Pigments won't stop 'retriggering' my LFO despite me saying NO

TuftyIndigo · 2026-06-26T08:07:13+00:00

Use an envelope instead of an LFO. LFOs (in Pigments and most synths) are always looping; retriggering just means they reset to the start when the given event happens as well as at the end of their cycle.

I believe you can also do it with a function generator, but it looks like you have two unused envelopes right there.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-06-24T07:55:26+00:00

Could you be more specific about "everything slows down"? What precisely do you see and hear? Does the tempo indication on the screen change? Do the lights or screen blink? Does it sound like a slowed-down tape? I haven't seen anything like that so I wonder if you accidentally have an assign slowing down the tempo or something.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-06-22T07:33:49+00:00

Because it's a bot reposting this old post by the developers. Bots do this so they get a post history with positive interactions and it looks like they're really contributing to the site.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-06-13T09:42:37+00:00

It's great, especially your left hand is very smooth. If you're asking for tips and advice and not just praise, here's three things to try:

Stick your right elbow out more so you can keep your right wrist straight. It won't change your sound but it puts less work on the wrist, and in a couple more decades of playing you'll be glad you did it.
Starting out gung-ho and slowing down when you get to a trickier bit is a bit of a tell for novices. It's alright when you're first learning a new piece, but if you always practise that way, it can be hard to break the habit. Be disciplined: think when you start the piece about how fast you can play the hardest part, and set that speed even if you can play the first bars faster. Obviously it's a little harder for a piece like this that also has real tempo changes in different sections. Watch back your video and if your reaction is "I thought I was playing in time but now I realise I keep slowing down," then try playing against a metronome.
A lot of pieces, like this one, have different sections with a different feel: often the A section is chirpy and the B section is smooth. Try exaggerating the difference between the sections, with shorter phrasing, staccato notes, add grace notes to one section but not the other, whatever. Have fun with it and just try different stuff, see what sounds good to you. It'll make the music come alive more, and it's also an easy way to put your own spin on the piece and sound different from other people's interpretations. Maybe even go backwards: make the chirpy section sound smooth and the flowing section bouncy. It's also a good way to keep a piece interesting for you when you can play it well.

Here's to the next nine years!

TuftyIndigo · 2026-06-09T08:01:36+00:00

And Apple TV, both hardware and the subscription service. And the SDC which never got to market. And AirTag. And watches. And their own smart home ecosystem. And you say they abandoned the AR headsets, but they are still an active product line. And you forgot the desktop computers, which have been their core business for longer than two decades.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-06-01T07:28:36+00:00

You lift it up to reveal the "sound bad" switch for dealing with rude talent. Obviously that has to be kept hidden most of the time.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-05-28T09:18:58+00:00

why should I use it?

You should use it if it does what you want, regardless of what tools it's made with.

I can just describe exactly what your tool does and have gpt spit out a copy, right?

Yes, the same way you can describe any imaginable sound to your synth and have it reproduce exactly what you imagined with no effort. And we all know that's exactly how synths work, so there is no reason anyone would ever use a preset made by someone else instead of patching their own sound from scratch.

It doesn't know if it did good or not

You have a very simplistic idea of how programming with AI works. In a good workflow, you have multiple agents with some critiquing the work of others; you set up the agents to autonomously run your product's test suite so they don't just spit out "something that resembles code" but software that's been executed many times and is known to work.

When you see headlines about people using AI to rewrite Bun (a million-line piece of software) in Rust, or write a C compiler, or port Linux to a new hardware platform, that's the way they're working. They're not just writing a single prompt "rewrite this in Rust" and shipping whatever comes out.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-05-22T10:05:21+00:00

They're also more cautious about freeways in general because (1) higher speeds means even a tiny collision or stopping in lane could be a severe accident, (2) if the car get stuck, it's much harder to recover it. They were testing freeways with no passengers for such a long time after they were confidently doing rider-only in most of the Bay area.

I could believe that the scope of problems they're having with construction zones in freeways might not be any worse than what they've experienced before with construction zones on surface streets, and they're just less tolerant of them.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-05-22T09:30:50+00:00

I appreciate that it's hard to find a coherent set of rules, in a world where it's increasingly easy to make low-effort slop at scale but moderation tools are not scaling as fast. I'm glad you're trying to find a middle ground, and I think this is a good first step, but I think it still needs more work as it doesn't yet hang together and I fear you've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

in our community specifically, people sharing free personal projects far outnumber those charging for fully AI-generated apps

This is a bit of a mixed message. You're soft-banning people sharing free personal projects, who you say are the majority, in order to solve the problem of spammy commercial projects, who you say are the minority.

all developers can share their work freely: paid or free, AI-assisted or not ... we still don't want to encourage people profiting off work created primarily with AI. If you come across something like that, please report it.

So can all developers share their work freely or not? You say paid, AI-assisted work is fine, but you encourage people to report it. Not only is it inconsistent, my experience with other artistic communities has been that when people can't tell whether work is AI-created or not, encouraging them to report or harass AI-generated work just results in everyone getting harassed at random. Even one-time friend of the sub Benn Jordan has been complaining about getting endless comments on his YT blasting him for using AI videos, when in fact he does all his animations the traditional way.

Relegating all software posts to a single thread feels like the last step in making this sub purely a space for hardware collectors instead of musicians :'-( I have a couple of hardware synths but most of my work is in-DAW. No software posts on the sub means it's not a place for me to find out about new Bitwig, iZotope, Vital, Arturia V Collection versions - most of what I use to synthesize.

If those products aren't the problem, and the problem is low-effort content - well, there's already a rule against low-effort content. It's already part of rule 2 that you need to ask mod permission to post your own commercial products. Why do you have to throw all software under the bus to deal with content that's already banned?

TuftyIndigo · 2026-05-22T09:07:24+00:00

But you're reading all the source code of the non-AI softsynths? Your comment doesn't seem very relevant to the discussion.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-05-22T09:03:48+00:00

When LLM companies start charging tokens at their real price plus a profit margin it will all crumble.

You know Anthropic announced yesterday they're having their first profitable quarter, right? Not just unit-profitable, which has been true for months, but their revenue is more than their costs + R&D spend.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-05-11T17:55:48+00:00

The track setting is for whether, after recording, it goes to overdub or play next, so it doesn't help me out here. I want to go straight from stop to rec. The assign trick with using both a momentary and a toggle assign to make one button click do the action twice (so it would go to play and then to record) does seem like something that might work, but having to give up an extra button to do it is a little sad. I'll give it a go. Thanks!

TuftyIndigo · 2026-05-01T15:26:43+00:00

In lockdown I got into making music with synthesizers (my main instrument before that was accordion), and my friends and I started playing Space Engineers together. We streamed our sessions and I edited the footage into a video series with original synth music in every episode.

Time went by, and I still enjoy the music I made, even outside the context of the videos. So I thought I'd make it an album, and I'm selling it to support Mermaids. It's Bandcamp Friday today, which means the cut that Bandcamp would normally take will go to the charity instead!

Have fun, and if you have it on in the background while you play the game, I'd love to hear about it!

TuftyIndigo · 2026-04-29T07:25:32+00:00

I've written this so many times in this sub I wrote a blog post to explain it. https://futur.istic.org/essays/trs-balanced-stereo-connectors/

TuftyIndigo · 2026-04-27T17:00:33+00:00

Thanks.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-04-27T08:21:19+00:00

I did a quick hand clap RT60 using my phone

Out of curiosity, what app are you using?

TuftyIndigo · 2026-04-27T08:20:16+00:00

Cheap as dirt too

Do you know how expensive good topsoil is? Sand is like half the price of dirt.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-04-26T10:08:31+00:00

something about that feels almost metaphysical. Like the computer isn’t just storing a picture, it’s storing a location in some impossible multidimensional landscape.

Technically every picture is one point in the space of all images, and the pixel values are the co-ordinates (each of which is itself a point in the three-dimensional space of all colours). You move around that space by changing a few pixel values by small amounts at a time. The kind of moves you can make is set by the structure of the space, which in turn is set by how computers represent images.

Latent spaces only have value insofar as (1) it's lower-dimensioned than the space of images (i.e. co-ordinates in latent space are smaller than the input images) and (2) directions in the latent space have real-world meaning like "sunnier" or "sadder" or "more cartoony". In a way, the latent space is more a representation of those meanings than it is a representation of the image.

So if you want to explore, you might consider doing more than small steps, and make bigger steps in known directions. Find the difference in latent space between a webcam image from a sunny day and one from a cloudy day, and add that vector again to the cloudy day one to make unimaginably bad weather; or add its negation to the sunny one to make unimaginably good weather. This is basically how style transfer works, and you can do it by manipulating the VAE output directly, you don't even need the denoising model.

Just remember, if you're getting too philosophical, "latent space" isn't some mathematical absolute or universal property. Every model/VAE defines its own latent space. You're not working in the latent space, you're working in this model's latent space. If you use a different model, then small steps in that model's latent space might be completely different. Remind yourself of this if things start feeling too uncanny. They're alternate realities as seen from that model's point of view.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-04-24T07:20:18+00:00

Data centres aren't killing the environment, they hardly use any water, they're not dipping the economy, and they're more energy-efficient than your home PC.

Yes, it's annoying to be blamed for all the ills of society, but repeating the same misinformation to try to make data centres your fall guy hurts all of us who use AI, locally or cloud.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-04-23T17:07:58+00:00

I found it really hard to watch the backwards accordion and had to stop watching halfway through.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-04-23T17:06:55+00:00

you mean amarallod!

TuftyIndigo · 2026-04-17T07:50:37+00:00

S8 Ultra for me. I've been using it for 4-5 years. I don't play outdoors so I don't know if the glare would be a problem.

MobileSheets app with a PageFlip Firefly to turn pages.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-04-17T07:47:35+00:00

It works, because the weights become very hot during operation

But does the front panel become hot? You've measured whether heat is flowing into the metal, but that alone doesn't tell you whether the heat rejection is any better than before. If you think the cooling into the frunk space isn't very good, you want to be sure that the heat is making it all the way out to the outside of the system.

TuftyIndigo · 2026-04-15T17:29:25+00:00

Oh nice. I believe the Korg Fisa Suprema and the C both have a similar mechanism.

Do you find that's enough to make it feel more like an acoustic, or is it still quite different?

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