started, which sounds a bit like the way that USB connectors and video connectors get changed every few years. But modern pedals often no longer have any provision for a removable 9V battery, instead a centre-negative 2.1mm barrel connector provides the DC power. - from the mains! But that DC power is 9V, not the 5 Volts that you get from USB...

Up until very recently, that was the end of the story. Pedals were 9V, (not USB!) and you used a wall-wart power supply to convert mains to 9V DC, with daisy-chained connectors for pedal boards (or better, but more expensive: isolated outputs). However, the last decade has seen a lot of advances in Power Converter chips, and they have got smaller and lighter... To the point where you can put them into connector plugs. So it is now possible to convert the 5 Volts that you get from a USB charger to 9V with what appears to be just a cable.

A Deluge of Ideas

It was the Synthstrom Deluge FAQs that reminded me about USB-to-9V cables. The Deluge groovebox is quite unusual because it can work of an internal lithium-ion battery (Yep, it really is very close to the 'Novation Circuit on steroids, or Circuit 2' that many people have wanted for some time...). I've got a small 'classic' Boss BCB-30 pedal board that is mains powered, plus several pedals (An OWL, a Poly Digit and various other 'boutique' pedals that might get put onto a board eventually (none of which have 9V batteries!). But power has always been the problem, and it goes well beyond the usual 'serious' pedal board design advice:

'Don't daisy-chain one adaptor: Use a power supply with multiple isolated outputs.'   

Synthstrom Audible suggest that one way to power the Deluge is to use a lithium-ion USB power-bank with a USB-to-9V cable to do the voltage conversion. So I ordered a couple of cables from Songbird FX...

BirdCords from Songbird FX

Here's what I got: two bags (everything is in bags these days!) with the ubiquitous stickers! What looks like a cable with a 2.1mm barrel connector on one end, and a USB plug on the other end, is the USB-to-9V converter cable. It can provide a peak of 1 Amp, which means that as long as your USB power-bank (or USB charger/mains adaptor) can provide enough current, then you can power quite demanding devices. I tried my Deluge, and with my usual 'LEDs almost at lowest brightness' setting, the current consumption was just over 300mA, and with full LED brightness, it went up to around 425mA. The Default 'full brightness' LEDs on the Deluge is very bright, by the way:

The Deluge can be very bright!

I powered the Deluge through the USB-to-9V cable for just under an hour in an ambient temperature of 25 degrees Centigrade, and the plug only got slightly warm, so it looks like there's no problem with providing about half an amp continuously. 

The cable is disarmingly small and light - the plug isn't a big heavy blob at all! I then tried it with a pedal, captured here in an 'action' shot:

As you can see, the 9V connector is plugged into a pedal, and I'm just about to power it via the USB connector. Stunning cinematography, eh?

I'm very pleased with my BirdCords. They are small, neat, do what they say, and are useful gadgets to have around for emergencies, as well as a perfect way to reduce the proliferation of different mains adaptors. 10/10 from me.

Mobile

Okay, so the Deluge already has a battery inside, but there's lots of gear that doesn't! And none of my boutique pedals have batteries inside! So having USB-to-9V cables means that I can remove my dependence on mains power, by using power banks, which is great for live performance - especially unreliable mains power.  Even if mains power is available, then having just USB adapters/chargers means that I have more interchangeability in case something goes wrong... Losing power mid-set isn't my favourite experience: the thumps and clicks in the audio are bad, but having a laptop still powered up when your synths, drum machine and effects are all rebooting to an unknown state is pure stress and embarrassment. 

So my aspirational mobile rig would have a high power (20,000 mAh or more) USB power bank to power USB-powered gear, with USB-to-9V cables powering my pedal board. But my 'ideal' mobile rig would be to have two power banks with auto-switching between them... I'm trying to find something that does this...

Links

Songbird FX - BirdCords, including the USB-to-9V cable featured here.

https://synthstrom.com/product/deluge/ - The Synthstrom Audible Deluge web-page...

http://n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery - Info about lithium-ion batteries...

---

If you find my writing helpful, informative or entertaining, then please consider visiting this link:

Buy me a coffee

Synthesizerwriter's Store (New 'Modular thinking' designs now available!)

Decoding a 'ParamName Value' control string in MaxForLive...

Over time, Max and its 'Ableton Live' cousin, MaxForLive, have iteratively added functionality to do music, MIDI and audio-related tasks. 

Me, I'm not so good with new functions. I tend to use the same Max objects over and over again, because I know them, I'm familiar with how they work, and so I use them. 

The problem is, sometimes this means that I struggle to solve problems when there's a perfect solution just waiting, not hidden but overlooked, already in Max. This happened recently when I wanted to decode a 'ParamName Value' control string, and string processing is not one of Max's greatest strengths. I have used quite a few of the 'zl.' list processing functions, but there are a lot that I've never used as well. Searching through the 'zl.' help pages, I found 'zl.sub', where the example shown isn't very exciting:

Okay, so for the first number, '1', then it will output the number '1' indicating the first position in the list. And 2 for the second item, and so on. But then I realised that the numbers were distracting me, this is a list processor, and so it could be any 'symbol': numbers or text. It suddenly dawned on me (Duh!) that the 'sub' in the name meant 'Sub-set', and it all became clear. All of those convoluted 'If' objects that I had struggled with previously to process text strings were instantly rendered obsolete. 

Yep, a face-palm moment.

So here's an example that should make it much clearer what you can do with zl.sub in a more musical  'MaxForLive' type of context:

At the start is a control string: a parameter name, followed by the value of that parameter. The sort of string that is human-friendly... The 'fromsymbol' object turns it into a list containing a string symbol ('Cutoff') and an integer ('100'). This is then split into two separate fragments by the 'unpack' object. The symbol goes into zl.sub, which reports back that 'Cutoff' is the 5th item in the list, and the integer is the value of that parameter. 

Human-readable input becomes programming-friendly name and value pair. It's not a click-bait headline, but it makes quite a few of my abandoned projects much more possible now. 

So that's a face-palm turned into a light-bulb moment. Not bad for a Max command I'd always overlooked. My Day: Made. Happy face.

(Yep, one of the shortest blog posts so far, I think...)

---

If you find my writing helpful, informative or entertaining, then please consider visiting this link:

Buy me a coffee

Synthesizerwriter's Store (New 'Modular thinking' designs now available!)

  

Customising a Yamaha RM1x Groovebox Floppy Disk Emulator

Vintage gear can develop a number of problems. There is already a lot of material available online about replacing electrolytic capacitors, which heat and age can dry out causing them to lose capacitance. Unsoldering capacitors is fiddly work, really needs a good quality desoldering station, and can take a lot of time if there are lots of capacitors to change (replace with higher temperature rating and higher voltage if there is space...) Backlit LCD displays are another common problem, where the electroluminescent backlight drivers fail over time, and the LED backlights gradually seem to go dim. If you can find OLED replacements then these are arguably the best, but I haven't been able to find out much about the real-world long-term life of them - after all, 90s gear is nearly 30 years old! And then there are 3.5 inch floppy disk drives - particularly the ones which use belts instead of direct drive. It seems that old drive belts go loose, or go sticky, or go brittle, and all of these tend to result in a floppy drive that doesn't work. 

I've been gradually replacing the backlit displays and floppy drives on my vintage gear. To be more accurate, I mean 'what used to be backlit' displays. When you start replacing displays, you quickly discover that the difficulty of doing it varies enormously. Some synthesizer expander modules (the Yamaha TX7, for example) are very easy, whilst some keyboard workstations can require quite extensive amounts of disassembly. Here's a link to a pretty detailed description from a blog post describing the process for a Korg Wavestation: https://jaryic.livejournal.com/11778.html . As it says, 'not for beginners'. I couldn't find any way to backlight my Roland TR-505, though, so if anyone has any ideas, just let me know...

Floppy drives tend to be easier to replace, but there are sometimes complications. For example, the Yamaha SY99 uses a 26 pin floppy drive interface cable, rather than the more usual 34 pins, and that has long been a topic of much discussion on the relevant Yamaha forums. Most of the better companies that sell floppy drive emulators are well aware of this complication, and have their own reliable, verified and tested adapters. 

My own description of the pinouts of the 26 and 34 pin connectors is still available on the Interweb: http://www.martinruss.com/sy99adapter.html Then there is also my description of replacing a failed SY99 floppy with the long-discontinued official Yamaha replacement, complete with Yamaha adapter board: http://www.martinruss.com/sy99.html This article is probably rapidly becoming 'vintage' in its own right!

But my Yamaha RM1x floppy drive proved to be a different type of challenge. The floppy drive is accessed via the front panel of the RM1x, whilst the main control surface of the RM1x is the top surface. 

When the only control on the floppy drive was the 'Eject' button, and the writing on the floppy label was easy to read as it ejected, this was fine, but for modern floppy emulators, there are more controls, and a display. The simple 7-segment LEDs are not my recommendation - OLEDs which show file names are much better, if a little tiny. But the display is on the front of the floppy emulator... 

This means that the OLED display of the floppy emulator is not easy to see when you are using the RM1x. You only need to bend down and lean back a few times so that you can see the display before you realise that it is very awkward. So I moved the display so that it was easy to read when you are using the top 'control' surface of the RM1x!

But, first things first. I got my floppy disk emulators from CPMagneticMedia on ebay.co.uk: https://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/cpmagneticmedia , who are very knowledgable, and have a wide range of floppy emulators, backlit LCDs, and lots of other useful stuff for customisers/upgraders, etc. 

The first thing I did when I had the floppy emulator installed and working was to remove it, open it up and thus void the warranty! The OLED was held in place with hot glue, which is easy to remove if you have a hot glue gun...

But before removing the OLED display, I got a 'potting box' of about the right size and worked out how much I needed to cut it down with my trusty Dremel...

Then I removed the OLED display (Carefully! They are very delicate - note the black foam used to hold it in place...) and removed the remaining hot glue with snipe nose pliers.

Then I cut the potting box to size and cut out a window in the top surface the correct size for the OLED display - using the existing hole in the floppy emulator as a guide. 

One of the actions to keep doing when making mods like these is to check and re-check. So I now checked that the OLED, the mounting foam and the new potting box all fitted together nicely.

I then extended the four way cable to the OLED, so that I could push it through the hole in the floppy emulator front panel.

I then mounted the OLED display in the potting box, using the mounting foam and more hot glue, then glued the potting box to the floppy emulator front panel.

And from the top, things are a lot neater in appearance.

From the remains of the potting box, I then made a cover for the underside of the box, to hide the extender cable... and glued it in place.

The finished result looks very nice!

Now you can easily see the display when you are controlling the RM1x.

Full disclosure: before I extended the display into the potting box, I did explore using a prism to try and twist the display so it would be visible, but this suffered from the 'mirrors only swap one direction, not both' problem and I got reversed text on the display.

I would like to thank CPMagneticMedia for all their help with this project!

As with any mod, you are almost certainly going to invalidate warranties, and you may break rare or custom parts that are hard to find. So you do any mods at your own risk! Only do mods if you are confident and experienced. 

Postscript

Some people have asked me if I could send them the FlashFloppy FF.CFG file for the drive, as well as the jumper settings. I did not buy a generic Gotek drive, flash it and configure it - I bought a custom  RM1X-specific drive that was already flashed and pre-configured, with a rotary encoder and an OLED display. 

If you want to use FlashFloppy on a generic Gotek drive, then the GitHub site is at: 

https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki/FF.CFG-Configuration-File 

---

If you find my writing helpful, informative or entertaining, then please consider visiting this link:

Buy me a coffee

Synthesizerwriter's Store (New 'Modular thinking' designs now available!)

Customised Synthstrom Audible Deluge

One of my background tasks for the past few months has been researching mid-to-high-end 'grooveboxes'. Whilst the marketplace has lots of low cost (sub $500~) examples of 'single portable boxes that can create music using MIDI and samples' (aka grooveboxes, although there are much more sophisticated and complex definitions), from Teenage Engineering's Pocket Operators, OP-1/Z, the Roland MC-101, Novation's (hard to beat) Circuit, Korg's Electribe 2, Elektron's Digitone/Digitakt and Model:Cycles, Polyend's Tracker, the 1010 Music Blackbox, plus many more, the next level up is significantly more sparsely populated and much more diverse in approaches. Doubling the budget ($500-$1000 and more) can get you a much more capable device, but I wanted to know which one was best suited to my way of thinking? 

(The title of this post kind of gives away the end result, of course!)

Many years ago, I remember being greeted with a certain amount of disbelief when I expressed my opinion that the major deciding factor in choosing a DAW should be the workflow and its alignment with your own internal mental model of how to make music. It seemed that brand-name, who else used it, resolution, number of tracks, latency, bundled plug-ins and many other factors were far more important to many people. My opinion hasn't changed, although I have found that I have increasingly moved to the 'boutique' end of the market: small, independent manufacturers who tend to be musicians and technologists. As an example, my most sophisticated pedal is a Poly:Digit, which isn't exactly mainstream...

The other vitally important word in that brief definition is 'single'. When I go away from a DAW with access to external hardware synths and effects, into the 'live performance' scenario, then I'm looking for ideally one box, and probably three boxes maximum. I've played the game of having lots of equipment to set up and tear down, and like most people who have done that more than a few times, I have decided that:

Simplicity Means Less To Go Wrong! 

But back to those 'next level up' grooveboxes. So what are the main contenders? I whittled the list down to these:

- Elektron Octatrack (mk1 or mk2 (mk2 is a makeover that is probably more like a 1+))

- Roland MC-707

- ModDuo X

- Synthstrom Audible Deluge

- Akai Force

- plus a few others that were fighting for attention (MPCs!), and I even considered a few no-longer-current devices - even though trying to find second hand gear can be stressful... 

As always, your favourite is probably missing from this shortlist. Note that I deliberately rejected these whole categories:

- hardware 'sequencer-only' devices (no Squarp Pyramid or Polyend Seq or Social Entropy Engine...) 

- hardware controllers that require a DAW or computer (NI Maschine, Ableton Push...)

- modular 'sequencers plus a few modules'. (Creeping module purchases means your rig is never quite finished...)

My opinions

After months of careful research, here's my personal opinions:

- Elektron Octatrack. 

The Octatrack has been bubbling under on my GAS list for a long time. And that's probably the main issue - it has been around for so long that it may be about to be replaced, and I hate buying something which is immediately replaced by something much better for less money! 

Pros. Flexible sample playback, a song-mode sequencer (the Digitone and Digitakt lose points because of their lack of song support), and some neat processing. The eight channle scan also be used as a mixer, which is interesting. Looping support is also good. The Mark II's slider control is definitely a good reason to go for this in preference to the Mark I.

Cons. Seems to be difficult to learn. This might be the classic 'I will say it is hard to use because that makes me look good!' situation, but the YouTube video's of people using Octatracks seem to reinforce the amount of learning that is required. Is complexity what I want in a live environment? Probably not. Also, most people seem to use other gear with an Octatrack, so that's a concern. Finally, there's the nagging doubt that there's probably a Mark III in the pipeline, or maybe even a total revision.

- Roland MC-707

My first album was recorded using a TB-303, a TR-606 a Sequential Pro-One and a Casio CT-1000, and I've currently got a heavily modded TR-505, so I'm no stranger to Roland gear. The MC-707 is kind of what I reckon an Elektron Octatrack 3 might be like, although with a different workflow...

Pros. Ableton Live-style grid is a plus. Lots of immediately editable sounds without any need for a computer (probably the top feature request for the Novation Circuit 2). 

Cons. No song-mode is a major disadvantage. At the sub-$500 price-point then this is acceptable, but I've spent too long with old school drum machines to want me to be constantly controlling what is happening. No way to send MIDI CCs might also be a problem if I was going to use it with anything else... No 'Scale' mode for the buttons is weird when most of the sub-$500 group have this! Having to effectively sacrifice a track to sequence external MIDI is strange, but again, for a single box then this is not as important as it might be if I was using this as the centre-piece of a studio. 

- ModDuo X

I've been trying to buy one of these for over a year now, and it seems to be permanently out of stock, with pre-orders all being consumed in a few seconds of the site accepting them. So I've more or less given up on this one. I talked to Mod at one of the Ableton Loop events, and they seemed very confident, maybe not in a good way. Given their apparent supply chain problems, maybe my gut feeling was correct... 

- Synthstrom Audible Deluge

Definitely a 'boutique' device, this goes against the grain in all the right ways. No display - well, not a display in the conventional sense, although if you scaled up a Novation Circuit, it could well look a lot like this. An interesting design, with unusual/novel controls that make a lot of sense. 

Pros. Small, light, song-mode (plus arranger functions), Subtractive and FM synths, sample replay, and looping. Comprehensive features and a very good firmware update policy (frequent!). Seems to think the same way that I do!

Cons. Using the display as the main control means that you can spend a lot of time jumping in and out of song mode. As with the Octatrack, there seem to be a lot of shortcuts that require muscle-memory to learn. 

- Akai Force

I immediately thought of a 'DAW in a box' when I first saw this, and this is too much like a Push and Ableton Live. I would struggle to say that I was 'DAWless' if I used one of these.

The result?

I went for a Synthstrom Audible Deluge (a 'Deluge' from this point onwards). It offered the features I wanted, the size and weight and convenience, and a pretty good 'single box' solution. When it arrived, the adapter envelope had a note on it:

So I took the 'Martin :)' and turned it into a label for the top panel:

So if you ever see a 'Martin :)' where you were expecting a Deluge, then that will be me!

---

I will report on my progress with the Deluge as I get familiar with it... So far, I'm definitely enjoying it!

---

If you find my writing helpful, informative or entertaining, then please consider visiting this link:

Buy me a coffee

Synthesizerwriter's Store (New 'Modular thinking' designs now available!)