I have two kids under 5 and a full time job so I can relate to being very restricted in terms of time. But I’ve found the TT very quick to learn and the possibilities it offers give me a lot of inspiration. Working at a computer all day I’m very keen to not use a computer in music making if I can help it, the TT opens up a range of generative functions that make this much more possible.

But it does have limits, some of which I’m looking forward to seeing change when v2.0 is ready, it doesn’t feel like a bottomless pit - more like a flexible and useful goo.

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drums are usually very limited in scope upon first inspection…especially a single hand drum
also
our voices

those are my two favs because they are intuitive/accessible yet infinitely deep

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all my personal biases are showing thru but i must add

a mixer

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I remain convinced that all music (even the most synthetic inhuman computer music) relates back to our voice in one way or another.

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I think I’d say voice or drum. We may have been banging on things even before we started to sing.

however speech and language existed before tools and musical instruments (drums)

i’m inclined to believe songs came first

true

it is the most perfect instrument…i was just ruminating the other day about how crude and limited cv and triggers are in comparison to the similarly electronic pulses which control the muscles when singing

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Mr. Patel here seems to agree with you:

Specifically, I proposed the “vocal learning and rhythmic synchronization hypothesis” (henceforth, “vocal learning hypothesis”), which suggests that the capacity to synchronize with a musical beat resulted from changes in brain structure driven by the evolution of complex vocal learning. Complex vocal learning is learning to produce complex vocal signals based on auditory experience and sensory feedback.

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We’re straying a bit off topic here… but one of my fav Autechre interview moments:

Q: have you developed any personal theories as to what music actually is?

A: yeah music = speech - text

at least roughly - i reckon it’s a kind of super-developed version of the pitch and intonation parts of speech (the aural bit that doesn’t contain textual info)

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Those guys are the best ^^

This primacy of the voice is one reason I’m interested in software that pulls digital data out of audio signals. Many variations on this idea exist, but I am drawn to the UI in this app:

But the challenge will always be pulling enough resolution in to live up to the acoustic reality. But such tools are useful in a number of ways (learning/analysis, transposition, etc).

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Haven’t tried it, but I’m told the pitch tracker on the disting works really well.

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@randy has a new instrument coming out that is input-driven, which i suspect will be an exceptional companion to live vocal and drum processing.

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glad you linked to it

I was thinking of virta as well

Woah, thanks tehn for opening this thread! (should have done that myself, sorry for that… next time)
This evolved very nice!

My perception is somewhere near that. but I additionally always have the laptop near my modular for recording… So I find it a bit silly to add another keyboard to my table (which is always only temporary for music making btw.)

This is the part I need to be more aware of. And TT can be so many things…

Thanks guys for the great responses!

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perhaps surprisingly, modular with its openend-ness is great for this. similarly to what @analogue01 described i like to create smaller setups with a specific goal in mind and then treat it as an instrument, get to know it, learn to play it (tempted to get isms as it’ll be perfect for this).

same for small set ups, a small mixer and a couple of other devices, especially some unlikely companions, this often leads to integrating things in a way you never thought of before and breaking out of the ways you tend to use them traditionally.

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I’m struck by the way Richard Devine will talk about modular patches in a seasonal time frame. I get the impression he likes to work with a single patch (with patch cables all tidied with velcro in a way that would seem to discourage re-patching) for several months continuously. Makes perfect sense to me.

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Morton Subbotnik supposedly re-patches his Buchla once a year.

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yeah, it’s nice to come up with an idea for a patch and then explore it for some time before taking it apart. i often have the same experience with new patches as i do with new instruments, it takes time to learn how to interact with it before you get something interesting (or, to be more precise, before you give it a chance to teach you how to make it sing).

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Which, of course, reminds me of this quotation, from the articles that would be come Tracey Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine:

Back at Data General, one day during the debugging, [the engineer’s] weariness focused on the logic analyzers and the small catastrophes that come from trying to build a machine that operates in billionths of a second. He went away from the basement of Building 14 that day, and left this note in his cubicle, on top of his computer terminal: “I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”

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