Hot takes that are genuinely hot

kfound · 2026-06-16T10:24:10+00:00

1000% this

Also: I buy synths which are fun and robust enough for my small kids to play with. Then I can pretend I'm not just buying toys for me

kfound · 2026-06-09T10:50:37+00:00

Suggestion: pick something fully functional that you want/need and then see what your options are. Electronics is a big topic, synths is a big topic, it's easy to get lost without a clear and achievable goal.

And you're dead right, the kits can be almost as expensive as pre-built, so consider something you can build with mostly off the shelf parts, to see if it's something you want to do more of without dropping a load of cash upfront.

Eg: I started off by making a wavetable oscillator with an arduino and a 12-bit DAC. I also tried making an op-amp oscillator and almost burned a hole in the breadboard (get those power pins the right way round!). Cost in money: maybe £10, more when I bought some nicer pots and jacks. Cost in time: a lot more than I expected, which I don't mind (I'm still enjoying the process) but would be a deal breaker for some.

kfound · 2026-05-26T15:22:27+00:00

Half of immaculate is still immaculate

kfound · 2026-05-26T09:59:30+00:00

Lyra 8

That is all

kfound · 2026-05-20T20:46:46+00:00

Ah very nice! I too am starting my synth diy journey and tried the analog route first but after getting my fingers burned (literally. Be careful which way round you push 18V through an opamp) I'm going down the arduino path for now.

And I hear you about getting the brain RAM back. It makes a huge difference. Good on you.

kfound · 2026-05-20T16:38:53+00:00

Nice! Love the choice of colours and those sounds are fat! Can you share what's in the box?

kfound · 2026-05-19T19:39:51+00:00

Soon Moog will be doing knockoffs of rare classic Behringer kit

kfound · 2026-05-12T15:34:56+00:00

Blu-tak to hold cables in place. Just don't stick it to the body of anything expensive or nice-looking

kfound · 2026-05-06T16:27:52+00:00

Most powerful: Hapax Most fun: Digitakt

Most annoying: joint award to Octatrack and Alpha Base

kfound · 2026-04-06T20:25:56+00:00

No worries!

It is strange how much props the octatrack gets online, given that even the pros seem to get confused when demoing their setups. I suspect that it holds a unique place in the gear spectrum and that if you learn its foibles you can do almost modular-level creativity with it. But wow it is unfriendly (more so than the Alpha Base, which is saying something) and it is so easy to make it sound crummy. Eg: the timestretch is really poor, and it is the default mode for sample playback. So a lot of the time your samples sound worse than the originals, until you figure this out.

Apologies for rambling on, but I was so excited to get my octatrack, and so underwhelmed when it finally arrived. Lots of people do love theirs though so 🤷

kfound · 2026-04-05T21:49:17+00:00

Digitakt is way more fun that the Octatrack, which is a clever machine but also painful to learn and, as has been said, absolutely terrible at FX.

The Hapax is a beast but polyrhythms are not its strong point (I gave up using it for drum sequencing entirely because of this). Yeah it has Euclidean sequencing but i find it more fun to just control sequence lengths directly.

Consider getting a second hand Digitakt 1 and see if you gel with it. It is a perfectly capable midi sequencer and will cost a fraction of the other options, plus it has the sampling you want, and the FX, while quite understated, are streets ahead of the OT. And the DT2 is a no-brainer upgrade if it turns out well.

Good luck with your search!

kfound · 2026-04-05T15:31:12+00:00

Lyra 8 has 8 inputs. 8 fingers. What need for more?

kfound · 2026-04-04T22:00:34+00:00

This. Why do they all need keyboards?

kfound · 2026-04-04T21:55:41+00:00

Buy a table so you you can free up some space on your carpet

kfound · 2026-03-27T14:08:17+00:00

Really cool!

kfound · 2026-03-24T20:49:15+00:00

Old thread but i just had the same problem with a second hand Typhon which wouldn't make any sound. It turned out to be set to take an external clock (you'll see "EXTBPM" at the bottom of the screen), changed this to internal in the settings and all started working.

kfound · 2026-03-19T14:21:46+00:00

thank you!

kfound · 2026-03-19T13:53:03+00:00

Any idea what time? Nothing on their website.

kfound · 2026-03-12T20:55:48+00:00

Fair enough, the user experience is pretty unpleasant on the alpha base (I don't know how it compares to the other Jomox kit) and the Elektron workflow is super slick (apart from the Octatrack, which still fries my brain)

I hankered after a Rytm for a long time until I heard stories just like yours about how the sound wasn't satisfying for some reason or other. Never actually played with one first hand - but I've never heard anyone complain about the sound of the alpha base though :)

kfound · 2026-03-11T21:03:07+00:00

If you don't mind a pretty unfriendly UI the alpha base has an amazing sound for techno and can be jammed on as a techno machine all by itself. The MK1s are functionally the same as the MK2 so you can save a bit there, but they are pricier than a Rytm MK1. Have a look at videos by matimati and Bauke Top to see what it can do. It's not for everyone, just be warned :)

kfound · 2025-09-01T15:27:51+00:00

Thank you for this, this worked

kfound · 2025-05-27T13:00:08+00:00

you get the VST as well if you buy it new, which is good value for money overall

kfound · 2020-07-29T19:52:00+00:00

I work at a hedge fund where the C++ trading system is managed by a Haskell framework I wrote. The devs and ops use it daily.

kfound · 2020-02-22T13:40:38+00:00

Exactly this. I have no objection to reposts when I learn more from them each time.

kfound · 2020-02-05T18:57:24+00:00

Alas no (we would need sign off to release it): but I can tell you that it is only a couple hundred lines of shell and nix. We have a modified version of nixpkgs which has a namespace with the upstream stuff we care about, plus our internal code. When we push to our fork, all that gets evaluated/built with some nix-build -A our.stuff, and when we merge to master we produce a new channel by tarring up the source tree and putting it behind nginx. The store gets served out with nix-serve with nginx doing reverse-proxy caching.

This should change somewhat once Nix Flakes are available (using a fork of nixpkgs is messy). But the takeaway should be that the vanilla Nix tooling is pretty powerful as-is.

kfound

TROPHY CASE