Hi Gerald, I guess you are right in pretty much all of your arguments. Its just that I don’t really enjoy using the computer for making sounds so much - as soon as there’s super precise control over frequencies and gain etc, I want to use it, and I get completely lost in all the options. I also don’t use any sample libraries (except for your standard drum machine samples…), I mostly just sample from records or resample my gear.
Basically, I have this theory of the Digital Divide, that House and Techno (which is basically the music I make) really changed once people started to do most of the work in DAWs, because you can be much more detailed and have access to technology that before, only very few had. So the production value in music mixed in the computer tends to be much higher, but for me, there’s a real lack of personality and excitement, which is maybe just my starry-eyed interpretation of the shortcomings of available technology. That is of course a gross generalisation, I am not meaning to say everything that’s done on a computer is bad! But limitations spur creativity.
I totally get that. I went down the whole computer music rabbit hole when it first came out. I built my first midi box the old midi box 64 on the pic to have a knob box as the mouse got to be exhausting, limiting and I really missed the hands on part. A good sampler is the only thing that is really missing from the midi box platform. That said I am also aware of the cost in time and effort to build create something that the big manufacturers are already building ie maschine. Good luck on what you decide if you fine the time to work on the tsunami it looks to be a really good project. There are boards for the sega chips too. You could build a sampler around them as well. that project is in the works a bit last I looked at it but it sounded like it would play samples if you set them in the sega format.
What about the korg electribes the newer 2 S? The new roland tr-8s also is supposed to let you load your own samples if you are mostly working with drum samples. There is also the https://modularaddict.com/bastl-microgranny2-kit. Their site looks to be dead but code page might be helpful if someone was wanting to get something going on midi box platform: https://github.com/bastl-instruments/microGranny2
Well, the Tsunami does work already, it’s just much more limited in what it can do when you are only using MIDI commands. Most of the cool features are via serial, and routing is fairly restrictively set via the sample name. It also only responds to one MIDI channel, with PCs to switch “banks” of 128 possible assignments. I built mine into a tin box with 8 sockets for the outputs as a temporary solution. This Microgranny thing looks pretty cool, but probably more for experimental stuff, it’s monophonic, too.
I just kinda like the idea of having everything centrally sequenced by the MBSeq, so I don’t want to add other machines with their own sequencers, but rather a plethora of small modules scattered around it!