jmtd → Jonathan Dowland's Weblog
Below are the five most recent posts in my weblog.
- Behringer Model-D (synths I didn't buy), posted on
- Why hardware synths?, posted on
- Arturia Microfreak, posted on
- Code formatting in documents, posted on
- synths, posted on
You can also see a reverse-chronological list of all posts, dating back to 1999.
Whilst researching what synth to buy, I learned of the Behringer1 Model-D2: a 2018 clone of the 1970 Moog Minimoog, in a desktop form factor.
In common with the original Minimoog, it's a monophonic analogue synth, featuring three audible oscillators3 , Moog's famous 12-ladder filter and a basic envelope generator. The model-d has lost the keyboard from the original and added some patch points for the different stages, enabling some slight re-routing of the audio components.
Since I was focussing on more fundamental, back-to-basics instruments, this was very appealing to me. I'm very curious to find out what's so compelling about the famous Moog sound. The relative lack of features feels like an advantage: less to master. The additional patch points makes it a little more flexible and offer a potential gateway into the world of modular synthesis. The Model-D is also very affordable: about £ 200 GBP. I'll never own a real Moog.
For this to work, I would need to supplement it with some other equipment. I'd need a keyboard (or press the Micron into service as a controller); I would want some way of recording and overdubbing (same as with any synth). There are no post-mix effects on the Model-D, such as delay, reverb or chorus, so I may also want something to add those.
What stopped me was partly the realisation that there was little chance that a perennial beginner, such as I, could eek anything novel out of a synthesiser design that's 54 years old. Perhaps that shouldn't matter, but it gave me pause. Whilst the Model-D has patch points, I don't have anything to connect to them, and I'm firmly wanting to avoid the Modular Synthesis money pit. The lack of effects, and polyphony could make it hard to live-sculpt a tone.
I started characterizing the Model-D as the "heart" choice, but it seemed wise to instead go for a "head" choice.
Maybe another day!
- There's a whole other blog post of material I could write about Behringer and their clones of classic synths, some long out of production, and others, not so much. But, I decided to skip on that for now.↩
- taken from the fact that the Minimoog was a productised version of Moog's fourth internal prototype, the model D.↩
- 2 oscillators is more common in modern synths↩
Russell wrote a great comment on my last post (thanks!):
What benefits do these things offer when a general purpose computer can do so many things nowadays? Is there a USB keyboard that you can connect to a laptop or phone to do these things? I presume that all recent phones have the compute power to do all the synthesis you need if you have the right software. Is it just a lack of software and infrastructure for doing it on laptops/phones that makes synthesisers still viable?
I've decided to turn my response into a post of its own.
The issue is definitely not compute power. You can indeed attach a USB keyboard to a computer and use a plethora of software synthesisers, including very faithful emulations of all the popular classics. The raw compute power of modern hardware synths is comparatively small: I’ve been told the modern Korg digital synths are on a par with a raspberry pi. I’ve seen some DSPs which are 32 bit ARMs, and other tools which are roughly equivalent to arduinos.
I can think of four reasons hardware synths remain popular with some despite the above:
As I touched on in my original synth post, computing dominates my life outside of music already. I really wanted something separate from that to keep mental distance from work.
Synths have hard real-time requirements. They don't have raw power in compute terms, but they absolutely have to do their job within microseconds of being instructed to, with no exceptions. Linux still has a long way to go for hard real-time.
The Linux audio ecosystem is… complex. Dealing with pipewire, pulseaudio, jack, alsa, oss, and anything else I've forgotten, as well as their failure modes, is too time consuming.
The last point is to do with creativity and inspiration. A good synth is more than the sum of its parts: it's an instrument, carefully designed and its components integrated by musically-minded people who have set out to create something to inspire. There are plenty of synths which aren't good instruments, but have loads of features: they’re boxes of "stuff". Good synths can't do it all: they often have limitations which you have to respond to, work around or with, creatively. This was expressed better than I could by Trent Reznor in the video archetype of a synthesiser:
Arturia Microfreak. © CC-BY-SA 4
I nearly did, but ultimately I didn't buy an Arturia Microfreak.
The Microfreak is a small form factor hybrid synth with a distinctive style. It's priced at the low end of the market and it is overflowing with features. It has a weird 2-octave keyboard which is a stylophone-style capacitive strip rather than weighted keys. It seems to have plenty of controls, but given the amount of features it has, much of that functionality is inevitably buried in menus. The important stuff is front and centre, though. The digital oscillators are routed through an analog filter. The Microfreak gained sampler functionality in a firmware update that surprised and delighted its owners.
I watched a load of videos about the Microfreak, but the above review from musician Stimming stuck in my mind because it made a comparison between the Microfreak and Teenage Engineering's OP-1.
I'd been lusting after the OP-1 since it appeared in 2011: a pocket-sized1 music making machine with eleven synthesis engines, a sampler, and less conventional features such as an FM radio, a large colour OLED display, and a four track recorder. That last feature in particular was really appealing to me: I loved the idea of having an all-in-one machine to try and compose music. Even then, I was not keen on involving conventional computers in music making.
Of course in many ways it is a very compromised machine. I never did buy a OP-1, and by now they've replaced it with a new model (the OP-1 field) that costs 50% more (but doesn't seem to do 50% more) I'm still not buying one.
Framing the Microfreak in terms of the OP-1 made the penny drop for me. The Microfreak doesn't have the four-track functionality, but almost no synth has: I'm going to have to look at something external to provide that. But it might capture a similar sense of fun; it's something I could use on the sofa, in the spare room, on the train, during lunchbreaks at work, etc.
On the other hand, I don't want to make the same mistake as with the Micron: too much functionality requiring some experience to understand what you want so you can go and find it in the menus. I also didn't get a chance to audition the unusual keyboard: there's only one music store carrying synths left in Newcastle and they didn't have one.
So I didn't buy the Microfreak. Maybe one day in the future once I'm further down the road. Instead, I started to concentrate my search on more fundamental, back-to-basics instruments…
- Big pockets, mind↩
I've been exploring typesetting and formatting code within text documents such as papers, or my thesis. Up until now, I've been using the listings package without thinking much about it. By default, some sample Haskell code processed by listings looks like this (click any of the images to see larger, non-blurry versions):
It's formatted with a monospaced font, with some keywords highlighted, but not syntactic symbols.
There are several other options for typesetting and formatting code in LaTeX documents. For Haskell in particular, there is the preprocessor lhs2tex, The default output of which looks like this:
A proportional font, but it's taken pains to preserve vertical alignment, which
is syntactically significant for Haskell. It looks a little cluttered to me,
and I'm not a fan of nearly everything being italic. Again, symbols aren't
differentiated, but it has substituted them for more typographically
pleasing alternatives: ->
has become →
, and \
is now λ
.
Another option is perhaps the newest, the LaTeX package minted, which
leverages the Python Pygments program. Here's the same code again. It
defaults to monospace (the choice of font seems a lot clearer to me than the
default for listings
), no symbolic substitution, and liberal use of colour:
An informal survey of the samples so far showed that the minted output was the most popular.
All of these packages can be configured to varying degrees. Here are some examples of what I've achieved with a bit of tweaking
All of this has got me wondering whether there are straightforward empirical answers to some of these questions of style.
Firstly, I'm pretty convinced that symbolic substitution is valuable. When
writing Haskell, we write ->
, \
, /=
etc. not because it's most legible,
but because it's most practical to type those symbols on the most widely
available keyboards and popular keyboard layouts.1 Of the three
options listed here, symbolic substitution is possible with listings and
lhs2tex, but I haven't figured out if minted can do it (which is really
the question: can pygments do it?)
I'm unsure about proportional versus monospaced fonts. We typically use
monospaced fonts for editing computer code, but that's at least partly for
historical reasons. Vertical alignment is often very important in source code,
and it can be easily achieved with monospaced text; it's also sometimes
important to have individual characters (.
, etc.) not be de-emphasised by being
smaller than any other character.
lhs2tex, at least, addresses vertical alignment whilst using proportional fonts. I guess the importance of identifying individual significant characters is just as true in a code sample within a larger document as it is within plain source code.
From a (brief) scan of research on this topic, it seems that proportional fonts result in marginally quicker reading times for regular prose. It's not clear whether those results carry over into reading computer code in particular, and the margin is slim in any case. The drawbacks of monospaced text mostly apply when the volume of text is large, which is not the case for the short code snippets I am working with.
I still have a few open questions:
- Is colour useful for formatting code in a PDF document?
- does this open up a can of accessibility worms?
- What should be emphasised (or de-emphasised)
- Why is the minted output most popular: Could the choice of font be key? Aspects of the font other than proportionality (serifs? Size of serifs? etc)
-
The Haskell package Data.List.Unicode lets the programmer
use a range of unicode symbols in place of ASCII approximations, such
as
∈
instead ofelem
,≠
instead of/=
. Sadly, it's not possible to replace the denotation for an anonymous function,\
, withλ
this way.↩
Although I've never written about them, I've been interested in music synthesisers for ages. My colleagues know this. Whilst I've been off sick, they had a whip-round and bought me a voucher for Andertons, a UK-based music store, to cheer me up.
I'm absolutely floored by this generosity. And so, I'm now on a quest to buy a synthesizer! Although, not my first one.
I bought my first synth, an Alesis Micron, from a colleague at $oldjob, 16 years ago. For various reasons, I've struggled to engage with it, and it's mostly been gathering dust on my desk in all that time. (I might write more about the Micron in a later blog post). "Bad Gear" sums it up better than I could:
So, I'm not truly buying my "first" synth, but for all intents and purposes I'm on a similar journey to if I was, and I thought it might be fun to write about it.
Goals
I want something which has as many of its parameters presented physically, as knobs or sliders etc., as possible. One reason I've failed to engage with the Micron (so far) is it's at the other end of this spectrum, with hundreds of tunable parameters but a small handful of knobs. To change parameters you have to go diving into menus presented on a really old-fashioned, small LCD display. If you know what you are looking for, you can probably find it; but if you just want to experiment and play around, it's off-putting.
Secondly, I want something I can use away from a computer, as much as possible. Computers are my day-job, largely dominate my existing hobbies, and are unavoidable even in some of the others (like 3d printing). Most of the computers I interact with run Linux. And for all its strengths, audio management is not one of them. If I'm going to carve out some of my extremely limited leisure time to explore this stuff, I don't to spend any of it (at least now) fighting Pulseaudio/ALSA/Pipewire/JACK/OSS/whatever, or any of the other foibles that might crop up1.
Thirdly, I'd like something which, in its soul, is an instrument. You can get some amazing little synth boxes with a huge number of features in them. Something with a limited number of features but which really feels well put together would suit me better.
So… next time, I'll write about the 2-3 top candidates on my list. Can you guess what they might be?
- To give another example. The other day I sat down to try and use the Micron, which had its audio out wired into an external audio interface, in turn plugged into my laptop's Thunderbolt dock. For a while I couldn't figure out why I couldn't hear anything, until I realised the Thunderbolt dock was having "a moment" and not presenting its USB devices to the laptop. Hobby time window gone!↩
Older posts are available on the all posts page.