Sound Byte Labs

A half hour of video games in the morning is such a nice way to wake up 🤗

Gorgeous! Love your style

Where has feedback been my entire synth life?? I guess I was a bit scared of damaging my system or my hearing, but when used carefully I've really been enjoying the spectrum of feedback from adding some tasty saturation to high pitched howling and back! #modular #synthsky

I wasn't super excited about the Make Noise Multiwave because I usually don't gel with wave tables but then I played one at the music store! Absolutely killer sounds coming out of that thing. Pretty sure Tony & crew did it again 🤩 #synthsky #modular

Yeah hear that. I'm currently working with a Frankenstein system in 3 cases and only 1 is deep enough to hold them all.

And on the Doepfer topic, I also appreciate the build quality and component selection. Dedicated to keeping their modules repairable by keeping everything thru-hole and shipping boards with DIP sockets for easy chip swapping. I like that. #synthsky #modular

I've never drooled over them like Make Noise or Mutable, but all 3 of my Doepfer modules have quietly made their way into the 'indispensable' tier that never leaves the case. Maths, Pam's, @intellijel.com Quad VCA and Dixie II+. It's not crowded up there! #synthsky #modular

If you're working on a 'for serious' music project, don't forget to take time to play just for fun!

...continue passing those skills, tastes, and values refined over many generations to people younger than us. Thank you for attending my TED talk. In summary, support the arts!

People will always make great art. I worry that we will create less of it and that our communities will be worse off if we continue down the path of devaluation. I think there are so many ways art is necessary for the soul and a uniquely human gift. I also think there is so much lost when we don't..

...appetite for art and entertainment media has only ballooned. To fill the demand created by increased access and lower economic barriers, those with the means to scale and commoditize creative work did, relentlessly.

... and gaining social status as a journeyman artist or creative person is alien to younger generations. How widely accepted is the notion that STEM is safer and more respected than liberal & fine arts? That an arts education is an exercise in futility if not outright vanity. Yet if anything our...

...future. It's not just the demolition of attention spans and media literacy that gets me. It's the concerted reorienting of the very idea of valuing creativity, uniqueness and artisanship. It's been going on for a long time, longer than anyone alive remembers. The concept of earning a living...

One trend among many that I'm grumpy about is the sustained attack by tech & media companies and prolonged apathy from consumers on the value of creative work. I'm definitely that guy wringing my hands about what endless content feeds are doing to us. We're in a very 'the medium is the message'...

It sucks that modular synths are an expensive hobby, but I absolutely love the community and their willingness to support boutique and experimental instrument makers. For me it's a bright spot in the otherwise soul-sucking race to the bottom in consumer products & expectations! #modular #synthsky

...but I still think it's worth learning the fundamentals in order to build out a better architect toolbox. No doubt the skillset needs to evolve, but that's par for the course in computer science.

That's a great analogy. Truly, I think beyond really cutting edge techniques or intense performance requirements, most seasoned engineers come to view most coding as mostly mechanical. Any dev can learn to write the code for a well architected and spec'd component. Coding alone will be devalued...

And I really don't think we can hand wave our way past the communication gap. *Maybe* AI will magically become so adept at gleaning our true intentions, or the iterative process becomes so fast that it doesn't matter that most people don't know what they want. Not sold on that yet.

... it will cease to be useful to employ humans who have a deep understanding of the product. I think a lot of companies will find out the hard way that even describing in natural language what you want software to do is quite difficult if you don't understand the underlying systems and capability.

If you're a software engineer or adjacent and you're concerned about AI automation, you might consider that understanding software at the code level is likely to be an increasingly rare skill. Lots of companies will choose the short term profit gains of automation, but I'm skeptical that ...

Close up of lower bottom Gatekeeper PCB showing the Sound Byte Labs logo

Shot of the bottom of the Gatekeeper PCB

First power of the Gatekeeper prototype did not result in any obvious shorts or heating! Additional testing and first firmware dump later today! Excuse my awful hand soldering 💀 #synthdiy

The manual suggests feeding the Bruxa output back into the input, so I'm going to try that next! #makenoise #synthsky #modular

My favorite Bruxa patch so far was cranking the resonance on QPAS till it was self-oscillating at a pleasant pitch, then feeding that into Bruxa and playing with the cutoff frequency and radiate controls on QPAS. Really nice gliding effect through the harmonics generated by the self-oscillation!

I say, as I fiddle with my modular system

I'm really glad Neural DSP introduced the Quad Cortex mini because now it can be out of my price range by half as much 🙏

Make Noise Bruxa Eurorack module, a time/filter experiment

Make Noise Teleplexer module

Said goodbye to the Squid Salmple and welcomed a few more members to the Church of Make Noise 🤩 They are beautiful 🚀🎸 #modular #synthsky #makenoise

PO-24 Office pocket operator hooked into a modular synthesizer. The input has a sync signal and the output is stereo audio

I knew it! Buying the PO-24 Office was totally not impulsive and completionist consumerism! I knew it would come in handy one day. And she looks right at home 🤩 #modular #pocketoperators #teenageengineering #synthsky

I feel like the Gatekeeper module needs one more output, which is just a normally open direct connection to the CV input, controlled by the gate button. This seems obvious in retrospect 🤔 #synthdiy #modular

I still randomly pat myself on the back for the time I successfully convinced my entire friend group chat and immediate family members to switch from WhatsApp to Signal 😂 It is possible!

I'm not one to long for the past but I do think it would be cool if sticking a feather in your cap was a good reason to puff your chest out and strut a bit 🤷‍♂️