hexagon5un

I have always admired the "only buy the Deluge if it currently does what you want" ethos. That's emotionally and ethically honest; it's not selling the D to be any more or less than it is. Of course, it doesn't hurt that they are doing more active development on it than any other synth/gear that I've got.

I have learned a lot from the forum. At the same time, I've always wondered what was going on in the FB side, and regretted that I couldn't do Beta b/c of the FB requirement. I'll be taking a photo with my D and sending it in shortly. Hooray!

While I've sometimes picked up cool tricks from the "feature request" zone, it's low signal/noise ratio relative to the tips/tricks/samples that I've gotten from other parts of the forum, and I won't miss it. If it helps the Deluge team focus on getting their stuff done, then I'm all for it. I doubt that they'll all of a sudden stop listening to their user base.

If the change helps us users re-focus our energy on doing the most with what we've got, then it's a win for us too.

This morning, I taught my son what chords are using the Deluge. It was so easy to just say "pick three notes that aren't all next to each other" and have him repeat that experiment, listening to how they sound together and apart as they rolled around the sequence. "Try leaving one gap, try leaving two." I have music theory up the wazoo, but distilling this down to exactly what a 6 yr old needed was just perfect. And we could do it on the sofa, in real time.

Just started playing around with FM on the Deluge. Here's a Solid Bass to start out.

https://gist.github.com/2102bbefc28b4c9057585efba07040a8

And here it in in context: ripping off Orbital's "Halcyon and On" bassline, which was recorded with Solid Bass on a DX100, FWIW.

https://gist.github.com/5fabad4d2fd9684c0ddfea2ab772375f

I actually looped a section from the song in an Audio track, and A/B'ed these until it sounded about right. They may have used distortion / compression on their track? Or maybe it's just old tape. It sounds a tad more saturated.

It's a super simple patch. It's basically OSC1 <- MOD1 <- MOD2+feedback. OSC1 is on ENV1, and the modulators are on ENV2: they make the growl.

The default knobs have the MOD1 and MOD2 levels on the parameter knobs where cutoff and resonance normally are, and you should definitely have a play around with them to tweak the sound to taste. The "cutoff" is OSC1, which sets the basic level of modulation, and "resonance" is OSC2 with feedback, which makes it more or less "metally". They're both super sensitive and the "right" values are pretty close to one LED on for each, so it's a little bit touchy.

I'll post up some more FM sounds as I make them. My main synth is an SY99, so the Deluge feels like a strange/limited FM synth to me, but there are a lot of classic sounds that should be able to fit into this little box. Being able to bang out both a patch and a drum beat and the rest in one night from the couch, without touching a computer, is priceless.

Just saw this:

Deluge at the center, Octatrack for some live effects, and bleepy-bloopies from the modular. And of course, much talent standing behind the boxes.

Jeremy does a lot of playing live on the Deulge, sometimes one-offs, sometimes recording in loops, mostly basslines. He plays the eight audition keys like a short piano, and even pulls off that scrolling-up-and-down glissando trick. He's also got entire kits of 2-bar / 4-bar loops that he'll just dip into and run one or two of for ambience / rhythm in different sections. There's lots to crib here.

He always makes real music, but the other videos he's made with the Deluge, I've felt like he saw it as a hardware DAW / clip-launcher. In this vid, you get the feeling that he's really starting to get the D, and it's awesome. Even though it's sequenced, it's always evolving, and it's live in a way that just unmuting tracks in Ableton Live isn't.

There's a great bit where he bashes in a one-note rhythmic bassline with the audition pad, and then tosses in some octaves here and there on the grid. That's the kind of thing that I love most about the Deluge -- the kind of live sequencing thing. Play a couple lines, record one, tweak in real time, carry on. The sequence as part of the performance.

Anyway, he's still got room to grow. I want to see him "get" the iso keyboard. The audition pads are nice and all, but there's only eight of them, and you know he's got bigger musical ideas. That'll be killer.

(He also gets great mileage out of the Octatrack's two-scene crossfader and heavy/light drum patterns, but I don't really understand that device, and that's for another forum.)

Anyway, great show that really underlines the "Performance Sequencer" side of the D.

I'm not gonna lie. I took a center-positive charger, cut it, flipped the wires over, and soldered it back together, isolated with shrink-wrap. And put a big yellow sticker on it that says Deluge.

Maybe not for you, but maybe you know someone who could do that for you? If not, you need to hang out with more nerds.

Great workflow walkthrough!

You can do the same mark-and-split export thing using labels in Audacity (truly free). Heck, if your audio is clean enough, as it is here, you can auto-split-on-silence and not even have to worry about marking them all up.

Which is just to say, the particulars of software side of things shouldn't prove limiting.

What AOpsyche said!

Kits are good for instantaneous muting of samples, and really shouldn't be thought of as being only for drum samples, IMO.

Some people have longer drones or even entire stems that they like to pop in and out of a live performance. With a kit element, the Deluge lets you mute it, but keeps the sample "rolling" so that it keeps synched with other samples.