Sometimes, when I open the browser app on my smartphone, I start typing an url and instead of www-something I make a typo and get eww-something.

And I think this is a fitting description of what the internet and the world is right now.

So you missed me playing at this years GPN24? Or you saw me and want to repeat that? Then I have good news, because I'm gonna play this september at #mrmcd26

Wanna know what to expect? Here's the video of my performance at GPN: https://makertube.net/w/kjMQaaWVVr9oFNsPW5P8Yy

Wanna know when my slot is? Yeah, me too. I'll let you know when I know. 😅

Nur falls es keiner mitbekommt: Die KfW-Förderung für Wärmepumpen wird gerade kaputt gemacht, bevor Menschen sie noch nutzen um ihre Gasheizung zu sanieren. Also jetzt gerade! Wenn ihr Förderanträge einreichen wollt, müsst ihr das bis morgen Mittag getan haben!

Allright, to everyone who saw Phentr0pulse at #gpn24 or missed my performance: Here is the video I recorded. Contains: Comments, audience reactions, me cursing over hihat chokegroup settings and mobile phone videos: https://makertube.net/w/kjMQaaWVVr9oFNsPW5P8Yy

The video is ready for 2 weeks now but I had to put serious work into the subtitle comments. I wanted this to be the video I'd loved to watch when I started with all this and had no idea what I'm doing. So: Enjoy!!

I just had "the talk" with my 9yo. He came to me asking "Dad, why does AI use so much water just for generating one answer?"

So I explained to him how LLM works, how GenAI came out of that and why AI is a marketing term and absolutely wrong in that context.

Then I loaded GPT4All on my laptop and asked the thing what the result of 9+7 is. It took my poor laptop cpu 12 seconds to come up with an answer and another 12 seconds to generate the sentence with the answer. I showed him how fast kcalc (using the CPUs ALU functions) comes up with the answer for that specific question.

And then I asked a followup question, which almost take 2 minutes to compute. I showed him how the previous question and its answer became part of the prompt which made the calculation longer more complicated just to emulate a dialoge.

He noticed that my laptops CPU fan stepped up and started to roar to get rid of the core heat. Then I explained to him how AI datacenters solve all this ineffitiency by running millions of servers in parallel and how this generates so much heat that it "uses" cooling water by just boiling it until it vapourizes.

I then explained the current business model and how the companies currently burn through their cash to be the last one standing on the market when everyone else dropped out or became bankrupt. What we user pay for using this and what we actually would have to (and in the future probably will) pay for this service.

Needless to say, my kid is not a big fan now.

And it is done! My complete livejam set from #GPN24 here for you to listen: https://funkwhale.apps.phentr0pulse.de/library/tracks/13/

Here's proof, the file exists! Mate bottle and cat in background not included. I already drank the mate and the floofy furball is my snuggleboi!

Everyone, good news! I did not fuck up the recording from my #gpn24 livejam. I still don't know why I had muddy garbage on my headphones, maybe the signal between the monitoring path and the headphone port got inverted and created artefacts. I don't know. But I'm listening to the entire thing for over an hour now and it sounds good! I will clean it up for release in the next days.

I also had a camera pointed at the drum computer for the entire time. My idea was to combine the audio recording with the video to make visible what my hands do. Maybe I also add comments via subtitle to explain a few confusing situations I had when fighting the hihat choke group. 😅

@nflux
But my face must have been priceless yesterday: "There are four buttons lit, but I can only hear one open hihat! Wtf?" 🤣

@nflux oh, one thing I noticed about the TR8S yesterday somewhere mid-set: I need to disable the hihat choke group. At one point I muted closed hihat and unmuted open hihat. And with that I mean that I didn't use the mute-button function but I just pulled the fader to zero.

With the fader down, the closed hihat still chokes the open hihat. And since the TR8S cuts the sample where the analoge drum machines (and the T-8!) would generate a mixed sound of closed and open hihat, I suddenly had some muted open hihats and it took me a few seconds to understand why.

I realize now that I use this sound way too often and that I'm missing this third sound as a feature... What I sometimes do is using a closed hihat to cut the decay of the open hihat before that. And on the TR8S I could just twist the pod to reduce the open hihats decay, so I don't need the choke feature to do this. Which means it causes more trouble in my workflow than good. And therefore it has to go. Thankfully we can just switch it off. 😅

Since the zoom recorder was between the mixer and my headphones I expect the recording being shit. I pray but I'm too scared to check. We have everything on video and a few photos as well. Let's hope there's sound, too.

HOLY SHIT! I had only mud on my headphones but people were dancing and people were applauding afterwards and cheering. Holy shit! People ENJOYED this!! What did I do??

Sorry, give me a second.

I envy everyone here who holds talks and goes on stage to make music here at #gpn24 like it's a natural thing for them. I ran from panic to panic since this morning. I don't want to call it panic attack because I'm "just" trembling and feel very unwell and I know from myself: This is nothing compared to the real thing.

It's under 2 hours until it's go time and I think I prepared everything so far just fine. I'm calming down, enjoying a talk right now and try not to think about what will happen.

I'm sure next time I will be as relaxed as the forementioned people. But not this time.

Also I need to point this out: This will be a random generated set. The idea is: Switch to the T-8s 303 BASS channel, push Shift-A a few times until either 8 or 16 LEDs (or 5 or 6 or 9 or whatever polymetric pattern you feel could be cool) are lit, then unmute it, listen to the ideas that come from a bunch of randomly generated notes and start punching in beat patterns into the drum computer. Tweak filter settings to unfold the melody, tweak reverb and delay to build a room and hit it hard with your beat. Until it gets boring or you feel you archieved everything. Fade out (or use the delay as buffer), make sure the 303 is on mute and hit Shift-A again as much as you like. Fade it, alter the Beat, rinse and repeat.

...and never hit Shift-A and G# at the same time with your fat fingers or the T-8 crashes because Roland didn't fix this bug (that I reported and got confirmed last year) yet... 😅

Not sure if I have posted the event link here yet, but: In about one week I'm going to play a set at the Gulaschprogrammiernacht #GPN24 in Karlsruhe. https://cfp.gulas.ch/gpn24-lounge/talk/MCXXDV/

I will be on stage next weeks saturday, 06.06. starting at 18:00 and uh, it will be the first time I officially play for 90min. I tried this a few times now and I start to feel comfortable with the idea.

This is not final yet but I plan to come up with a Roland Tr-8S, a Roland Aira Compact T-8, a Korg NTS-3 Kaoss Pad multieffect device and a Sim'n Tonic Nome 1 (former Midronome) midi clock. I'm also going to put in my Zoom H1n recorder so that we have something to listen to later and if I have room left on my desk, I will also set up my Novation Circuit Tracks and the Roland Aira Compact S-1 to perform a Song or two from the Monotonic album, but that's only if there's room.

The WOC stage is outside, next to the food tent, which means you don't need a ticket to see me. Just come to the ZKM. But if you want and you're lucky, there might be day passes left so that you could go watch hacker do hacky things, see a talk about hacky stuff or just enjoy a very large number of neurodivergent and friendly freaks being themselves. 🥰

I think I can do 60 or even 90 minutes without fucking up too much. I have a plan b in case I crash the T8 and have to reboot it mid-set. The T8 audio is plugged into the Tr-8S external input (and I just remember I need to set up the postfader gain there, too, so that I can crank the external knob all the way up, too). Means if I have to reboot it, I put the external fader to zero, switch the thing off, start my Tr-8S solo part and switch the T8 back on. Since the input fader is set to zero, this will produce no popping sounds. Then I use the midi clocks re-sync feature. The midi clock knows when the 4th bar finished and when the re-sync is activated, it will send a Midi Clock Stop-signal at the end of the 4th bar and a Midi Clock Start-signal right afterwards. You can't hear that everything stopped and started together all over again, but this will make the T-8 sequencer play together with the Tr-8S again. It's a cool feature and I use it quite often when switching from a polymetric pattern back to a 8- or 16-step pattern.

Anyway, that is my plan to unfuck the T-8, in case I trigger the input bug that lets the UI crash...

I prepared the gear for my upcoming set. I had to fight a bit with noise but with a bit of trial and error I found a solution by grouping the synths on two powerbanks. The cabling looks nasty but after I took the picture I used velco strips to bibd everything together into one single cable tree. If I put down the gear as seen here and drap the cable tree around it, I just have to plug everything in and that's it.

In my homemade sets I manually finetune the mix, but for my stage set I prepared the postfader gain settings to set the mix so that I can push the fader all the way up without being too loud or too silent.

My goal is to be able to set everything up in a short time and being able to start playing without having to correct the mix all too much.

Oh my god, it is really happening. Today I got my GPN timeslot assigned. I'm going to post it after I clarified a few things. But this is so going to happen.

Anyone of the synth people with stage experience, what are you recommendations? What should I prepare for and what do I need to keep in mind when playing DAWless on a real PA (and not some battery-powered bluetooth speakers with line in)? It's my first time on stage and I don't want to fuck it up.

After a year... I finally updated my project blog: https://www.phentr0pulse.de/blog/me-in-2026/

Let's see how this will turn out. I just hope I "only" have to be afraid to loose my job during the planned staff layoffs (we don't know who has to go but we know 50% of us will be fired, so it's a coin flip). No digging graves for pets this year please, I can't handle that anymore!

Everybody! Quickly, gather around!!

Okay, listen, I want to be cool about it. Really cool. But deep inside of this old man is right now a giggly teenager escalating because they TOOK MY APPLICATION!! I'm gonna play a liveset at the GPN in ...oh shit 3 weeks from now??!? Calm down, calm down. Everybody... carry on and... stay cool about it, okay? We're cool. Like 0° Kelvin cool.

Cool.

SQUEEEEEEEE!!!! 🤩