he's awesome! kinda needy for attention a lot of the time though :D

@@maxmarco Finally, a studio dog smaller than Ricky Tinez's studio dog!

big part of my studio reorganization/simplification over the last handful of years has been to minimize dust collection and making cleaning as easy as possible - I do my best work in a fairly clean and organized space, being surrounded by dusty gear really bums me out!

glad you enjoyed! I used excerpts of a couple different modular recordings for the background music

multitrack hybrid is awesome, on paper at least... haha! thanks a lot!

thanks a lot! many of my videos are essentially just about capturing the same kinds of electronic music demos and lectures I often force upon unsuspecting visitors :D

thanks a lot! the modules definitely have a way of taking things over...

thanks a lot! for better or worse I don't have anywhere else to put it :D

accumulating a bunch of modular and getting into electronics DIY has definitely been a hugely educational experience, both technically and philosophically! Greybeard is a mouse actually, I think they are cuter than rats (and lower maintenance), although rats can sort of be litter trained which would be nice...

@@maxmarco Greybeard is a big (and beautiful) mouse! I had a white rat and he was very clever, and learnt the litter. Mouses are perhaps less receptive to our bourgeois comfort :-) I think our brain is done for practice, pure ideas seem to teach us far less than practicing. They are more volatile, even the better. When you do something real with your passion, you always capture some pieces of truth. Pure ideas can be wrong from start to end... A Modular never lies :-)

thank you! I think it's just about whatever gives you the most fun and inspiration - eurorack for me has always just been about the pure joy of creative patching and playing with sound so as long as I still love firing it up and patching away it's serving a purpose quite excellently 👍👍👍 still planning to sell some modules though :D

hey thanks man! one or two of my older modular info videos covers how I patched it up in my 'iteration one' setup - kzfaq.info/get/bejne/msmHfKWDt7KWnaM.html and kzfaq.info/get/bejne/bJN1ZsKCxt7dfmw.html might be helpful - mostly I have used it for generating medium term control signals, for modulating things like Tyme Sefari record state or Plog logic type

haha! thank you! Greybeard is awesome, but it's certainly not an everyday thing to let him walk on an Elektron... 💩💩💩 :D

I definitely recommend to stay efficient :) I've been reducing things a bit lately and scaling up is much easier than scaling down! :D

thanks a lot! very glad you enjoyed 👍👍👍 I think mixing (and mastering) with headphones is something a lot of people do, but might not always admit to :D Personally I find I don't like bouncing between too many different listening environments while working on projects and for some time now I purposefully only use my 770s and nearfields - what I find most important is to be intimately familiar with the listening environment(s). The nearfields are important (but not always necessary) for checking the stereo image and for potential phase issues, but the frequency balance even with all my acoustic treatment is still so-so at best, and that's where the headphones are much more consistent. I'd actually like to spend more time using my nearfields though, particularly as they are less fatiguing than headphones, but my environment tends to be noisy, and unless I'm 'mastering' something I'm almost never in the nearfields' sweet spot. I've also found that because I now have a decent amount of acoustic treatment I can hear much more easily that my monitors could use an upgrade - before the treatment everything was just mush anyway so their quality was kind of irrelevant the esteemed Andrew Scheps is somewhat well-known for mostly mixing in headphones these days, here's what he said in a GS Q+A thread last year (I also feel the same way he does about frequency response correction) - "I do mix in headphones quite a lot. It started because I was travelling a lot and needed to keep working. Then when we first moved to the UK I didn't have an ideal place to set up my speakers so I mixed a lot on headphones and then checked everything on speakers before sending it out. The more time I've spent on headphones, the fewer changes there are when I switch to the speakers. I use Sony MDR-7506 headphones, but I think it's because I'm just used to them and they also sound like the Tannoy SRM-10B speakers I mix on. They are bright but relatively flat. I wouldn't recommend mixing on headphones for everyone, but it is a great way to take control of your acoustic environment . You're basically wearing your studio on your head and it sounds exactly the same no matter where you go! I never use frequency response correction software or any crosstalk functions. I think for me I just hear the extra processing, even though it might make it more like an acoustic environment. But remember, there are no right answers to things like this, and the whole point is to have a listening environment where you can be creative and your mixes translate to whatever system somebody might listen to your mix in." I also remember seeing another quote from him regarding headphone usage, where he said something along the lines of 'if you are working on a mix in headphones, and then you check on monitors and you hear something that wasn't in the headphones, go back to the headphones - if you still can't hear the thing on headphones that showed up when checking with monitors you need to use a better set of headphones'

thank you! is very good to see people are enjoying this kind of video

@@maxmarco Wondering your recommendations for entry into Modular? Also, any benefit of buying MK2 Octatrack? And can you tell me when selling Elec gear? Thanks. OH...your rat....I have a Savanah Monitor..........no play dates....LOL

haha! he's a mouse actually, an adult rat would weigh 10x what he does. Rats actually seem like better pets in some ways but need a lot more space and maintenance, and a male rat can't be kept alone like a male mouse re: modular I think getting a quality semi-modular to start is a good way to go. There are lots of great options these days but I don't have any specific recommendations. Then buy a small case, either one or two rows of 84-126hp and slowly add modules in order to augment your semi-modular. Eventually as the case starts to fill up you may decide to sell the semi-modular as it starts to become less necessary - or you may realize you quite like having a semi-modular around and keep it as a convenience. Always try to force yourself to buy used if at all possible, both cases and modules. It will slow down your purchases and make your money go much further. re mk2 OT I don't have too much to say, I'm perhaps a bit too familiar with the mk1 and didn't like the look/feel of mk2. the higher headroom on the audio i/o would be nice though

a long time ago I felt I had to have everything out all the time, hooked up and ready to go, but eventually I started to hate it. These days I can have a piece of gear plugged in and turned on right in front of me, doesn't mean I'm necessarily going to favor using it over something that's on the shelf at the moment, that's why with my current setup I've made it very easy for me to change things around. If something sits in the closet and is truly neglected though I eventually sell it.

my pleasure, thanks for watching! the switch-up on the OT faceplate tripped me out a bit. I kind of like the feel of the textured one better, but I think the smooth one looks cooler

oh yeah, just remembered - probably the reason they stopped using the textured finish is that it can chip easily, mine has one or two little nicks and I've heard about some pretty battle-scarred ones

max marco yeah mine is textured and I agree that the smooth one looks more aesthetic. Perhaps in another universe (or simulation) I have the smooth black one and wish I had the textured. I’m curious what are your thoughts on the mk2 OT? Also, I have to bring attention to a brilliant quote in your video ‘once I had a taste of the slim phatty my bank account began to take a beating’ 😂

hahaha! re: mk2 OT it is nice in some ways but maybe I am just too familiar with mk1 OT - I much prefer the look/feel of mk1. Main/only thing I want from mk2 is the higher headroom on the audio i/o

@@maxmarco That's what I think. The OT powder coating can chip, so this is a better paint job.

Also, great fucking tip on that Weber attenuator. I definitely have been needing a piece of gear like this, and I never realized that they were even made.

thank you, glad you've enjoyed! I've never opened it up but it seems the Weber attenuator is basically just a couple rheostats wired up to jacks so probably would not be hard to DIY one with a bit less features. Definitely super useful if you have a guitar amp you want to milk for some distortion without blowing up your ears :) :) :)

I do my mastering in the box - to me 'mastering' doesn't necessarily have to do with altering the sonics of the audio, it's more about preparing an audio file for a particular delivery format - particular sample rates, bit depths, true peak levels, etc. What a lot of people call 'mastering' these days is just master bus processing, which in electronic music I would generally say is a fundamental component of the mixing stage. Dedicated mastering hardware would be nice but it's completely unnecessary and very expensive (much like eurorack, hah!!). If there needs to be massive amounts of sonic alteration at the mastering stage then that implies the hardware stereo mix probably just wasn't that good and it probably should be re-mixed and re-recorded. I like having a bit of compression available in my eurorack, but they're either used for fairly light mix bus processing, submix processing (like a drum bus), typical compression sound design on individual sounds, or as part of more experimental patches (compressing a feedback loop for example).

max marco that is helpful thank you. That lines up with some of the information I've read online. I have found that I can generally get a song to meet my standards just by doing simple performance-based mixing so I'm probably overthinking things. When you hear lots of your peers talking about mastering and EQ and all these things, the tendency is to feel a bit insecure like "oh crap, should I be doing that?"

just setting everything to a proper level is 99% of getting a good mix - EQ and compression in a mixing context is more about helping to achieve proper levels than something that's always necessary, especially in electronic music where we are often working mainly with relatively static sound sources. It all depends on context - if I'm recording a live vocalist for a track I'm definitely busting out a compressor for mixing purposes (might even track with a compressor), and if some frequencies are harsh I'm going to tame them with EQ. I would generally always advise to use only what processing you know is absolutely necessary to achieve what you perceive as a satisfying result - and that knowledge is always developing and changing as you spend time and gain experience

thank you! very glad people have enjoyed this one, was surprisingly challenging to put together

@@maxmarco its really well made, good work.

mixers are fun and cool but I moved away from using them other than inside my eurorack systems. Even a relatively small mixer has a lot of parts that can fail, channels get noisy over time, they need maintenance, etc.

oof, sorry to hear that! mine has been acting up a little bit recently unfortunately - I found a pretty good deal but it clearly had taken a beating. Haven't had problems before though and has been doing fine the last week so I'm hoping it was just a fluke

I'm not sure you need/want any sort of direct box or re-amp box - what do you mean by 'modeler' - can you point me towards a specific unit you are planning to use? do you mean a preamp? the output of a preamp will generally be an acceptable impedance to plug into the majority of power amplifiers, part of the job of a guitar pre-amp is to account for the necessary impedance conversion. Whether or not driving your guitar cabs with your standard power amplifiers makes sense you will have to check the specs - what's the output impedance of your amplifier(s)? what is the input impedance of the guitar cabs? usually these are within a range where it will work without issue but depending on your needs your amp may not be able to deliver enough power to the guitar cab depending on the impedance relationship.

yeah it's extremely useful for maintenance/restoration of jacks, cables, and (some) pots - improves electrical contact by helping to remove oxidation - not something that's absolutely necessary to have right away but in the long term it's essential

@@maxmarco Man, that stuff has been around a LONG TIME! kind of made me chuckle when you mentioned it... Seems like that, and a can of compressed air quickly follow from an electronics kit, soldering iron, solder, multimeter, and flux.

thank you! those are standard pomona cable hangers, the orange ones are meant for thinner cables (I use them mainly for eurorack cables) and the black ones are for thicker cables (1/4" and MIDI, also work with stackcables)

I use an old version of Sony Vegas for editing, my main camera is a Panasonic Lumix G7, and my secondary camera is an old Sony point and shoot. The only video lights I have so far are a couple basic LED floods

I designed and built my own cases

yes, I built/designed my own eurorack cases

@@maxmarco Sorry, it's in the video, of course

I designed/built my own cases

If I went that far I'd make sure to keep an Octatrack also :D I'm still keeping a lot of stuff, although have shifted some things and am continuing to de-clutter

*cues up Pringles jingle*

not quite that bad fortunately, I'm in Chicago in a pretty nice neighborhood and my rent has increased nearly 50% since I first moved into this apartment 8 or 9 years ago - most of that increase has been in the last handful of years

The mice is the best!

It has always been much easier for me to make (more) money doing just about anything other than music as the most straightforward way to make money from music is to do work-for-hire, whereas I've generally only been interested in producing my own original music in whatever way I find most satisfying

Fuzznuts is most definitely a mouse