#183

Thanks for that!

One thing I have been doing (actually almost THE only thing I’ve been doing) is trying to replicate demos on YouTube. This is about the closest thing I can think of to “eurosonatas”. I do find this as close a way as how I learned to play more traditional instruments: by replication and rote.

1 Like
#184

something i’ve found helps me a lot is taking notes on manuals. you end up spending more time ingesting the concepts which helps them stick, and putting things in your own words keeps you from glossing over something that maybe you read but didn’t fully take in.

i also only take notes on things that don’t work the way i naturally assume them to. if playing the thing by intuition got me there already then i already “knew” it before going through the manual. this keeps the notes useful and quick if i need to refer back to them.

doing it with pen and paper is also great because you can easily give things different emphases by the size of your writing or by circling things or creating different layouts, you can draw the icons/buttons/whatever you’re making notes on, and it’s slower than typing which goes back to my first point.

and something i got from learning traditional instruments - doing a little bit every day over a few weeks will cement things more than doing longer sessions that are spaced out by even a few days. of course, you can’t top daily long sessions. :smile:

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#185

Putting in half and hour each day is something I learned from Hainbach. It’s such a good practice. Consistency and being that person that says “I have 30 minutes, I’m going to patch something” instead of being the person that says “Meh, 30 minutes, I’d rather do nothing”. Huge difference for me.

Even sitting down and doing one Teletype exercise, or reading one thing in a manual, or solving one small problem. It all adds up.

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#186

That’s funny. I just started a regimen of taking notes to start to really learn my Octatrack.

Big difference!

And it’s even still hard to follow!

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#187

Lately I’ve been struggling with how many modules to keep. I have a set of modules that I like that’s just shy of a 520hp-case-worth (some acquired, some to be re/acquired). That said, I’m very fond of the the 9u 84hp case format, which works out to roughly half the hp. I think it’s just something to live with, and maybe the answer is discovering how to more satisfyingly live with such a scenario rather than fret over what is too much or too little?

#193

It’s so funny to watch the synthfluencer video barrage that comes with high profile launches now.

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Pre-release Hype Megathread
#194

My feed today:

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#195

The Hainbach video was entirely charming.

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#196

synthfluencer barrage meme aside, they are all very very good at what they do :slightly_smiling_face:

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#197

It’s pretty easy to rag on Make Noise for having a very specific kind of sound that their demos tend to cover (though it is also worth noting their more recent material has been more diverse), so I appreciate having people whose work I am familiar with readily provinding insight into something new. Each of them does very different stuff, so seeing each of them work with it definitely helps make sense of whether and how it might fit in a given workflow.

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#198

All of this marketing, including the week-long build up, at a time when too many are struggling and to a community known for GAS felt kinda icky to me.

I didn’t wanna wet blanket people’s fun while trying to solve it, but I’m more comfortable saying it now.

Maybe I’m looking too hard for an issue (I am fortunate enough not to be one of those struggling financially) - if so, I’m fine being told so.

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#199

Yeah, it occured to me some time ago that basically my youtube feed was almost constant stream of new gear videos/hardware focused with single videos about making music sprinkled here and there (and I got into hardware to make more music - oh the irony) I decided to unfollow almost every channel. It sucks because some of youtubers seem like genuinely nice people (like for example Hainbach and Andrew Huang) but I decided that it was probably better for my problem with GAS to visit synth related channels manually and leave my subscriptions to music releases/music making theory etc. I still follow some of these channels on Instagram but I visit it much less often (like once in a week) so it is no as problematic as with youtube for me.

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#200

There’s an app I like called Kawara which I’ve been using recently to deal with this. You can input a link and tell it how often you want to see it (e.g. you don’t need Hainbach’s videos on your feed but maybe you want to check in a few times a year; an instagram channel you want to see once a week etc). iOS only. There’s a website I came across that does something similar. It’s an interesting approach to dealing with not only GAS/marketing related internet sites, but interacting with the internet/social media in general.

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#201

I know that feeling very well. I stopped watching TV and listening to the radio completely a few years ago because I desperately wanted out of the onslaught of ads and constant money-grubbing, only to realize that I’m now actively exposing myself to an army of Youtube channels and personae instead that get paid for trying to sell me stuff too. Maybe I’ve been ignoring it before, but I still feel like all of that marketing stuff is a recent development for many of these channels and just slowly and subtly crept into my feed. Look at Hainbach. His videos used to be these charming explorations of tape recording techniques and other quirky niche-stuff, but nowadays most of them feel like amorphous, 30-minute blobs of name-dropping and product placement. The actual content and all of what used to attract me to his channel and others is lost along the way. Maybe unfollowing them all is the healthiest alternative.

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#202

They’re not trying to make you feel bad or capitalize on you misfortune. They’re a tiny company that designs and sells tools. Like everyone else, they’re trying to do the best they can under the same trying circumstances we’re all facing. There’s an optimistic aspect to it, too.

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#203

I don’t knock them for developing and selling their product, but gimmicky marketing at this moment feels a bit tone deaf to me.

Again, acknowledging that I could be off base. Just expressing how this felt to me.

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#204

FWIW I can sympathise with both opinions here.

It’s a shame the synthfluencer (hadn’t heard that unitl yesterday - lol) crowd are so tied to product launches etc. They clearly all have so much to share on technique and process, but are clearly tied in to so much product stuff. It does feel too much sometimes. I peek at it occasionally…

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#205

“gimmicky marketing” is redundant. Let’s not exaggerate, though, this is a very very small pond. Make Noise is not engaged in a tone deaf commercial play that detracts from a “war effort”, they’re just seeking some community joy in the launch of a product they’ve put months of work into that will sell in the hundreds of units.

I think what you’re really feeling is an appreciation that what happens around here—however humanistic, however commercial—is, from one perspective, inessential in the face of public crisis. You may just not be in the mood for all this right now, in which case, detach for a while. That’s perfectly fine.

But that is not the only perspective.

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#206

Trying to figure out what they might design has been a genuine pleasure for me over the past week. A silly riddle to solve. It’s stupid, but it was helpful for me to add some levity to what is otherwise a really monotonous day to day with a lot of difficult news to make sense of. I appreciate acknowledging that it feels like business as usual in an unusual time, but it felt to me like they put extra work into the reveal for levity. (Formally acknowledging that I don’t expect this can or should be everyone’s experience, just my little slice.)

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#207

If we accept these videos at face value - these are advertisements - it remains up to us how we are going to engage with that.

The synthfluencers have partnerships with manufacturers to get gear for their videos at launch. We know these aren’t “reviews”, it’s just ad time. They get shiny new gear to drive up views, the manufacturers get great ad space.

The real cost I see are channels like Loopop, who used to put out engaging and interesting material and now is basically ads all of the time. Loopop, Red Means Recording, and many others… are for the most part lost to ads.

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