💾 Archived View for senders.io › gemlog › 2021-03-18-everything-needs-autosave.gmi captured on 2022-01-08 at 13:39:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I watched a live stream lastnight of a musician I like, Jay Hosking, who makes interesting electronic music. I had some ideas afterwards and decided after work today would setup my drum machine and mess around.
I use the Elektron DigiTakt as my groovebox and brain of my hardware jamming. It is a sampler drum machine and midi controller rolled into one.
I setup the digi on my desk, plugged it into my interface and got to writing. The plan was to use it's per-sample LFOs to mess with certain parameters of each sound. I used a CR-78 drumkit with a few samples for ambiance. I had the LFOs of each track modulate parameters like play direction, the low pass filter, and bit reduction. This caused this pulsating groove.
I built a very basic 4 bar phrase as a sketch and opened up Ardour6 to record it all. I typically record my jams so if I accidentally stumple into something cool I can export it and send it over to my cousin to discuss (he makes actual songs rather than what I do just recording my noodling and practice).
I was able to get a decent 2 minute playthrough of the 2 bar phrase manually triggering certain samples, muting and unmuting samples to build a sense of progression and movement. But in my excitement of finding something actually musical I hit <shift + stop>...
DigiTakt has, at a very narrow control, the ability to erase a pattern. The entire pattern... every step for every sample... gone... in a single shift click.
These days you're so use to everything having some form of recovery built into it. Undo, autosave, some semblence of state management and temporal progression. Not the digiTakt, it has a scratch space you can temporarily save a pattern to without saving over the core file (vim's .swp). But this is something you have to press. It's also a simple shift click <shift + yes>.
I posted on the discord of the musician what I was able to make of the ideas that were discussed in the livestream and a PSA to remember to save your work. It's extra embarassing as a professional software engineer who should know better about the value of saving your work. My default typing position is left hand on WAD and a trigger finger on ctrl+s. I am always saving and yet on the machine that I now I should be saving frequently on I didn't.
Thankfully I had a single take that was usable on my DAW that I could salvage and make _something_ from. I plugged in my guitar and got to work creating some ambiance to the track, which with its cookie-cutter drum beat needed something spicy.
[flac] Lfo Autosave Jam (11MB) (02:01)