I love working with Samples - its great fun. BUT - I HATE organising samples. Cataloguing them, collecting them, loading them. UGH. My Ideal workflow is to have one item that makes some cool noises, that I can sample into a Digitakt and then make music/sequence with.
What I’d like is a box I can plug into my (sampler) and create sounds / loops / oneshots from an endlessly broad palette on the fly, and sample as I go. So the question is - what’s that box. For those who are familiar with Mr. Bills’ mud pie concept - that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about (I have no desire to make music like Mr Bill)
What that follows is a deliberately grumpy, cynical and slightly troll-ish breakdown of the options I can have considered, and why they aren’t the one. Please convince me I’m wrong about one of these, or tell me what I’ve missed.
Octatrack - Requires samples, not enough random generation. I’m lazy and would prefer to ‘curate than create’ Modular Synth - Not going down that rabbit hole - probably the answer I want but not the one I can afford Loop libraries - cheating, sucks the fun out of making music Digitone/Digitakt/Elektron - not enough effects to go really nuts with it Polyend Tracker - might be fun for making weird loops but again, not enough effects (no I’m not counting those effects you need to render, they’re a PITA) DFAM - Is this the one? Maybe… Can you get it in time with anything? How varied is it? VCV/Ableton/Bitwig - Mice can do one as far as I’m concerned Pulsar - Yeah cool but I’m not made of money Lyra - If I wanted to make noise jams I’d get my vacuum out, KMFDM style Deluge - It does everything, except sound good Field Recorder - that involved going outside, and I live in the countryside so there’s only so many cows I can sample Tastybits - Granular is cool for a bit - but essentially it all ends up the same . Plus you still need to put samples into it norns - who wants to learn code? puredata/etc - see above (ps I’m a developer some of the time)
note - I am being deliberately difficult for fun (It seems we need to be clear about intention at the moment) but I would genuinely like to find some cool sound source, doesn’t need to have a sequencer, and prefer organic / distorted sounds and short envelopes and broad sonic possibilities for creating samples.
There’s fun amongst the grumpy, I hear it.
So, how about 1010music’s Lemon Drop? Drop samples in to varied and interesting effect, performable and modulateable, couple of good fx, can effect live inputs if you wanna get fancy.
its a very good should actually, but still touchscreens are kind of uninspiring. There is some cools tuff out there though, fractal bits popping straight into my head.
Also quietly mumbling (as I recognise it’s not for all) but curate the heck out of one compactflash for an Octatrack once and rejoice. Only good shit, no hoarding, just lots of stuff that revs yr engine.
The problem you’ve got here is the phrase “endlessly broad palette” which makes things tricky. I appreciate thy you don’t like software/mouse/keyboard but you won’t get better value for money or flexibility.
There are very powerful soft synths, both modular and more fixed architecture, for free or very cheap. You can just set your sampler (or DAW) to record and then just noodle and design sounds then chop out the bits you like.
In terms of hardware, maybe a semi modular desktop synth? Plenty of experimentation and options if it has enough patch points. Doesn’t necessarily need to be hugely expensive.
I switched from dawless to it, more or less - and sample into it…
And I love to draw single cycle waveforms with it and build my own renoise instruments with it.
The digital filter, vowel filter in sample mod,… lets just say the stock fx are top notch!
It’s so flexible, hard to beat imho. I couldn’t connect to ableton, flstudio or bitwig the same way, and I used all of them quite a time.
Price for what you get is seriously unmatched!
Oh, and never underestimate an Octatrack. That’s heresy!
Renoise is a full blown modular synth - you can get some crazy stuff out of it. It’s kind of why I bounced off the tracker… its hard to look back. I stopped using it because I was making music with a vocalist and its no good for tracks with long-playing instrumentation.
I think an iPad is definitely the best answer for the brief of “an endlessly broad palette on the fly”. Just leave it hooked up and hop between a huge selection of inventive and inexpensive sound sources. Pull up Youtube, try an internet radio station, and then dig into apps that fit your preferences like a glove - Fractal Bits, auGEN X, SKIIID - as well as a wealth of original and emualted synths and effects.
A DFAM is a good call, for sure, and that’ll hit spots of grimy analog chaos an iPad can’t match. But for sheer scope, and the specific task of finding a ‘connect and forget’ sampling source, I don’t see it being beaten. If you don’t really like touchscreens, I predict you’ll get over that pretty quickly.
Wee wild card: I love to generate samples by letting the Volca Drum generate random ‘layers’ - basically two oscillators, (sine, saw, noise IIRC), their envelopes etc completely randomised. Super easy, ‘Func’ plus a step key - ‘Love that one’, ‘Nah…next’, ‘YES’ etc etc. Reliably batshit, often lovely.
