SyNRG unit back with the SyNRG unit

i'm back, whats pop, whats hot, started from the top now we what
synrg hp go naught, his vote value 💩 block
dey beat his mind dey assaulted'z it
the societal constructs upun him
they must be brought
he rattles and bangs his drum way into the night
it's all hes ever got his last fight hold tight
don't go gently into the dying light

edit:

I didn't even bother to listen to the audio(with headphones) before editing and posting the video. On my speakers it sounded "okay" enough to post but now after doing all that and writing the post with headphones i realize how bad the sound is hehe. I will not be recording audio straight into the camera again because it came out horribly unbalanced and lacking oomph. I will re-record but if you are just listening on your laptop it should be fine.

so wassap this is a little jam i made on some of my music machines, bassfunke. what you are seeing here is an elektron analog heat+fx processing the signal coming out of elektron syntakt which has audio coming from elektron model:cycles. The model:cycles is basically like a 'preschool' version of the syntakt both machines doing fm synthesis. The fist elektron machine i owned was the model:cycles and it definitely has some boom potential which is explored a little bit here. It's funny because as they are both FM machines it would have probably made more sense to get something more sample based that could use real world, recorded sounds for something more organic but when i was hearing jams on the sytakt i was like the thing sounds so amazing and i am ready for a model:cycles upgrade so here we are. It's a bit overkill because both machines feature a lot of the same/similar sound engines resulting in sometimes u can create things on the cycles that you could create on the more expensive syntakt without spending the extra money. But doubling up nonetheless has been quite interesting. I still haven't even mastered the model:cycles let alone the syntakt but i am also happy for persevering this far. When a new piece of music gear is released people say don't buy them new, wait several months and there will be plenty on the used market by people that bought them, used them, realized there was more to the thing and decided to pass the buck to someone else. For sure there is a lot of frustration especially at the beggining with rhythms/melodies/beats feeling stale, robotic, repetitive and of course that isn't the goal of a lot of music. I often had times listening to other music where i thought... how on earth did they come up with that!?! And it may have been absolute genius, thinking of how to perfectly sequence that beat, and then executing, but more often than not. Those random strokes of genius are just simply, happy accidents that happened. And then people figured out those happy accidents and made them their own. Playing around and just really... putting in the time as they say. It's not going to happen overnight.

The tempo is 118.5 and while i have an audio recorder, this jam was directly recorded from the headphone out of the analog heat running into the mic-in of my camera. While the audio is 'ok' i think i will record more with the audio recorder and see if any of the clarity or something is lacking, but for now i think the audio is okay as far as i can tell. But also, not sure, hard to say but i feel like something may be missing. Also other jams i didn't record were even probably more amazing hehe.

During the video my camera lens which has a 'lovely feature' known as zoom creep and this occurs throughout the video, causing the frame to become more and more cropped as the lens slowly zoomed itself in. The slight forward tilt of the camera and the bass was slowly causing my lens and the resultning optics to jiggle enough so towards the end it's hard to see what i am doing but hey maybe i'll try a different lens next time too.

Creating music is incredibly complex. On one hand you could sing one note and literally call that a song. But on the other, creating something involving, complex or simple for the listener, with harmonies, something that goes somewhere and takes the listener for a journey. Maintaining unity while also having a sense of variety. Rhythm alone is a topic that can take a lifetime to master. And then you always have those nagging thoughts of maybe i am just not any good at this. But of course as with all things perseverance brings about the fruits of your labour.

I was interested in taking some lessons from a producer a while back(still am-have to actually) but i remember asking him in the initial chat we had... how do you create... the 'wubs'... and he laughed... and said... anyone can create the wubs... it's about... controlling the wubs, and making them do, what you want them to! I thought that was pretty funny and profound and true, anyone can take a low end bass noise but without any sort of rhythmic and maybe melodic context, it will not have the same gravitas as when that same sound is preceded or followed by another noise and you have that repetition. But you have to know how it all comes together within the rhythm to as well as use harmony/melodies create the desired effect.

When i told him how long i had been fiddling around with all this stuff... it's been like years, it's actually a long time. He was surprised that long. So i think if i were to be a bit critical it's like my output has been very low. I heard someone else say, if you are not finishing tracks, you aren't getting good at...finishing tracks. So i think one has to also think about moving out of the whole fiddling stage into actually producing finished pieces of work and learning how to arrange and and compose pieces is a whole process that doesn't happen without it's own practise and putting in the time. My mentor so to speak was like... whatever time you basically put into it, will be your reward. And i thought that that was also true, it's been like, just a heck of a lot of dabbling for me. And I had the realization back a while ago if you are not eating,sleeping,breathing music 24/7 there are 50000+ other people out there right this second that are and good luck competing against that. Not to say one should sell ones soul or whatever to get success, i just mean that dabbling around only gets you so far and you must go through the process of putting together larger works in the hopes of one day having something special you know you worked hard on and can package into something meaningful for others to digest.

I love listening to music so much but there comes a point for a lot of people where listening to other peoples music just doesn't quite cut it any more. I mean it's cool of course but the yearning to listen and share something that you have spent hours/days/months etc perfecting, honing, working on. Your craft of course. Of course there are always false first impressions like creating electronic music is so easy anyone can do it, but to actually sit down and create something tangible that resonates with people takes time and effort. For some perhaps the journey is easier, having more musical backgrounds. Sometimes I will read bios on some of my favourite artists and see they have musical backgrounds, their parent being a composer/musician etc. and it's easy again to get caught up in comparisons or ideas that i don't have what it takes sort of thing. but of course everyone has their own journey and comparison is the thief of joy.

in the meantime getting to know these devices is a fun process, if challenging at times. i remember shortly after getting the model:cycles thinking of why exactly they called it 'programming' a drum sequence into the synthesizer/groovebox: you are indeed actually programming things, note by note, step by step. If of course, that is the way you want to roll. And it's a lot of fun to experiment with this, it's where a lot of the magic happens. There is of course live record functionality and you can mix both methods, step sequence some manually and play in other notes. The model:cycles has 6 tracks that you can work with. And while i jokingly called it a preschool version of the syntakt, it is quite powerful in it's own right and honestly is a BEAST but then as well you have the Syntakt is 12 tracks. Which actually gets to be a lot to handle really and you have to know all your patterns very well and have a system worked out of what is happening on what tracks because the machines offer you a lot of flexibility in terms of how you want your patterns to be set up with whatever sounds you wish happening on each individual track. On both the syktakt and model:cycles it is possible to change individual steps of the sequence to be 'parameter locked' i.e. to change the sound at a particular point in time and you have much control over all the various tracks and devices operating on those tracks with each their own parameters which once again, can be changed at will. And it's this tweaking, making things a little bit less repetitive, making things interesting for the listener. It's really quite cool what you can do on these machines, let alone in software... because a modern computer is a basic god to audio what modern daws can do would have made recording engineers from the seventies faces melt but with that ability to do anything it's almost overwhelming and for a lot of people having a hardware base to fall back on as something to 'ground' yourself in and can always take that to the computer later... and of course i definitely dabble in that as well. Which hasn't been with it's own headaches. While i love these elektron gears it's like they are not perfect, i think the ppl that buy them and own them know it, there's certain quirks ... a lot of learning 'thats not a bug, thats a feature!' i swear i was having bugs when working with my computer and the elektron boxes but i will have to play around more to know. Their support emailed me back cause i was frustrated with some things and i couldn't even get back to them because it's like yes I will try an new project like u said but grrr that was a lot of frustration. Maybe I'm just new to the stuff and was doing something silly but I honestly felt like I was losing my mind the one night with certain sounds just morphing into other ones (wasn't sounding good) and i'm no techno master but u get the idea of what your 16 measure loop sounds like and it's like u play around with one thing and the thing was falling apart on me in front of my eyes. Not the way it should have been.
I heard that old school producers, people making megabucks off of their careers will have like a fifteen year old macintosh g5 and like 4 more exact computers all with backups and old software, plugins etc and they will not for the life of them ever upgrade. And dealing with all the hardware nightmares, i totally understand that, and if they are supposed to be making music/beying payed to do that not mess about with technology and getting things wired up and talking to each other as they should they just wanna turn it on and go. And like I am saying a bit dealing with these weird techno issues that creep up which often take hours trying to remedy/research/troubleshoot etc it's freaking brual sometimes i swear though i'll get it figured out 😌

i finally managed to pick up that new computer i was going on about a while back, and it has indeed been a breath of fresh air in terms of being a 'new computer' faster, more memory etc but there was a ton of hurdles at the start, getting everything set up, things not working the way they should. I said to myself, this new computer as supposed to make everything easy, but instead it just added a layer of complexity onto things which i hadn't anticipated. Thankfully, most of the growing pains are now over and i have settled into a pretty functional system and i still have to make the most of it really. Along with the hardware upgrades i bought ableton live 12 suite. I think it's probably the most expensive software program i've ever bought. Someone else i was talking to called ableton a 'cheat' program because it was so easy to make things that sound good. And i get what he was saying. Ableton Suite comes with gigabytes and gigabytes of 'packs' as they are called, extensions for ableton live with instruments, effects, sounds, loops. melodies, etc. And there's plenty of loops out there, drum, bass, synth, lead, pluck, snare, etc. So u can just like lego blocks your song together without ever having done anything more original than dragged your mouse around dragging other peoples content into 'your' song and calling it a day and people i guess make some sort of livings doing this... maybe maybe not mileage may vary. But beyond all that crap which you can basically do in any daw if you know how to find loops/sample packs(hint:everywhere) ableton live is an actual insane pice of german engineering. At the end of the day it doesn't matter the software it's what you are doing on it.

What also starts to happen when you start incorporating more elements like this hardware/software etc the possibilities of what you can do start to become quite staggering and when browsing certain topics or watching some videos on the topic it starts to sink in that audio engineering is just absolutely that, it's engineering and I'm sure arguments can be had over which engineering is the most complex but let me tell you audio engineering is not a simple thing it is wholly astounding the knowledge base that people have come to grasp with in terms of how audio is propagated, heard, stored, effected, analyzed, reproduced, percieved, etc. This is another topic that could take a lifetime to master, it really just never ends 😆

The pics here are from an insta post i made just half joking about releasing an album and one of my friends was like ALBUM OMG! And i was like album yay yes indeed meanwhile it's like i gotta work up to that. I gotta put in some more flex for that to happen but i also gotta come to a point where it's like i'm gonna do a project and see it through to the end and go with it no matter how 'bad' it might be at some point u just gotta be brave enough and honest enough to share your warez!

anyways not sure what else to ramble on about at the moment big ups to @twicejoy cause the guy kept hollering at me and hollering and i wouldn't even reply for like...weeks but yeah if you liked this post go give him an upvote if you can he brought me back here hehe