How did you get here?

[mouseflies]

I was looking for something like the FORTH system we used in Allen Strange’s Electronic Music class at SJSU and stumbled on the Teletype, which lead me here. So much information and inspiration on this forum!

[Mangrove]

This + Mannequins gear.

[sademik]

im also from minneapolis! used to live in the loring park neighborhood right next to downtown. went to IPR!

[sandettie]

A friend and I began tinkering with synthesis, hardware, code, Max, the lot of it, in 2016. At some point, he linked to something here, and I stayed. Notwithstanding my utter innocence of anything Monome, this place feels much more like internet-experimental-musics home to me than, say, other places on the web.

[RABID]

“you may ask yourself,…………”
letting the days go by, let the water hold me down…”
(sorry, got the song stuck in my head now from the thread title )

I am the ultimate fly-on-the-wall!
let’s see… hard to explain… in ’98 or so, met Ezra at Oberlin(that’s another story… with Peter Blasser, Stefan Tcherepnin, and some others… actually, funny side-blurb- Stefan, one year, lived in a house where Chelsea Clinton’s boyfriend-at-the-time stayed, he said the secret-service made things pretty awkward for everyone there every time she visited)…
then in 2002, Brian and I lived in the same dorm-flat first year of grad at CalArts so i met him there, and Ezra also started there at the same time: i remember one of the first days, had to go to the music-school office for registration of some kind, saw Ezra there and i introduced the two to each other …but they would’ve met without me, no matter what i just like to falsely take that credit we all took many classes together and played many games of John Zorn’s Cobra(one time even with visiting-artist-in-residence William Winant)…
me and Brian, in fact, attended one of the very first meeting/rehearsals of Ezra’s band from back then, “The Mae Shi”(still got a lyric stuck in my head from that night: “The Machiiiiine, It Cries For Its Mother!!”)
also around then, i saw the first prototype of Brian’s grid(a cigar box with 8-buttons in a row and leds located near them…), and then i met Daedelus when he came to that same flat to pick up his first 256, and around same time, saw Brian performing with his own grid and started to realize: the leds would go under the buttons! and that it would remain open-ended!… so around the beginning I bought a 40h kit, then got obsessed with grids for awhile: spread my nonsensical and wordy ramblings all over the old monome forums til everyone was nicely traumatized… along the way, helped a few there with max patches(i did some contract for cycling74 which gave me an upper-hand in Max starting around Max5 and that got me even more obsessed with monomes…), eventually as i was growing old and tired, thought i’d step back for a bit, but then Rodrigo came along and pulled me right back in asking me to dev karma~, and long story made not-short-enough-at-this-point:
no matter how often i fall out of existence, i keep coming back to check out what Ezra, Brian, Rodrigo, Glia, Edison, and all you other crazy creatives here do… and i can honestly say this has been the best full-circle fly-on-the-wall flight of my life!

[edison]

yes! those were the days sam! really felt like i was into something amazing. getting to go to school and geek out with awesome folks over what was blowing my mind… (i hope that serge is still at city college)

i found monome through tehn’s videos.
mlr literally kept me up at night for a while.
live sample cutting!
was just so different than anything going on.
2007 i was a starving artist in the bay area, (think i made less than $9,000 that year) living in the bay.
i sold some gear for a 40h kit, having never soldered before. and just motivated myself to make it happen.
was a steep learning curve, but those were hands down the most creative times i’ve ever had.
then just digging into the forum…
this space has always been friendly, smart, cordial and supportive like nowhere online ever.
getting to meet and play with so many folks from here was incredible…
still in contact now!

vimeo videos
beta testing mlr mods
flying out to play princeton…
so many good things
hell, monome videos got me hired at my career as an audio engineer…
monome is life bruh.

edit: RAJJJJJJAAAAAAA!!!

[Whinger]

I went to CalArts as well, but was in a different school. Always regretted not spending more time looking into what the school of music was doing. I had no idea how interesting it was at the time, all I remembered was the students hanging out in the hallway, with a gourd that had a long handle with piano wire, and they’d play it with a stone. Didn’t understand that they had anything to do with electronic music, nor did I know that they had a Serge there (or that it started there). But I was lost in my own world at the time. Kills me now, but I think that’s sort of the thing with art school, you never really understand what you have, or how amazing it is at the time.

[RABID]

ha, funny, feel like i saw that gourd-thing before… ya, best part of CalArts, though, were the art-openings(i can’t believe there’s a school that pays for the whole school to have several kegs and full reign over the campus to throw some wild art-gallery-based party every Thursday ), i think all the music-students looked forward to meeting the folks from other schools at those, too… if i recall correctly, brian switched out from regular music to ‘InterMedia’ just so he could collaborate and learn from folks in other schools… i’m sure we all enjoyed the same general mindset, CalArts provided such an amazing mix

[wave.terrains]

I lurked around for many years as I contemplated first grids and then other aspects of the monome ecosystem. While I still haven’t jumped into the monome ecosystem, I’ve appreciated the thoughtfulness and depth of conversation that occur across a range of topics and generally find the style here better suited to longer form discussion and exploration of ideas.

[fourhoarder]

someone must have low key mentioned this was here on that other site, but I think what introduced a lot of this to me was @mlogger instagram videos. I just had to figure out the little text grid in the silver box. it seemed so far away from everything I had ever done with sound.

[Whinger]

I was in the art department, but was in design. So we never threw any of the cool parties, we’d just make the posters for them. We had a typeface design class at 9am Friday morning that the teacher chose specifically because of Thursday nights. He did it to weed out the casuals. Ha.

Wish I’d collaborated more.

[n_ev]

oooh

11 years ago…

I had an old and ugly dying windows computer + max and was searching the web trying to find an instrument that will fit my needs.

even had the grid+aleph combo and still regret selling both things years ago.

met some folks through the old forum. im so so grateful to this community for my friendship with @glia

the inspiration I get from monome is probs one of the main reasons I still make sounds with computers… defs need to buy the arc/grid/norns combo and maybe port some of my max tools.

[anxietymachine]

i’m pretty new to the forum, but this place has been a huge relief to me since i started reading it at the start of the pandemic. i stumbled on the sp/roland sampler thread last year while reading up on the 303/404 late one night. then i stumbled on the tiny corner thread while exhaustively searching for inspiration. then i stumbled on the old monome posts trying to figure out what “mlr” was. i just kept checking, and eventually read the whole norns pre-release thread over a few days, trying to figure out what all of this was. with everything slowed down & stopped for last year or so, it’s been great to learn so much and find so much knowledge & inspiration here.

this is significantly gushier than i expected the answer to this question to be. thanks y’all.

[Mangrove]

Sometimes I feel like I am only going to meet people from CalArts and Mills for the rest of my life. I am ok with that. Mills Alum myself.

[Jet]

Nine years ago I started participating in a weekly thing called the Disquiet Junto. I have no memory of how I found out about that.

About 4 1/2 years ago Marc emailed the Disquiet Junto participants to say he was moving the discussion to some online forum called lines instead of the Soundcloud groups. Next time I joined in a Disquiet Junto I created an account here and got involved.

I own no hardware instruments and don’t do any coding. While there’s a lot I enjoy here there’s obviously plenty that I feel has no relevance. So in the last couple of years I’ve increasingly spent time in the Disquiet Slack ahead of posting here.

[Pineyb]

Landed here after a random 3 Sisters impulse buy at Control in Brooklyn. I’ve been involved with modular since the 70s, but only about 5 years with Euro stuff.

I’m really happy to have found this sunny glade in the howling wilderness of the webs.

[ryanruppe]

Saw Daedelus play a tiny hole in the wall show in San Luis Obispo in 2004 and he used this wild-looking wooden box with tiny light up buttons and “monome” handwritten on it in pencil. It was such a tiny place and crowd that he explained how his whole setup worked after the show because we kept asking.

From there I kept up on what was happening with Monome every few years but never did anything with making music until in 2019 I finally was in a place with enough disposable income that I bought myself a PO-20, and was slowly infected with a specific strain of tiny GAS. I had heard about the norns through Beaunoise’s Norns Tape and I was super intrigued by the idea of it, and just around this time last year I finally decided to pull the trigger after lurking for a while.

[rknLA]

Similar story for me. I was a freshman at UCSC in 2004/2005, and Daedelus played at the Vet’s Hall. I went with some friends. He was late (car trouble maybe?), we were intoxicated and impatient. The show was small, and I don’t think there was a stage - just a table at the front of the room. My friends and I had been slowly moving from indie rock music interests towards electronic, and we were all kind of stunned by the makeshift light brite instrument that Daedelus used to play. We talked to him a bit after the show, he said it was hand built by a friend in LA, and maybe they would make a version to sell soon.

Fast forward a few months or a year, and I was in an intro to programming class, and someone in the row in front of me was browsing Engadget on her laptop during class completely in my line of sight. One of the things she scrolled by was a photo of the 40h. I forget if we talked about what she was looking at after class (we became friends for a while), but that was enough of a lead for me to find my way over to monome.org, and then eventually figure out how to find enough money to buy one.

The forum and community was essential for getting set up and figuring out how to use the thing to make sound. I stuck around for a few years, then drifted away for a few years around 2011/2012, and came back sometime after the transformation into lines.

[danbond]

I’m a guitarist/pedal guy, but I bought the Volca Sample as a fun bo to make music with on my commute to work. This led me to looking at other groove boxes and eventually seeing a Monome Norns on probably Matt Lowrys page. I’m still a pedal guy but more tabletop than full-band.

Like 1 year later and I just bought a Norns - I think the fascination with Norns has been slowly growing in me for ages as I tried to work out what it was actually doing, but I didn’t think it would be the device I’d actually buy.

Now I’m hooked

[Quru]

I think I was googling something about Mannequins modules, and stumbled upon this forum. I read a bit and found it refreshing that there was a place where people were discussing about electronic music gear and especially modular without the elsewhere pretty prominent under(or over)tone of “why is it so expensive (waiting for the Behringer clone!)” or complaining about pretentiousness and pointless bleepbloops when anything is even a bit different from the norm (a bit overexaggeration to be fair). And besides gear people were talking about interesting music, social constructs and everything under the sun without being followed by childish comments about corksniffing. I’ve found so much interesting and inspiring discussion about music, creativity and it’s process here it’s been very influential in my music making even though it’s only been a short while here.