BIT-101
Bill Gates touched my MacBook Pro
In my 2024 retrospective I mentioned wanting to create some finished songs and put them out there in the world. And I suspected that the #jamuary project might be a way to do so without worrying about the songs being too polished. “Hey, it’s just a jam!”
Well this has worked out well - way beyond what I imagined. To date I’ve put out I think seven (SEVEN) songs! And they are all masterpieces. NOT. But some of them are OK in my opinion. Most of all, I’m just having a ton of fun doing this. I’m probably a bit obsessed to be honest.
Something just clicked this month. It’s been a couple of years that I’ve been dipping my toes in and out of trying to learn a bit of music here and there. SuperCollider, LMMS, Ardour, Ableton Live, various hardware synths and MIDI controllers, Reaper, other apps, various books, courses, videos, etc.
And then…
The day before New Years Eve, I woke up not feeling good. By noon I had a fever, by dinner time I had tested positive for Covid. My first bout with it, so I can’t complain, but It knocked me down and kept me down for most of a week. During some moments of lucidity though I was watching some Youtube videos and stumbled upon this:
I had played with some trackers in the 80s on my Amiga and dabbled with them a few times since. But I saw Renoise mentioned in there and it was something I’d heard of more recently. It’s a modern tracker. In fact, it’s fair to say that it’s a full fledged DAW (digital audio workstation) that happens to have a tracker interface. You can use high res samples and just about any kind of synth or effect plugins via VST and other standards. MIDI in and out. Which is to say, it’s not just chiptune stuff.
On the first day messing with it, I managed to put together a full jam that I actually really liked and felt good enough to release.
Over the next week or so, I banged out another couple of songs. The tracker technique just really seemed to work for me.
Having realized that the tracker paradigm gave me super powers, my attention went to a device that I’d been eyeing off and on for months. The Dirtywave M8.
This is a small, gorgeous looking device, machined aluminum case, display panel, and all of eight keys. Basically a handheld tracker.
There are other hardware trackers such as the Polyend Tracker and Polyend Tracker Mini.
The full size Polyend Tracker is definitely a desktop device. The Mini is also large in comparison to the M8:
Here’s a screenshot from a video which shows the sizes more clearly. (This shows the first model of the M8, which is a bit different than the model 2, but the same size.)
The M8 is just so much more compact and portable. Something you can jam with on the train or at a restaurant or a park and most people would just think you were on your phone or playing some kind of game. The Mini is more like a very thick iPad. It doesn’t hurt that the M8 is a bit cheaper too.
The M8 has its history in software that was created for the GameBoy, called LSDJ (short for Little Sound DJ).
One of the brilliant things about LSDJ and the M8 is that little menu you see in the bottom left. Each one of the letters represents a particular screen in the overall system. So you can use the left and right arrow controls to go from Song, through Chain, Phrase, Instrument, and Table. Each of those main screens usually offer an up and down option for other screens as well. You can see on the Song screen there that you can go up to Program, or down to Groove.
But the other wonderful thing about the M8 is that there is a freely available version of the software that you can download and run on a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller, which you can pick up for around $30. This is a headless version of the software, so you need to run something else on a computer or other device to get a display, sound, keyboard and midi input/output.
One might think that offering the software for free might cut into sales of the hardware device, but after just a day of playing with the headless version, I was committed to buying a real M8.
I won’t go into the details of how the M8 works or how to set up the headless version, but awesome-m8 should answer all of your questions.
I got a 3d printed case made for my Teensy board (thanks Luke!), and its pretty much permanently been dangling off my computer for the past week. And I’ve already put out a few jams/songs that were done on it. This is the most fun I’ve had making music ever. I can’t wait to get the real thing.
One final update on the subject of making noise.
Now that I’m making music(al sounds) that I’m not afraid to share with others, I’ve been thinking about how best to share them. Last year I set up a SoundCloud account and I’ve been putting stuff up there. But the free plan is limited in space. I’m not close to quota and a paid account is not that bad if I get there, so I might eventually do that. There’s Bandcamp, but that’s mostly about selling music, and I’m not even thinking that way yet.
A few months ago I heard of Faircamp. This is obviously a response to Bandcamp and some changes that happened there last year. But it’s software that creates a static site for your music. I could do this with Hugo (like this site), but it would be a bit of an investment. So I decided to try Faircamp.
It’s pretty decent! You run the executable and point it at a folder that contains your music, images and some metadata files and it spits out a site. It’s really that simple.
You can run it in preview mode which sets up a local server to view your changes before you publish them. And there’s even a command that will sync your built site to your live server via rsync. It even does all the encoding to whatever formats you tell it to, sets up playlists, rss, embed codes, the whole lot. It’s also got some options for selling your music, thought it’s not a full fledged point-of-sale system. I haven’t actually looked into that side of things because, again, I’m not anywhere near there and may never be.
One thing is that the customization options are limited. You can set up a site theme and individual release themes with a few color options, but not much more beyond that. But it looks pretty good, so for the utter simplicity it offers, I can’t really complain. I would love it if you could include some custom CSS in a future release. Of course, there’s probably a way to do that now, but it would take a bit of hacking.
I had a domain I wasn’t using, keithpeters.org. So… there’s my Faircamp site. KP-BARA is the name I chose for my musical identity, just to keep it a bit differentiated from BIT-101.
I haven’t put up all the stuff I’ve made there. Some I only posted on Mastodon because they were just fun silly things. I guess the ones I put on the site are somewhat worth keeping around. If all goes well, I’ll look back in a year and be embarrassed by them because what I’m making then will be so much better!
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