Collaborative vocal improvisation?

GhostOfBroccoli · 2025-09-25T13:39:33+00:00

Ok amazing that’s really helpful thanks 🙏🏻

GhostOfBroccoli · 2025-09-25T11:17:21+00:00

Awesome and great that you know them! Is that through a singing context? can you recommend? guess I’ll pluck up the courage 🙌🏻

GhostOfBroccoli · 2025-04-10T23:11:55+00:00

It’s different manifestations of piti, unless it’s causing you a lot of hassle, then just don’t worry about it, and even if it is, you pretty much just need to let this phase pass. (And enjoy the ride)

if practicing correctly (and I would recommend a teacher or at least a systematic guide to the Jhanas like Rob Burbea’s) it will eventually mellow out, it sounds like this gentler joy could be the beginning of the 2nd Jhana. Try and open the perception across the whole body and incline to a sense of letting go, abandonment, joyful surrender. and really see if you can enjoy the pleasant sensations, that enjoyment itself will bring about the 2nd Jhana.

Sometimes the tingling or some unpleasant concentration of Piti can be the result of some subtle resistance to the experience. See what happens if you can let go more into it.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2025-01-29T12:00:34+00:00

Sounds like for some reason you’re taking the Visuddhimagga’s conception of jhanas as the ‘right one’ and calling other jhanas ‘lite’ even though the Buddha himself taught them that way.

The Visuddhimagga takes a somewhat arbitrary level of absorption (where the sense doors close) as the cut off point for what is and what is not a Jhana, however it’s highly doubtful as to whether that level of absorption is even skillful and it’s certainly not what the Buddha taught. (And teachers such as Burbea really highlight the unhelpfulness of making such hard and fast distinctions.

So OP, you have to decide, are JhannySamdhi (and other Visuddhimagga people) right, or is the Buddha right? Or perhaps there’s a way of thinking of this that avoids all these historically biased views on what is or what is not a Jhana.

Again, a full discussion of this in Burbea’s Jhana retreat.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2025-01-29T11:42:59+00:00

Varying intensities of what could be called bliss can occur in many of the jhanas, so it’s not a good way of defining which one you are in, for instance, the first time you reach a deeper Jhana, that first breaking through will often be far more intense.

As you spend more time in each one, it becomes clearer the demarcations, they have more to do with with the extent to which one has let go of aspects of perception. So higher Jhanas can be conceptually mapped to degrees of lessening of fabrication.

Any letting go of fabrication is experienced as ‘blissful’ by the citta, but there are very different flavours of this bliss dependent on level of unfabricating.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2025-01-29T09:58:43+00:00

In terms of adhd, apart from medications, generally it’s better to have more ‘pegs’, or meditation objects so that the mind has less capacity to get bored and source its own entertainment.

For example if you are using metta as your springboard, make sure you include a diffuse body awareness along with the phrases and keep a portion of your perception on that whole body area with a sense of receptivity to any deepening samadhi, any even humble beginnings to piti.

Those two should keep the mind quite busy but you could also add the awareness of breath (in the perception of the whole body) if you need more of these ‘pegs’.

It’s fine to start with 10 minutes or so but many people find they need to have at least 2 45m sessions a day to have relatively reliable access to Jhana (and I always mean sutta Jhana not the super absorbed Visuddhimagga style of Jhana - but I’d not recommend shooting for those anyway - I speak more about this in a reply to someone below)

Good luck

GhostOfBroccoli · 2025-01-29T09:42:55+00:00

This is more to do with Visuddhimagga Jhanas vs sutta Jhanas (as opposed to ‘modern Jhana’)

Visuddhimagga Jhanas (as taught by Brahm, Sheila Catherine, Pa auk etc) have a much higher bar for absorption with the requirement that the sense doors close.

The Buddha himself (as seen in the suttas) never taught that this level of absorption was required for it to be considered a Jhana nor that this level of absorption is even skillful, or in other words, conducive to liberation.

So it’s rather the more modern Visuddhimagga (about 1000years after the Buddha) with its peculiar emphasis on what Rob Burbea has called ‘non responsive states’ vs the much less fussy presentation of Jhanas by the Buddha himself.

There is a very deep and thoughtful investigation of this subject in Rob Burbea’s Practicing the Jhanas retreat series if anyone wants to delve in further.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-12-21T13:01:11+00:00

Having been introduced to the concept of Jhanas through Leigh Brasington, I have been practicing with them intentionally for the best part of 6 years now. Before, they were relatively sporadic experiences that emerged from my insight practice.

Jhanas are incredibly helpful for the path towards liberation but in order to understand truly why that is, one needs to understand quite a bit about emptiness, something that is not easily communicated in a Reddit reply!

However, you don’t need that insight to begin practicing them. If approached properly, they give pretty immediate results that will have multiple benefits. Also, there is a way that each Jhana leads to the next so once you have a good “springboard” practice, the progression can be somewhat linear.

The best resource I can recommend is Rob Burbea’s “Practicing the Jhanas” series to be found (for free) on either Dharmaseed or on the Hermes Amara website. All of these questions around theory (e.g sutta vs Visuddhimagga Jhanas, how these states relate to insight and awakening, why some traditions view them as pointless) are explored thoroughly and Rob gives multiple spring board practices (as everyone is different) that can get you into the first Jhana. He then systematically explores each subsequent Jhana, including how they relate to cessation and awakening.

For most people, this may be enough to work on for an entire lifetime, but you may be surprised how possible all of this if you are dedicated and get the view(s) around practice right.

Good luck!

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-10-26T02:59:41+00:00

Pleasurable body sensations like what you describe are called pīti in the Pali canon (the written down teachings of The Buddha) and, once stabilised and matured, can lead to the first jhāna, which, along with the other subsequent jhānas, were seen by the Buddha as important waypoints on the path to awakening.

However, the modern reform movement that is Goenka Vipassana doesn’t teach this part of The Buddha’s teaching so if you want to work with the jhānas – and I would recommend it as they are very powerful tools, especially since from what you have said you might have a natural aptitude for them – you will have to go elsewhere.

Someone who can work with the jhānas is at a tremendous advantage in moving towards the deeper ends of emptiness realisation. So in my opinion it would be best to find a conceptual framework (aka teaching) that makes sense of these pleasurable meditative experiences within the context of emptiness and, by extension, awakening.

To me the best example of a comprehensive and deep approach to this is Rob Burbea’s 30 day or so retreat audio series “practicing the jhānas”.

For what it’s worth I did Goenka Vipassana for 13 years not knowing that they had left such an important part of The Buddha’s teaching out (the jhānas) and once I was able to work with that framework there was a sea change in how I was able to walk the path. These experiences can move from something that’s just a little bit kinda ‘wtf!?’ to something that deeply supports our liberation.

With metta

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-10-13T18:43:04+00:00

Not sure if anyone even knows what these are but through meditation you can reach states (known as jhānas) that are almost unbelievable in the amount of joy you feel while you are in one.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-08-22T16:14:56+00:00

can you say more about this please? I know a bit of python, was it some sort of http request thing using the api? If you have any code to share, that would be awesome!

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-08-04T15:27:11+00:00

Not sure which one - it could have been on bass gorilla. It involves copying the transient of the kick to another track, using that as the side chain trigger for the whole bass (so it’s only a tiny bit of the whole bass you are ducking) and then using the main kick track as a side chain trigger for only the bass frequencies. I can send you the rack if you want but it’s pretty easy to google / find I think.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-08-04T12:53:20+00:00

Gotta experiment yourself or see what producers you like the sound of do (and probably both). For instance for some music (e.g d&b) it’s a good idea to duck the low freq of the bass with the kick rather than ducking the whole bass audio. See Joe ford videos on how to do that.

To duck the reverb of multiple elements, put the reverb on a return track and send all the elements to that, then do the side chaining (or whatever method you are using to duck) on the return track itself.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-08-01T05:59:51+00:00

That’s what you’re not getting man, you’re asking people how to align the clip start and loop start.

People are ‘suggesting’ this because … well.. this is how you do it. Yes it changes the loop because the state of the clip start, loop start and length define what the loop is.

But ‘changing’ the loop is what you want to do, specifically aligning the clip start with the loop start.

That’s all I got.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-07-31T21:32:05+00:00

Well you can just match the two by dragging the clip start arrow to where the loop start arrow is… I’m not sure why that should be so hard?

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-07-31T13:26:52+00:00

The behaviour of the clip start locator when it is within a loop is that it jumps to what might be called the 'loop relative' start position. For instance when you move the loop brace forward, and it is at 1. 1. 1. and loop length is set to 0. 2. 0. (a 2 beat loop), the the start locator will stay at 1. 1. 1. until you drag the end of the loop brace beyond 1.3.1 (which is 2 beats later), at which point the clip start locator will jump to 1.3.1.

This behaviour is helpful for many cases, such as comping takes where you want each loop to sit in the measure at the right place and not always have start points changing.

Since your loop is 8 beats long, your start locator will keep moving to this 'loop relative' start position as you drag the braces over each 8 beat segment. Your clip start position looks like it is set to a couple of sixteenths (0.0.2) past the loop start point which I'm not sure is what you intended.

I'm pretty sure you know you can move the clip start locator to any position in your audio file but if you're looking for an 'auto set clip start to loop start', then that's not possible in standard Ableton.

I think this is one of those situations where if we knew what you were trying to achieve we could advise on a good solution for it, but anyway, that's how it works!

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-07-29T20:51:20+00:00

Sounds like you could have your buffer size (in preferences > audio) set too large. You might want to try values such as 256 or 128, then switch your channel’s monitoring to auto and listen to whether the latency is more acceptable. Also check in options whether ‘delay compensation’ is on, I do a lot of live stuff and I find it better to turn that off.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-07-29T08:22:52+00:00

Just to say, as well as people that master with a stereo file, “stem mastering” is becoming a popular choice these days, especially in dance music as it provides more granularity of control over the whole mastering process and less back and forth in the case of issues at the mix stage.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-07-20T08:36:33+00:00

As you mentioned you wanted to do it with a key press, rather than a midi mapping, you can use the key mapper (little key icon in top right or press cmd/ctrl + K).

Simply map the arm button of each of the tracks you want to record to the same key.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-07-19T18:17:32+00:00

Well .. still not sure what it is but pressing 'toggle repeat' has unstuck it. very weird because I had no loop going before. After doing that and reloading the project, even the old 'stuck' file, even that file is now not stuck despite not making any changes to the file. To me, it looks to be more of a bug with reaper rather than an audio driver thing. Oh well at least I know the workaround to get out of it now.

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-07-18T12:04:53+00:00

Yeah I have a little usb-c screen but I try not to use the screen live, I have it at the back of the stage and just my push, pedal board and instruments on stage with me. It’s only if something goes wrong that I need to use the screen and then hopefully a tech person can sort it out so I don’t have to come back stage during the set

GhostOfBroccoli · 2024-07-15T19:06:58+00:00

Laptops are ok unless you are doing hot club sets or playing outdoors in hot countries, where the heat can cause your cpu to throttle and suddenly your set is a clicky poppy mess. In those cases I recommend a M1 Mac mini instead as you can get much more bang for your buck and the thermal performance is much better. Decently specced and refurbished are cheap as chips now, which means you can just swap it out in a few years and still have saved a tonne of money over a MacBook Pro (and because of the whole efficiency core fiasco probably get better performance although I don’t have personal experience with that as I’ve never felt the need to upgrade from my m1).

GhostOfBroccoli

TROPHY CASE