Aleph Bees

The next Elektron will be something like this, I hope. Hardware controlled digital modular synthesis. Hopefully with user created modules and such. The options!

Looks pretty cool, although the sound in the demo isn’t particularly interesting. :slight_smile:

It’s got a nice look to it but everything else is horrible IMO! Not heard one decent audio demo and editing looks torturous. Heaps of potential though.

Yes, I’d rather poke my eyes out with rusty nails whilst wall papering my hallway through the door mail box opening. Which gives you a fair idea of how inspiring I have found the whole User Interface thus far.
Just looking at some of the demo’s I’ve wondered what sort of a masochist would endure that ?

I agree, the user interface doesn’t look very promising so far - but the potential of this idea is pretty great, which is exciting. I’m not buying it, but hopefully it will inspire other companies (Elektron, for instance) to create something similar with a better user interface. :slight_smile:

A classy masochist (given the price tag). :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

it’s like an OP-1 made by LISP fanatics

I agree 100%.
Looks very interesting. But good grief, all that menu diving through cryptic readout data.
Seems like a device for people that like to program more than they like to make music (which is fine …they need toys too).
They have a long long way to go before I would even consider paying $1400 for one.

HA HA! @void totally!

So I ordered one and they have been pushed back by the horrors of winter.

Bee has no GUI yet.

The audio to CV conversion that they are working on sounds interesting - eg. play a violin into it and extract like 5 different CV signals out of it. Ezra Buchla plays it with viola plugged into the input.

I’d have to see and hear more demos of Buchla’s rig though.

hi!

it’s true, menus suck. what you gonna do.
i recently wrapped up the JSON schema for bees patches. so you can now edit them as text pretty easily (my new preferred method), or script their generation. ( https://github.com/tehn/aleph/blob/dev/utils/beekeep/bees_schema.json )

one of our associates is working on a pretty cross-plaftform visual editor in chrome. you could also easily convert between max patcher JSON and bees JSON (except max is not good at representing the preset layer.)

nevertheless, one needs to be able to edit the patch from the device itself. so, menus. actually i think the onboard editor is fine to use once you get used to it - we put a lot of thought into it. will continue to tweak and add shortcuts, etc. it is also open source, of course, and not the only thing to run on the device.-e.g. another direction for future work is to add aleph projects that just run a scripting language interpreter (lua, scheme, FORTH), wrapped around the hardware stuff and DSP parameters. so instead of making a BEES patch you just write a little script and run it from the sdcard (or over a terminal, for development.)

also thinking about adding some keyboard support to the bees editor, since aleph already has a HID driver. i dunno.

as for my “rig” - it is pretty boring! i have a viola, microphone, and aleph. sometimes a distortion circuit and/or this guy: http://flowerelectronics.com/Standard.html ,
i take the subway to my shows so it’s gotta be small…

i’m more interested in performing (about twice / month, mostly in LA) than in making demo videos, which i’m just not good at. and honestly, my taste in sounds is kind of weird probably. if you do want them, there is my discography. ( http://catfact.net ) and soundcloud ( http://soundcloud.com/555e ). i don’t think its too interesting to list gear, since the list is always the same - viola, mic, custom software, and analog distorion.

thanks!
-ezra b

i thought i liked one knob per function interfaces until i actually used one with a lot of parameters! :astonished: it’s potentially slow to find what you’re looking for and kind of overwhelming. i mean, i’m faster with the analog4 than the equivalent number of modules, with modules getting lost is part of the fun though and for instance, i way prefer the analog4 interface to the polyevolver.

i thought elektron fans would be more into that style. i dunno what you’d call it multi-modal?

when i’m in the zone i’m not even thinking visually, so yeah it doesn’t currently look “friendly” or illuminating, but assuming you can get over the learning hump, it could be potentially nice. sometimes initially friendly interfaces become stifling as you want to do your own thing, but can’t.

i mean, i messed with a op-1 recently and it doesn’t have a ton of knobs and visually some of the modes don’t give any “real” feedback and make no sense, but it doesn’t matter because it’s fun to use.

not used bees, but the big issue that makes it look unfun to me is it appears largely one handed. ime all fun and immersive interfaces mostly use both. even if you could only assign some of the buttons to play a note or trigger a sequence it’d give you something to do.

some of the shortcuts looked neat though and i like the mod matrix all in one place so that you can patch and try new connections quickly and freely. i think once you build up some nice patches to explore inter connecting in different ways it could be a good system.

although the knob to change the module and the knob to change the value seem close together maybe too close, so i’m not sure you could use both at once comfortably. maybe like hold a button + knob = move, knob only changes values. maybe holding another button and turning the knob is like page up/down and with a different button the knob jumps over the similarly named parameters. lol i don’t know why i’m thinking about this. :dizzy_face:

anyway, add lots of button + knob shortcuts, make like a honeycomb haha to visualize module interconnections and i bet it’d be fun. :joy:

cool thing though is that it’s open source, so while i’m not in the market for anything from anyone now, in a year, yeah, i’ll keep an eye on it. with the RAM you should be able to make cool delays and sample manipulators. with the CV in and out you should be able to whip up an infinite amount of useful utilities and not spend time looking at it while using it.

ha wow! ok, i guess we’re really bad at explaining things. the menu system is “edit mode,” where you are editing the patch. the patch includes how stuff is mapped from keys / knobs / midi / monome / CV, to DSP parameters. and those mappings can be really complex, modal, using layers of data, triggering sequences, recalling other routings and presets, etc etc.

but in play mode, which is the first behavior after bootup, nothing you do with knobs and keys has any effect on the patch except what you’ve explicitly designated. and all of them are available for designation. you get all that scrolling data in the play mode, by default. which is not very sexy, it’s true, so we’re gradually adding graphics elements that you can arbitrarily create and assign in the patch. (personally, i don’t care much, i don’t like to stare at the screen either. we made a “big number” object and that does it for me.)

anyways, i agree that the edit mode a bit like editing a max patch from a MIDI controller, but it works! ha

but no, edit mode during performance isn’t the intended use case.

this is one of those things that we really need to improve about documentiotn i think. there’s not a lot of sense of the actual playing experience (except maybe brian’s wurlitzer vid, and the very first video.) not great!

of course i think more sophisticated applications will happen as 1) more of the units roll out and 2) we make better tools and better docs, and 3) we can take some breaks from programming (someday…) will be rolling out more videos as we make stuff that is more fun to look at.

anyways, sorry for stepping in the forum so verbosely! i have lurked on it for a while. elektron is no doubt making the most awesome dedicated music hardware out there right now, and i’m a big fan.

thanks for the feedback jonah

and i like “op-1 for LISP fanatics” a lot btw

Hi! Thanks for popping in!

BTW, some of us have weird tastes in sounds ourselves. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Aleph or not, this track rules. JMO of course: