Pulse Wave

I've discovered just the other day that pony.fm isn't online. Is it down for maintenance, or is it gone for good without an announcement? If the latter, why? That'd mean that the last dedicated pony music website is gone.

Is anyone looking for drum samples for vintage sounding electronics? I'm asking because Reverb is currently giving away their entire Drum Machines collection for free. No guarantees, though, I haven't test-driven them myself yet. But considering what they usually cost, I guess they're worth a try.

One of the few Generation X-ers here, I guess.

A wee bit more insight now that I've actually released something: If I wanted every last one of my songs to be perfect, I'd have to spend months on one single song and go into pain-staking detail. I mean, I could sit down now and spend the next five months on a song that's due for GalaCon. I'd also have to spend crazy amounts of money to get the vintage machines that I'd need for an authentic 1970s/1980s sound. Not to mention the spacious studio all this stuff would require. Alternatively, I'd have to go into crazy details trying to emulate every last bit of sound character of authentic 1970s or 1980s equipment until nobody can tell whether this music was recorded in 2020 or 1983 or 1976, and yes, that includes contemporary mixing desks and contemporary recording devices. All this for listeners most of whom believe synthwave is authentic 1980s music except that it was made in the 21st century. There's only so much one can do, and there's only so much effort that makes sense. I'm not a proponent of "winging it" and thereby being able to churn out one new mediocre-at-best piece of music per day. But one has to find a point at which a piece of music is good enough to be released, even though it isn't absolutely perfect.

I currently use Qtractor, I've gotten quite used to it, and I'm most likely going to stick with it. Then again, I don't produce "inside the box", i.e. all inside the computer. All my synths are hardware (although only one of them is analogue), all my samplers are hardware, I also do all my drums with hardware, same goes for sequencing and instrumental mixing, all FX on my instruments are hardware, too, and if I ever start using a vocoder, even that'll be hardware. Qtractor only serves as a multi-track audio recorder plus the ability to put FX on vocals.

Sure, if you want to give me some. A few words on a few things, though: I know I can't sing. At least not by today's standards (then again, every other synthpop singer couldn't sing back then). But someone had to sing it, and as someone with next to no name in this fandom, I didn't want to bother any of the better-known singers with this. I tried to stick with/emulate what was possible in the first half of the 1980s. I've experienced the entirety of the 1980s myself, so I tried to stick closely to the period and not use anything obviously from the 21st century. That's also why there's neither auto-tune (unavailable in 1983) nor obvious pumping master compression (big no-no in 1983).

This is only my second song so far (I didn't feel like posting the first one here). I've completed it yesterday during Hearth's Warming Con which meant a whole lot of commuting between my hotel room and the venue and missing a couple of things including one interesting panel and BlackGryph0n's gig. But I still had to record the vocals. So if you want to hear what someone who grew up in the 80s considers the 1980s sound, have a little Aviators cover. 2-track promo single on Pony.fm Vocal version on Soundcloud (Okay, "little" is relative, Aviators' original is already over 5:30, my cover is a smidge over 6:00.)

Some of the music on Pony.fm seems to literally take forever to download as Ogg Vorbis. This is a particular pity in the case of music that was obviously uploaded as Ogg Vorbis and re-encoded (= compressed lossily once more) by Pony.fm. For example, when I tried to download "Don't Forget" by Donn DeVore, I got the usual message "We're getting your download ready! This'll take a few seconds." What should happen is the download actually starting after a few seconds. What actually happens is nothing more. The message remains (and I've left it running for at least 10 or 15 minutes sometimes, if not even longer), but no download starts. I've only tried material from times when lossy uploads were still possible and from imported archives. I haven't tested it with lossless updates because why download Ogg Vorbis if you can get the good stuff (FLAC), so I can't say whether these are affected, too.

Guess it depends on the situation. Maybe you've given yourself a deadline that you cannot push. Then you may have to make do what you can get made up to that point. Just try to make it not too shoddy. On the other hoof, if time isn't so much of an issue, take yourself enough time to iron out the imperfections that bug you before you release a piece of music. Do not, however, fall into the perfectionism trap and try to take your music somewhere you'll never get it quality-wise.

I'd really love to participate, and be it just so I can finally use all those Christmas cliché sounds I've got at hoof. I've always wanted to make a Hearth's Warming song, at least ever since I acquired that Yamaha FM expander. However, I don't know whether I'll make it in time, what with three more pieces of music that have to be completed and released before the end of the year. (That kind of deadline that really forces you to finally get something done...) My way of making music is quite time-consuming. And I don't even have a solid idea for a Hearth's Warming song yet.

The first of them all, played by Keith Emerson on a huge former Moog Modular demonstration unit: Emerson, Lake & Palmer – "Lucky Man" Edgar Winter going wild on an ARP 2600: Edgar Winter Group – "Frankenstein" Manfred Mann on what might be his Oberheim SEM (plus duelling Yamaha electric grands): Manfred Mann's Earth Band – "Don't Kill It Carol" Synth solos in already completely electronic music — well, why not? Have some Jean Michel Jarre remote-control a Roland D-550 with a keytar custom-made by Lag: Jean Michel Jarre – "Industrial Revolution", live at Destination Docklands 1988

Xubuntu currently takes the top spot among my GNU/Linux installs with three machines. It has become really nice, and it's easy on not-so-powerful hardware like nettops and 6x-generation ThinkPads. Manjaro comes in second with two installs, one with Xfce4, one upgraded from KDE SC 4 to Plasma 5. The latter shares my most powerful computer with Linux Mint KDE. Last but not least, I still have two Debians, one jessie in a Web server VM, one pinned together from jessie, stretch and sid with Xfce4 on a rarely-used nettop.

My absolutely favourite decade in music has to be the 1980s when electronic instruments grew up, became quite powerful and then increasingly affordable, but before the temptation of music based on a few looped patterns wasn't all over the place yet, and when songwriting and pop arrangement were still common for synthesiser-based music. Also, over-the-top campy hair metal. Then come the 1970s and — surprise — the 1960s. At a bit of distance, the 1990s follow. In fact, I'm almost just as likely to listen to something from the 1950s.

Brace yourselves, unexpected ultra-old-school reply is coming! My favourite electronic genres aren't from the 21st century at all. In fact, they're from before DAWs, they're from before the Detroit and Berlin techno craze, they're from before Chicago Acid House turned the Roland TB-303 from a cheap piece of junk into a sought-after and expensive cult machine. They're partly even from before MIDI. For starters, it's classic electronic music like it started in the 1970s. I'm a big fan of Jean Michel Jarre who became famous first for rather "organic" electronic music that stayed away from typical early electronic clichés and then in the 1980s for his gigantic concerts. I also like Vangelis who is most well-known for his movie soundtracks (e.g. Chariots Of Fire, Blade Runner) and Kraftwerk who were the first purely electronic band, who were the first in post-war Germany to make a brand-new kind of music with no influences from American and British rock & roll/rhythm & blues internationally popular, and who inspired most of the British synthpop craze. In between, there are the late 1970s works by Giorgio Moroder such as "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer which Brian Eno predicted to define the club sound of the next two decades. And then there are synthpop and similar electronic genres from mostly the early and mid-1980s. (In the second half of the 1980s, anything that wasn't metal was electronic.) It was a race of technological and stylistic advancement, also because much was produced by big names or in big studios that could afford the big flagship polysynths and sample-based drum machines and often had an outrageously expensive Fairlight or Synclavier. Of course, that was a time when tinkering and sound experiments were displaced by the (over)use of presets and commercial sample libraries, but that has a charm of its own.

If it isn't pony music regularly available for free (I despise ripping MP3s from YouTube due to sometimes multiple instances of heavy lossy compression) or concert bootlegs with no chance of ever being released commercially, I buy everything. In fact, I buy all my non-pony music on CD and rip it to FLAC which are then tagged properly. I don't use streaming services other than Internet radio stations. I don't care whether they're good for discovering new music because almost everything I ever listen to is several decades old, and there aren't so many major releases from, for example, 1983 or 1977 that I don't know yet but might find interesting.

Italo Disco. The electronic resurrection of disco music in Italy in the early 80s. People might overhear it occasionally on 60s/70s/80s oldie stations, but pretty much nobody knows that it's a genre of its own right. Within the bronydom, it has to be electronic genres from before Acid House was invented in 1987. I mean, who knows that there was electronic music before Deadmau5, and who knows that electronic music used to be made by playing hardware synthesisers by hand in real-time on their built-in keybeds rather than by clicking together notes in the piano roll editor of a DAW and routing them to a VSTi?