It was my birthday last week, another lap of the sun completed. I don’t really put much stock in birthdays any more or get really excited for them (though I did have a great time with family and a lovely meal out with my wife on the day itself). In fact I find myself now spending most of the year struggling to remember exactly how old I am now. Am I really 43? Or is it 42? Once I hit somewhere around my mid twenties I think I mentally felt like this is my age and I’m going to stick with it. Anything above that doesn’t really count. Just no-one told my haggard, ageing, body.
I fell down a synth laden black hole this week. It all started a few weeks ago when I dug out my Korn Volca Beats and was determined to learn how to use it. This magnificent piece of procrastination coinciding with the start of my latest Open University module of course. Then I started liking and following loads of synthy accounts on Threads that just post chill, ambient beats on hardware synths. I was scrolling for hours just checking out loads of cool sounds.
That led me to browsing hardware synths on Amazon for a while until I came to my sense and decided I should just use the toys I already have. Rooting around in my spare room, I dug out my Akai Miniak synth that I bought over a decade ago and also never learned how to use. I managed to switch it on and play around with some of the presets but it really needs some proper time put in to it to get the best out of it I think.
Time I don’t have it turns out! As my procrastination caught up with me after I had a birthday weekend and I suddenly found I had dropped behind schedule a bit on my uni course and needed to get my head down to catch up on some reading and go hug some trees on the first dry day we’ve had at a weekend for a while. I really went out and hugged some trees, as the course had us out measuring the circumference of local trees with a tape measure. Surprisingly, I didn’t see any posts on the local nosy neighbour facebook group for our town wondering why someone was hanging around all the trees taking pictures and measuring them.
That out of the way, I returned to my synth distraction. Which led me to building quite a wishlist on Amazon of some cheap hardware to do some DAWless synth jams. But I think that should wait. For now I have a drum machine, a beastly Akai synth that I just need to learn how to use, and access to Reaper and loads of software synths that I could use to find my feet with first. Yes, that sounds much more sensible. So instead of a new expensive synth that I won’t get round to learning, I received my dopamine hit by ordering a small USB midi keyboard controller instead so I can control software synths on Reaper and figure out what I’m doing.
My big plan is to use the synth stuff as a backing track to do some live jamming with my guitars, but lets see how that works out. If anyone out there has any VST recommendations or even some budget hardware recs, let me know. It would be a good basis of some music streams on Twitch I think if I can get the hang of it. If it works it’ll be pretty satisfying. But first I need to stop procrastinating and get back to some studying!
Mince and Skirlie 