Sound Byte Labs

9 Apr

Project Hail Mary was amazing! It was one of my favorite theater experiences in forever! 🛰️😎☄️🚀

4 Apr

"Sample rates above 48kHz are just marketing." Not true in DSP land! Many digital filtering and interp techniques produce more refined results with over sampling! Not to mention processing signals that interact with supersonic spectral content.

31 Mar

Experiments with Just intonation and microtonal harmony continue! My latest finding is that Just intervals play very nice with FM synthesis 🤯 Currently surfing the DPO waves and inhabiting a far away and harmonically lush region of space 🛰️🏄‍♂️ #synthsky #modular #makenoise

25 Mar

Find the thing that makes you feel this way and cherish it! #music #gratitude

24 Mar

Indian musical traditions and ragas are new (rapidly exploding) interests of mine. I'm honestly surprised there isn't more noise about them in the modular world! Subharmonicon explored Just Intonation and harmonics, but I feel like Lyra ragas solves the 'polyphony problem' in a really elegant way.

soundcloud.comLyraListen to Lyra by Michael Skiles #np on #SoundCloud

23 Mar

Morphagene > Lyra-8 👌 on.soundcloud.com/jIMJiyCi2z5Q... #modular #synthsky #ambient #makenoise #soma

20 Mar

Remember when VS Code was the alternative to IDE bloat? Sound Byte Labs 'members. I've been using Zed for about a month. I'm a converted user now I think. It's very good and fast and has a clean UX. Excels at ... editing text.

19 Mar

It was confusing people at the event that my portable DSP stack was running on Daisy hardware, so naturally I built it for ARM Linux hosts as well 😂 Audio was captured directly from the application, no added FX. The full Sound Byte Labs audio stack will be open source when it hits beta. #dsp #oss

13 Mar

After doing a DSP deep dive over the last year I now get why reverb is one of the discipline's holy grails. Ain't easy to do it right. #embedded #dsp #synthdiy

6 Mar

If you're in Chicago come see what I've been up to next Sunday! I'll have half a table and some fun prototype gear to play with! Tons of other boutique and not-so-boutique vendors will be there too 🎸🎹🕺 #chicago #synthsky #marz #fleamarket

2 Mar

My cross-vendor ARM audio library is starting to do very synth-y things! Stay tuned for lots more on this front 👀 #synthsky #synthdiy #arm #embedded #dsp

2 Mar

I honestly can't wait for Steam Machines because I'm so ready to ditch Windows permanently 🤢

1 Mar

One time I came to in medias res and found myself arguing with Finn, Anthropic's customer service chatbot about whether Claude was being wasteful with tokens. It was at that time I knew that the 5 hour token limit was a good thing. 🤖

26 Feb

Ask me if the cable is good one more time, Claude. #agentic #fafo #embedded

18 Feb

I'm not afraid to admit it, I love C++! Fight me 🤺 #embedded #synthdiy

13 Feb

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

9 Feb

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

4 Feb

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

2 Feb

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

2 Feb

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

1 Feb

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

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'...

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..

...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!

... 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...

...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.

...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...

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

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 ...

... 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.

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.

29 Jan

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

28 Jan

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!

28 Jan

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

27 Jan

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 🙏

27 Jan

I say, as I fiddle with my modular system

27 Jan

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

22 Jan

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

21 Jan

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

21 Jan

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!

20 Jan

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 🤷‍♂️

19 Jan

If you find out it's someone's birthday, put it in your calendar and wish them a happy birthday next year! People really appreciate being thought of like that and it makes that day even more special 💕

17 Jan

Making an EP at home is great until you start wanting to sample your own acoustic instruments and perc 😭 I love my wife for not batting an eye at me locking myself in the bedroom closet with a box of shakers and tone woods 😍🤣 #synthsky #modular

15 Jan

For all my griping about MIDI, 2.0 actually looks workable and I look forward to its wide adoption. For now, experimenting with MPE!

15 Jan

I know they're different things, but I can't decide whether to save for an Ableton Push 3 or a Linnstrument! My DAW mixing and control needs are real, but so is my love of strange and expressive instruments 😱 That continuous pitch slide on the Linnstrument tho... 🤤 #synthsky

13 Jan

Sampling acoustic instruments into Morphagene feels like cheating! #modular #synthsky

12 Jan

Great. Now I know about Chase Bliss pedals. My wallet is cooked 😱💀🪦

12 Jan

You know what would be a cool euro module? A Hi-Z instrument input with a good pre-amp, maybe an FX send/return! Turn your #modular into a guitar amp 🎸🤘