A few random things in the music realm.
Plugins: Dubmachines Revisited: Is Good!
I had purchased Modnetic and Diffuse from Surreal Machines a while back and I hadn’t really used them a lot, I had erroneously thought they weren’t super great vs what elseI was using (I was wrong, more on this later). I got an email recently saying there were new higher-resolution graphic M1 versions so I decided to reinstall them and see if my impressions held up.
So yeah, I was wrong!, the character here is actually really really nice, and I can see myself using these a bunch. The feedback at high levels is especially great, and I can this used to produce some really nice ambient tracks, and does a lot better than some other ambient effects. Further, adjustment of many of the parameters produces very nice tape-like warbles, while also sounding like it’s own thing when automated. Worth checking out.
Just based on my theories of extremely intricate song-craft being hard/painful in piano-roll DAW environments, I suspect my compositions may become a bit more effects driven in the future and it’s nice to have things that look like they would be fun to automate.
I find myself wanting some more characterful sounds and these hit a nice spot. For more realistic reverbs I still really dig Seventh Heaven and Cinematic Rooms, but I also am starting to be one of those people that appreciates the nuances of having too many different plugins on my shelf - especially when that comes to reverb, delay, and misbehaving tape sims.
Sonos: Still Good
While this category is mostly about electronic music composition topics, this post is a bit more about listening to music too, I guess.
I have had a Sonos system for quite a while (6-7 years?) and recently was getting some glitchy audio issues from having too many units and maybe spread out too much.
Basically this was fixed by plugging in many of the units into wired ethernet, and I had a few more accessible ports than I thought I had, hiding behind furniture and things (woohoo). I’m going to be adding some Sonos Boost units soon though and I look forward to seeing what that is going to do. There’s a pretty much whole-house system going on now, even if I have some cheap Netgear switches with … ironically … three cheap Netgear switches plugged into them for the wired parts (mostly like Apple TVs and stuff).
The system remains sounding really good, and I’ve recently added a Sub + Surround set of One SLs in one room and am impressed with how well that works. The sub is not as awesome as my SVS for a movie setup, but it’s solid enough for a lesser used TV or to add some bass to music. I moved some things around and even have one room using Play 5’s in a stereo pair, which seems almost like a miracle that it synchronizes wirelessly.
Sonos tech support, which I don’t talk to very often, astounds me at how good they are every time, they started off talking about how I should try reconfiguring something on my router like I new how (I did), and they are just so technical and good and you don’t wait to get on hold with a level 2 or anything, it’s just smart people out of the gate. Keep doing that!
In case you missed listening to it for 20 years, Soma FM is Very Good
I haven’t listed to much electronic music in a long while because aside from a few albums (where I appreciate the timbre and effort but not the compositions) there isn’t a lot like. I really disliked SiriusXM for playing a lot of dance-oriented EDM and pretending it was actual good music, and it was too much hassle to dig through a lot of amateur stuff on other sites/services to find things that were interesting. As I appreciate variety and hearing new things, buying albums didn’t make sense.
More recent usage of the Sonos has got me listening to various SomaFM channels recently (via TuneIn) and while I’ve known about this for a LOOOOONG time why did I never check it out. So good. There are quite a few channels and they are very diverse music-wise.
If you have one, you can connect to it on Sonos under Sonos Radio (which is free) or by adding TuneIn as a music service. I have a free coupon from Crutchfield that may reduce the TuneIn commercial frequency, but you mostly get the commercials when first activating a channel, and it’s not that bad.
So good. It’s all donation supported so do consider donating if you like it.
A lot of it blends in really great for background music, particularly at night with the lights down and while doing something else like playing Hearthstone or surfing some internet.
I suspect that being exposed to a bit more genre-variance is also going to be good for what kinds of music I instinctively try to make by default.
Sonos HD Radio: Also Good So Far?
The Sonos app was advertising Sonos HD radio as a subscription service, which is somewhat like Sirius XM streaming but only works on Sonos hardware. It’s $10/month and pretty high quality.
Some channels are pretty good, some mixes are a bit too varied to make sense.
There’s basically 5 classic-rock ish channels, one for famous guitarists, and I was happy to see an instrumental metal channel, even though everything isn’t exactly metal.
As I quit Sirius because the variety was bad (also the compression in the car!), it is nice to see more done here and I’ll probably keep it up for a while, and look more at TuneIn to see what commercial free options look like on their service.
I’m not a fan of Spotify, but I’m sort of considering Apple Music - that being said, I don’t buy an album every month, and I kind of prefer random curated music to be thrown at me a lot of the time, for discovery reasons, rather than finding what I want to listen to, so I may keep this instead.
The one win for paying for Apple music is that I could stream to the Sonos without using the Line In jack and my iPhone - sending airplay to multiple speakers at once is a bad unsynchronized experience and I don’t like their desktop app at all. But paying for streaming to play for music you already own is also a little strange.
Listen To Music You Make On Better Speakers?, You May Not Be As Bad As You Think
I wasn’t doing a ton of music composition stuff lately and was kind of playing around in sound design land due to some weird mental image I had that my music was bad.
I know we all feel that way.
Part of the problem for me was, that, once finished, I mostly just checked my mixes on my computer audio, or worse, an iPhone in speaker mode.
Back to the Sonos thing, you can easily add Soundcloud as a provider to a Sonos account and play Soundcloud music directly to a Sonos speaker. In doing this, on a Play 5 speaker with halfway decent bass, I’m finding my tracks are actually ok!
A few snippets of my synth-metalish tracks could fool me for a while into making me think they are commercial, and synth tracks that I thought were dull have some pretty good timbres and I appreciate the reverb and effects. This is good to know, and will encourage me to do more with my electronic music setup.
Anyway, if you have a Sonos system, do add your own soundcloud, and maybe listen to stuff you did several months ago again, and it may give you some more enthusiasm. Alternatively, play your music in the car or something!
People having terrible phone and computer speakers is probably a curse on the desire for music discovery and pushes more people to pop music, I don’t know.