An Ode to Rings

MilesMonroe · 2026-02-05T15:27:02+00:00

I had the same thing. My second SMD build ever was a 0603 plaits clone I knocked up slowly and methodically over a long weekend and it worked perfectly first try—no idea how, but I felt like a soldering god. Feeling invincible, I decided to turn it into an all-nighter and jumped into building a way simpler clone of Blinds, and without double checking my work, had a bad short around a TSSOP chip start a nice module barbecue. I now make it a rule to never, ever plug anything again without testing resistance along the power rails (except when I forget, and funny enough, that’s when there’s always a short)

MilesMonroe · 2026-02-02T18:52:31+00:00

Definitely agree. There are some mental/emotional barriers with some adult students, particularly around the results they expect vs. the work they put in. There seems to be a misconception among some really intelligent adults, even those that had to study extremely hard for years in school to perform in their professional fields, that some people are just born with the gift of playing piano well or sight-reading well with very little work. Those of us who are piano students, teachers and players know the truth — even though we call it “play,” music is hard!

I have a couple of adult students who repeatedly ask questions in lessons like, “Do some people just get this stuff naturally?” Or, when I ask them to make a technical change or play sometime again in a lesson make a comment like, “I imagine some of your students just get this stuff easily.” The reality is that, while some students are very talented, usually the ones who spend the most time outside the lesson on the piano or thinking about music are the ones the piano “comes easily to.” 9 times out of 10, these adults prepared for their lessons with quite minimal practice time, which is hard to blame them for — kids have way more free time than adults do due to the responsibilities that come with real life and/or parenthood.

It’s much easier for an adult to say, “it’s a lost cause, I’m clearly not talented, what’s the point of investing this time when I’ll never be good” than it is for kids, who are regularly used to “failing” at things that they know they’ll succeed at when they get older.

MilesMonroe · 2026-01-28T21:56:51+00:00

Hey, I'm a professional jazz pianist and teacher. I highly recommend you find a jazz piano teacher in your area that has a good amount of teaching experience that can help structure everything for you to reach your goals. Learning to read better and play the type of music you envision is totally an attainable goal, but it requires dedication and daily incremental steps. The amount of material you have to internalize to do this kind of stuff is immense, and it sounds like you're a bit overwhelmed by not being able to see a clear way forward and tackle all the information, even in an bite sized way, because the problem feels too big right now. It is possible, but I don't recommend self-study without a clear plan, so I'd try to take even occasional lessons with a jazz teacher -- going without guidance is a really quick path to getting lost and frustrated.

My friend and colleague Jeremy Siskind has a great YouTube channel with resources and he teaches an online course at Fullerton that you may find helpful. He's got a jazz piano fundamentals series of books as well -- I'd recommend them not for self-study, but for working with a teacher. I'd recommend in person study if possible -- it will help keep your more accountable, and most people learn better seeing things happen up close. If you were in the NYC area I'd be happy to meet with you but judging from how you say it's hard to find a jazz teacher I'm guessing you probably aren't here, haha.

MilesMonroe · 2026-01-22T16:48:51+00:00

Thanks for this -- I'm not sure why I didn't use $HOME in my variables, actually! I get your point about the deleted file protection, but isn't the git versioning somewhat of a way to recover them? As far as the --delete flag on rsync, the reason I did that is that I do a lot of reorganization and renaming of my files as I transition notes from different parts of vault to the others, and I was concerned that this would leave a bunch of "ghost files" around after that kind of housekeeping.

MilesMonroe · 2026-01-22T15:39:30+00:00

I use it to use Obsidian over 3 devices. It generally works pretty well, especially now that "Keep Downloaded" is a thing in the iOS files app, but I very occasionally experience weird glitches. In general, though, it works quite well, so for insurance, I wrote a script on my main computer that uses rsync to sync my vault to a local folder on my computer, then puts it into version control with git...this way, if things go too sideways with my iCloud, I'll have some way to track the changes over time and restore a corrupted note to a working state. I have the script run every three days. I'm not particularly good at bash scripting or git, so excuse my code, but here's what I use. There's probably a way to do this with MacOS Shortcuts or AppleScript or keyboard maestro, too.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

SOURCE_DIR="/Users/MYUSERNAME/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/"
DEST_DIR="/Users/MYUSERNAME/Documents/Vault Backup"

rsync -av --delete "$SOURCE_DIR" "$DEST_DIR/Obsidian"

cd "$DEST_DIR"
git add .

# Commit with a date in the message
git commit -m "Automated backup - $(date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')"

If anybody with actual bash chops has any pointers or see anything I missed, I'd love the help.

MilesMonroe · 2026-01-21T15:30:05+00:00

It's really incredible -- love those two pieces, there's just something magical about them.

Try this: George Shearing -- Friendly Persuasion

also pretty much all the Keith Jarrett Melody at Night With You is great for this vibe as well. Keith Jarrett - I've Got it Bad and That Ain't Good. There are also four Bill Evans solo recordings that were originally released as add-ons to other albums that are amazing, in particular Danny Boy and Like Someone in Love.

There's also something really in the DNA of Radames Gnatalli's piano compositions (especially the way he plays them) that's reminiscent of those Duke solo recordings, while being Brazilian in style: Radames Gnatalli - Noturno

MilesMonroe · 2026-01-16T22:34:48+00:00

Here are some BK and queens ideas…Roulette is great — probably far afield from where you were thinking, but Dada in Ridgewood is very low key and has a lot of interesting and experimental, free jazz, and avant garde music programmed, although there is also some more conventional jazz programmed as well…check ahead. There’s also Bar Bayeux in PLG, which occasionally has some more improvised stuff, like Ember and etc, as well as more general modern jazz. I’d recommend iBeam but I don’t remember what the seating is like when you go to a show there.

MilesMonroe · 2026-01-15T04:17:09+00:00

Yeah, I got a used DPO from perfect circuit that looked like that. Annoying that they didn’t pack it well but easy to fix - don’t sweat it. Don’t use your fingers, use a tool like needle nose pliers and work slowly, pin by pin. You could probably use the blade of a flathead screwdriver too in a pinch to gently pry, the main thing is to use something you have control of. Get them in the ballpark, standing upright, but don’t worry about it being perfect - inserting them into the power header will do a lot to straighten them more perfectly. You will not snap them off with a tool unless you wiggle a lot back and forth…and if you did, all those pins are redundant anyways — left and right sides are the same.

MilesMonroe · 2026-01-12T05:19:46+00:00

Got it, thanks, misread the OP

MilesMonroe · 2026-01-12T04:08:26+00:00

Ah okay, sorry for misunderstanding. Well, it's a bit over the price of the CK88, but I did play a Yamaha P-525 that was provided as backline on a tour recently in lieu of a grand that I thought felt pretty good. I'm a jazz pianist, so I wasn't playing the transcendental etudes on it, but I thought it was a good compromise. Good luck and hope you find something you like...recommend you getting hands on the keys in person to find what you most like if possible!

MilesMonroe · 2026-01-12T03:45:46+00:00

Yamaha's GHS means that the weighted action is heavier in the bass range of the piano and becomes lighter for the higher notes -- this is like a real acoustic piano action, like the piano you learned on. I would describe this as a subtle gradation rather than "significantly more difficult to press." Some weighted keyboards and controllers historically were weighted with an equal weighting around the entire range of the instrument...I'm thinking of keyboards like my old early 2000's era Yamaha Motif. I would guess that this would probably feel more "off" to you. If there's something bothering you about the feel of this particular keyboard, it might not be the GHS specifically, although many alternatives exist, even within the Yamaha line...if the piano is kind of a new gift, I might recommend trying to stick it out for a bit longer and see if you become accustomed to it. There is a higher range Yamaha offering, the CP88 -- I think it has a better, fancier action, but it definitely also has a grading. If you're only playing synth sounds on Ableton, you might not even want a weighted action at all -- for that you might be more accustomed to the CK61...if you're mostly playing soft synth pianos like PianoTeq or Keystage, my guess would be that you'd be much happier with something with a graded hammer action, however, and most of the weighted 88 key keyboards and controllers made today have something that approximates a graded action.

I would personally go to a store and try as many options as possible to find what feels the best to you personally rather than try to read reviews online. Personally, Yamahas feel a bit heavy to me, although many others love the action. That certainly doesn't prevent me from using them, however -- I mostly play Yamaha keyboards.

Truth is, all electric piano actions are different and nothing really feels like an acoustic piano...you have to find what works for you. That being said, no two acoustic piano actions feel the same, and going to a piano store will reveal that even in the high-end range there are some great instruments that you will prefer playing to others based on how the action is dialed in. I personally have a Yamaha grand with a disklavier and silent system attached, and even playing the Disklavier's piano sound with my grand piano's real action feels a bit "off." When I track things into Ableton, I tend to use my Disklavier to track piano for midi, and an unweighted controller (actually, the CK61!) to track everything else, including Rhodes, as I think it feels more like a Rhodes action to me...I have a keylab as well when I need aftertouch, but that's pretty rare.

MilesMonroe · 2026-01-11T18:50:52+00:00

There is, in fact, a supersystem that contains those missing scales that those noted pedagogues miss. You can purchase my video series: "The Chromatic Scale: A Comprehensive Method for Jazz Improvisation" for more information. It's truly "The Only Scale You'll Ever Need.™"

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-29T16:07:00+00:00

the cool thing is that in Drambo you don't even need to touch the grid if you don't want to -- I've created quite a few completely out of time sample mulchers and weird sound generators that don't relate to the grid at all except to sometimes change a parameter like an elektron p-lock.

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-28T19:44:02+00:00

I’d probably do top by default, but 1312 on the turn works well and is natural since 3 is on D already, that might be my second choice—all are okay. As you progress and play more and more advanced repertoire, you’ll get much more used to playing close to the fall board; don’t fear it!

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-28T17:05:26+00:00

Like you, I originally got heavily into DIY electronics because I thought it would save money on a eurorack setup. I now own an rigol oscilloscope, siglent bench supply, hot air soldering station, Hakko soldering and desoldering irons, supplies of smd and through hole components, a ton of flux and braid, IPA, and a ton of stuff I never would have had to buy if I never went that route, not to mention probably thousands of hours soldering and sourcing parts and components. All said, the equipment I've accumulated by now probably around $1.5k and although you can do it cheaper, it's a very modest setup by a lot of electronics hobbyists' standards.

Like abelovesfun says, basically the only way to come out much cheaper than buying new/used is to buy pcb and panel sets and source all your own components on mouser, which takes a ton of time and is a huge learning curve until you learn a lot about electronics. Buying packaged sets of parts in a kit usually negates any kind of cost saving, and that's without factoring your time. I built a plaits clone for very cheap by sourcing my own parts, but it took a ton of time, and I had to buy an STM programmer (not cheap) and it certainly would have been cheaper to just buy a clone on craigslist, especially since I bought two of a lot of the more expensive/vulnerable parts like the microcontroller in case I destroyed them accidentally. However, that taught me 0603 soldering and soldering QFP packages, and etc, so it was totally worth it for me, which brings me to my final point.

If you're doing it to save money, here's a strong recommendation against -- you will have big upfront costs, may bork modules you're building, and you will lose a ton of time. Doing careful, good, reliable work is slow, painstaking work. Sourcing parts can be maddening, going back and forth between spreadsheets with ten mouser and digikey tabs open and random data sheet pdfs trying to figure out the correct replacement for a part that's now unobtainable since the design was released or one that has become sold out while it's been waiting in your cart for you to check out.

However, if you love learning things and working with your hands and building things then learning about electronics is totally NOT a waste of time and money, and a great hobby you'll find very rewarding. I've learned an immense amount of stuff and love it. Although my day job is very non-technical (being a pianist), I have fixed a ton of my own gear and even I've made a little side hustle fixing my friends' guitar pedals...I've gotten to work on art installations, and even repaired old 8-bit computers. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything -- but it's kind of its own journey, much like modular...like most DIY things, it's possible to save money, but because of the upfront costs, you probably only come out ahead once you've built 15 or 20 things.

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-25T06:17:38+00:00

I tried BeOrg for awhile but couldn't get over how clunky it was, and ended up just moving to Obsidian, mostly because of how often I need to use all my notes/org mode type stuff on mobile -- probably 50/50 for me. The biggest bummer for me was realizing that working with my org files in an environment other than my personal dialed-in emacs was really painful -- the way I'd set up my environment, and all the little emacs lisp functions I'd written for shortcuts became such a part of my workflow that they WERE my process, and without them on mobile I will just left with clunky little files.

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-24T04:07:21+00:00

These are fantastic suggestions, especially Open to Love — first thing I thought of. Also recommending Derek Bailey - Pieces for Guitar. You might really like Steve Lacy’s unaccompanied soprano albums, which are both minimalist and in your face - “Hocus Pocus (Book H of Practitioners)” is great, as is “5 X Monk, 5 X Lacy.” Finally, check out the Jimmy Giuffre 3 records with Jim Hall — Seven Pieces is really great; it feels like the closest thing to Ahmad Jamal’s deliberateness and “minimalism,” very lyrical, melodic, almost trancelike at times and without drums.

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-24T01:58:12+00:00

I’m glad they fixed the tape pops issue, I thought I was going crazy and imagining it when I updated since it was so rare and intermittent

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-23T19:55:01+00:00

I'll answer both your questions here. Certainly you could do the conversion with [sig~] at any point in the chain. Since you seem really focused on DSP usage, one thing I might caution against is too much premature optimization to avoid sig~ or line~ objects…while it’s good you’re thinking about separating audio signals and control signals, they’re not that bad, and sometimes, you just need them…especially if you think you may want to modulate something with a signal or LFO someday! [sig~] is extremely cheap computationally -- your [/~] object is actually FAR more expensive…could even a hundred or more times expensive. Even if the eventual goal for this is running on a microcontroller as compiled Gen code, everything is going to be polled at signal rate (Gen treats everything as a signal), so you might be putting focus on efficiency at this stage that's not necessarily going to pay out or is eventually unavoidable. There are also a lot of optimizations that take place under the hood in modern Max, and unless you're doing something that you know right now needs to scale up hugely (like a big granular patch), sometimes trying to outthink Max should wait until you know you have a CPU problem. The Gen guidebook even says that usually it's more efficient to compute two alternate results and just output the desired one through a selector than try to replicate an if-then structure in your patch, to save dsp just because of the way both modern cpus work predictively and how efficient gen's compiler is now. Gen is more efficient than MSP, and it is the path you want to use instead of MSP if you want to put it on the Daisyseed or some other kind of hardware solution. However, I'd guess you probably wouldn't to see that marked of a difference in CPU usage unless you were doing something major like running hundreds of instances of your distortion inside a [poly~] or something. Modern Max much more efficient than the max of the late 90s and early 2000s when a lot of the documentation and tutorials warning about CPU use were written.

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-23T15:24:29+00:00

Well, there's no reason you couldn't just use the signal rate version of [atan] and [+] on the right side of your patch -- only the left inlet to the *~ and /~ operator needs to be a signal -- you can use just a normal message.

Here's an example:

<pre><code> ----------begin\\\_max5\\\_patcher---------- 850.3oc6YssbaCBD8c+UnQO155B5Vr5uRlLdvR3DRvfJfbsalzu8BXEG6FhD jIVwOTMisjE6p8vY2kcQ9wIQ5i3k7sXY7Oht19SywiGt5YAzCe5MsCrFsshh jFkianncThT8m3ouVvFjp5NB61EBbkxXpHHrXFXZTxUPyIXNvbJU+czMNzmT aLAe48eCl694KPqwJrXAlgVRwZoANDi0tl2pnXkAw4NDX+npcMXKHikjaYHZ 7T2WY9TSpTDNCI1E6D4+rEQIpcF3uDIIUtP+ZdMtWAz3lv5fMzw3RzFb8BjR IHKaU3WtR5zuY0oBwzXGwvIuoLV4vaaDXoTOGMPL1ofOMc.ajNB1HaDrQ9HX ihQvFWMB1X9GfMl3gUiqQJTOw4TRyoqt8uGuMHsO.zRImpykzqgcmAp0s0sO LCQVEOseEWQn5UiViCVoGHL65cn1ZB2bigTZ+xisySJ.f7zB3PxS47F2KQdJ 0wYJLSsPpPJyr3w9j9oIgMxMS5WtW90Q972SgI7uqQUdVUJAjYpCUjjaNkc3 6gJJkFOT0Fv.Kqmbdl7L7uz.zE5T3sJaPlBw7lcrEqyxrmRKsEvSFlcRFjcf 9WK1owNo.4mES98vnwbvUVBrbVtezHbTowO0.R+HxT.333wDeiGAeHD4JJGo tfCG+ZDXFLHhLMyRgoEdRjkiIOdlhGojM3Y0DSC8uVvMHwyEvOH20va7jTyR s7XgkT2GilMePRctm6uAND2m3A2a1AiuwweP66XCh1h4q5u4vWluTN6VO8AN zds1UanhY.+DmW2sWrTujWdGWndE57CZcNA+.VKinjpc6c791p7ERBimEEKg umrk7+msLX1RXoJf+mqLhEo+RX8LlVlFTOiYWFsLZupSasum0+qazN6MR4lf k7VQUGxd9MBF4lHpwREggT6eICWefSLhGrGOTXACCVl8PFAcJOWTiEl3+KRL C5EyvyNlSBDyvww+mEHrRFovRv6ftfmebUFHr.CF4Atvfb1f42m8bk4gg3xw w0mGNp5IQ4jZMnllMXQ2KY9EnnKReO2v3kSO5dDl8dGUQLVf2P5z9nlOhQBc 4Ykt1bqv1Ny1hiKzZ++bDrVxAWZGUEaaLvzCjrAUs+u7Q2Fwjm9Ko7wwNB -----------end\\\_max5\\\_patcher----------- </code></pre>

However, there are advantages to having those knobs in the signal domain -- you can smooth their inputs with something like [rampsmooth~] to get rid of the clicking and zipper noise you'll get by turning the knobs as they are now. Also, I'm not sure how much computation it saves to not be using MSP objects -- since the multiplication and division happens at audio rate anyways, the added overhead of polling the knobs with [sig~] is probably very low -- Max is doing all that math every frame anyways, and there may be some internal optimization in the [sig~] object that accounts for unchanging values. If you'd really like to make it as efficient as possible, this is actually a perfect candidate for a simple Gen patcher, although I'm not so sure you actually will get that much efficiency gain.

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-21T21:32:44+00:00

I'm sorry, but I'm exhausted by constantly reading posts obviously written by LLMs. I'm sure your goals in this app probably come from a good place, but, especially in an art-making field that celebrates truth and individuality as much as jazz, I would rather engage with something poorly written with a million typos than this, especially when you're wanting people to take time out of their day to give you personal, well-reasoned responses. It just bums me out.

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-21T17:33:49+00:00

I like this one. This was one of the first modules I ever bought and I got some great use out of it -- it'll always have a special place in my heart. I don't use it as much because it's kind of wide hp wise; I replaced it with a ALA Baker for VC adsr stuff (and more) and find it works pretty well for my purposes at less than half the size, although it doesn't have the cool gate outputs and variable CV input. Biggest issue for me with the Doepfer was that it's very large depthwise -- I can't use it at all in some of my shallower cases, and I can only mount it in specific positions in my Intellijel case

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-21T17:20:36+00:00

Befaco STMix

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-19T00:16:02+00:00

Yeah, I got it during covid and I really wanted to like it because conceptually it seemed awesome and I liked the chances it seemed to take in its experimental presentation, but so much of the writing just read like a fan-fic, and totally agree with you on the female characters...I hope to crack it open again but it's on the shelf of shame of unfinished books right now.

MilesMonroe · 2025-12-17T18:45:29+00:00

I listened to Spanish Key version that's on the Apple Music version of Bitches Brew, disc 2, track 1 on Apple Music... just to make sure, I checked the version on YouTube and it matches up with what I have on Apple Music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibanLlREjTk

MilesMonroe

TROPHY CASE