About five minutes ago there were two options in my life:
A) My studio is haunted
B) The weirdest bug just materialized (spoiler: turned out to be B)
Setup: some synths, Strymon trinity, DT, AR, Boss Rc 505 loopstation.
Here’s how it went down:
I punch in a sequence on the DT, let the Minitaur play it and record it to the looper. I opt to change the sequence and delete the track, which should make the loop stop immediately, since the looper is my MIDI master. Well, it didn’t. Those were my next increasingly desperate measures:
turn down the master volume of the looper (that made it go away as long as it was turned to 0) - came back when I turned it up
triple hit stop on the DT (next in the midi chain and my sequencer)
turn off the DT
turn down Minitaur’s volume
turn off the Minitaur
turn off all other synths
turn off the AR (yeah, I know…)
Restart the looper twice - still there every time it came on (how?!?)
back up the looper and factory-reset it twice - the Minitaur melody is STILL there!
get ready to report the weirdest bug somewhere related
turn down the instrument master volume on the looper - the melody went dead
unplug the instrument input jacks - the melody is gone?
turn it back up - add reverb on the BigSky. The melody has a reverb now
add delay - same.
hold “Tap” on the TimeLine delay and tap it again - the melody stops for good!
Solution: Somehow some machine must have sent a MIDI message to the delay, initializing its loop function that happened to be exactly as long as the Minitaur’s sequence. I have set all my machines to not send anything like that and it has never happened before.
I was once setting up for a gig: my pedalboard (15+ pedals) was tested and ready and I was getting ready to go on stage.
There was a horrible, intermittent buzzing noise when I tapped a particular pedal and I panicked. It wouldn’t go away so I ended up unpicking a good chunk of the board. It still wouldn’t go away!
After a lot of futzing around and working through each cable, it turned out that it was ONE of the XLR cables that the sound guy had used between the outs on my board and the DI box. Massive facepalms all around.
off topic anyone using Patchbase with this or any other modules? amazing software i recommend whole heartedly to access the immense power inside 80s machines, the digital filters on the D110 are beauts. https://coffeeshopped.com/patch-base
The time that my band drove for a few hours for a gig in a town we’d never played in before at the invitation of an old drummer friend, set up all the amps and mics at load-in, only to discover that my Electribe ESX (which of course worked perfectly at rehearsals) didn’t like having its US 110v power supply run alongside the other gear on the tiny stage in a not-quite pro-level venue, so shut down conclusively and made not a sound.
Unfortunately, said ESX was supposed to provide the percussion… thankfully, our friend is a terrific drummer and was headlining too, so stepped in, to the greater benefit of all.
The longer-term solution to the ESX problem was getting a 240v PSU, and then later our guitarist brought along his Machinedrum to provide blastbeats and more (the first time I encountered an Elektron device); then ultimately another friend learned to play drums, and things got even more fun.
I was the effects DJ to the real DJ doing live remixes for a friend’s wedding reception. We fully tested this setup many times during rehearsal.
We get to the reception hall, plug everything in, and BLINK… half the room goes dark along with our equipment.
Turns out the power requirement for our gear was tripping the circuit breaker. The manager had to break out this huge wooden box that drew appliance level power from the back where the hot boxes were plugged in. Saved the day. If he didn’t have that breakout box there would have been no music.
OH! When I was high school I was a drummer in a really terrible punk/metal band. Our friend got us a gig in Indiana (where his family was from) so we packed up the van and drove from Michigan all the way out there.
We got to the venue only to be told we had not been booked. Our friend swore up and down that he booked the gig, and I believed him. Pretty sure the owner just found a better band.
At least we had a place to stay with his family graciously letting us couch surf for the night.
I was trying to debug what I thought was a bad port on my patch bay. It quickly got worse as each port stopped working when I tested it. After an hour I realized the cable I was using to test the ports wasn’t plugged into anything on the other end
So I’ve got an earth hum from my MDs main LR out. Tried balanced and non balanced cables, eliminated all patchbay crosstalk by going straight into desk, still there.
And the biggest headphook is that from the headphone out there is no hum.
And I’m 99% sure previous configs I’ve had clean signal using balanced trs through the patchbay.
What’s occurring here……!?
What additional actions could be taken to identify?
I was DJing at a friends wedding and had to bring all the equipment including an improvised PA from old hifi equipment to this little location 100km away from my home. When we were nearly finished installing everything I realized that I left my firewire cable at home (because I made a backup of my harddrive before I left) and therefore could not connect my external soundcard. So i had to play without Cue-Out and had the main sound coming out of the headphones jack.
Once I prepared a set which incorporated TouchOSC on an Android phone to control stuff on a Macbook. Worked fine on the home WiFi, but once I got at the venue I couldn’t get the Android to recognize the ad hoc network from the laptop. Turns out I could have just asked for the venue’s WiFi password, but the thought didn’t occur to me. Bunch of neat automation tricks out the window for that one.
Another time, I had a tape loop in a stereo walkman which I used for live looping and transition between tracks. I forgot to bring backup tapes and of course the one I had with me broke during soundcheck. I managed to play nonetheless, but the transitions were rough.
Reaper kept randomly start to record in the background (one time for an hour or so @.@ ) until I realised that I had something placed on the midi keyboard (that is in front of my monitor behind my typing keyboard), which was sometimes rocking and pressing on the record button of the midi keyboard (a Button I never pressed …)
Yesterday my Seqtrak made a continuous rattling noise after switching on. I spent at least 10 minutes looking for the cause. Then I did a factory reset, during which I lost a promising song idea, only to realize afterwards that this f*cking MIDI adapter was plugged into the audio input
Years ago (mid 2000s) my old band played a show with Phil Hartnoll (he was doing a DJ tour). After our set we quickly shifted all our gear but it seems that some liquids ended up getting into an old MC505. We had another gig the next night and it was 90mins of program change roulette.
