Genuinely interested, if the ' represents skipped letters, how does this read to you?
As an aside, if you have the sentence "This is Lewis' reply to the parent comment" the ' at the end of Lewis is used to avoid Lewis's with the extra s at the end.
I know many musicians who love using Teenage Engineerings products for making music, performing live etc.
However, I do think there is a case to be made for falling into the trap of being more interested in the gear than the thing you're meant to do with the gear.
At the very least, Teenage Engineering hardware is generally very well designed, high quality and built to last. At least this product has some creative spirit behind it. I'm in love with the merge of Medieval and Modern Electronic here!
For an example of excessive consumerism, look no further than the Eurorack[1] space. They don't call it Eurocrack for nothing!
> However, I do think there is a case to be made for falling into the trap of being more interested in the gear than the thing you're meant to do with the gear.
that is literally the intention behind all modern music hardware (eurorack especially) i think. i've been a producer for nearly 20 years and i've still never seen anybody make genuinely good music with any of these things. not even once.
these 30-40 year old "enthusiast" types getting 17 views on their 28 minute "generative ambient jam #236" videos are basically an unlimited cash cow.
Heh I feel called out. I love these kinds of things and don’t publish any music. For me, it’s about the joy of making music. It’s not a performance, it’s a recreational activity. It’s playful.
When I want productive music making, with the intention of publishing, a computer with a DAW is the obvious tool for the job. No question. Hands down.
Still, there are absolutely people who publish fun tracks and perform live with this stuff:
And that’s just the indie fringe. Chvrches uses hardware synths. The Stranger Things soundtrack includes a critical sequence programmed on a modular sequencer for microtonal control. The Weekend’s Dawn FM video album features a Moog One prominently. Taylor Swift performed with a special edition Prophet 12. Etc etc
I'm a 30-40 year old with absolutely no interest in making music, but I want every single thing which crosses my news feed from Teenage Engineering. So yeah, that checks out.
People with the talent/skills/motivation to make music will end up making music with whatever they can get their hands on, and for anyone who doesn't fall into that category, no amount of equipment purchasing will fix it.
OP-1's portability, synth range and 4 track combo seems to have been pretty successful creatively from what I've seen, beyond that they've been extremely limited though. Closest I've seen them come is the OP-Z but a combo of build quality issues and just not getting the idea across very well has crippled it.
There's a decent argument a lot of those people could've achieved the same with some much cheaper 4 track alternative but it probably wouldn't have drawn them in as much.
Pocket Operators are a great fidget toy but the collecting nature of them all is a bit annoying (saying that as someone who bought a bunch of them and only ever really enjoyed 3 of them: 14, 32 and 33). Useless as music outside of maybe an drum beat to improv over from what I can see though?
Have very little issue with them myself though. Even absurd projects like the Choir are kinda neat to me; toys for rich people to burn money on which may result in other people stealing the good bits and making something better and more accessible.
Think whatever this is is a big misstep after the EP-133 done a good job addressing a bunch of their past issues as a business (albeit with a lot of room to improve)
I think you're largely right but man there's some gold in the jams. Here's a 1 minute synth jam video posted to youtube 17 years ago, it still blows me away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8Kiw4aoex4
Of course he's brilliantly talented and became Dorian Concept, to your point.
> and i've still never seen anybody make genuinely good music with any of these things. not even once.
So? Why does that matter?
I have a decent second hand Nord Piano 3 .. I certainly can't make good music on it, but I have fun playing it. Sure, with that kind of instrument I'm sure there's plenty of people making great music on it, but does that matter to me? Not really
I'm willing to bet the overwhelming majority of instruments sold are never used to make genuinely good music. People buy them to challenge themselves, to have fun, to learn new things.
Some instruments are more aimed at that kind of usage rather than actually making good music, and I think it's fair to say that Teenage Engineering stuff falls in that category.
I bought a couple of pocket operators at some point. I found it very fun and challenging to work within the constraints of those devices. I would never use any professional music making software because it's just too overwhelming. But with the Pocket Operator I feel motivated to try making some simple jams and have fun with it. It's never going to become anything serious and that's OK.
Well, probably wouldn't be able to convince you that the artists playing shows using Euroroack (or Elektron, or TE) in front of bigger audiences that you ever have are "genuinely good."
> However, I do think there is a case to be made for falling into the trap of being more interested in the gear than the thing you're meant to do with the gear.
Have you ever met a guitarist[0], or a golfer? I play guitar, and as a teenager I spent _years_ playing a cheap encore guitar plugged into a no-name 15w amp imaginable with a zoom 505 [1]. I practiced for hours upon and hours and sounded awful. Now as an adult, I get to spend some money on the hobby and sound like what I thought I sounded like aged 15!
I played for years, on a cheap, short-scale, Univox bass, and getting a used Rick[0] (don’t judge the hair. It was in style, back then) made a huge difference.
I no longer play, but did get get pretty good. In that case, the tool made the difference (and a buttload of daily practice. I felt I needed to earn the right to play that thing).
But I think everyone knows some rich bastard, that has a handmade bespoke axe, and is absolutely terrible.
I agree 100%. Getting a Gibson was also a game changer for me. Today there is cheaper stuff that is also good quality (but you gotta dig), but back in the day you needed the kind of gear used by pro musicians to actually go the extra mile.
And it's a good observation about bespoke guitars: I feel like the problem is people trying to go beyond that, with the illusion that "even more expensive" will be even better. Then they start buying things that are hella expensive but don't give much more (due to diminishing returns, or sometimes they actually suck, like bad handmade instruments), or doing things like collecting 20, 30, 40 overdrive pedals just to find the "perfect one".
> Today there is cheaper stuff that is also good quality (but you gotta dig)
I think I disagree here - You don't have to dig for cheap and quality anymore. An entry level squier from the last 15 years is sufficient quality for a beginner IMO, and one step up (classic vibe) is firmly into the "instrument for life" territory these days. You only need to upgrade for preference/feel.
I have the luxury of regularly getting to play a Gibon SG from the 70's which has been well maintained. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful instrument in it's own way, but my 2007 MiM strat is a _far_ superior instrument.
To me the biggest change has been to amplifiers. Mid range practice amps now sound passible. Digital modelling is pretty good, and helps keep the volume down. That wasn't true before, most practice amps made guitars sound horrible. I always recommend people spend more on the amp than the guitar. I have a motley collection of cheap guitars and they all sound preety good into my Fender Twin... my Classic Vibe strat (as another commenter said) sounds perfect, as does my homemade Tele with homemade pickups.
Digital Modelling is a game changer. I've got a Helix Stomp XL, and it's replaced every pedal and amp in my house for guitar & bass, _and_ it's smaller than a pedalboard.
Even the Pod Go (which I had before this) is completely usable up to a level where you can absolutely afford to replace it with a helix.
I have an HX Stomp as well, but I'm doing most of my practice lately with a Tonex One, which I got for €150 brand new, and sounds amazing. It's incredible how far we come.
It also reminds me of how a lot of the most coveted guitars, pedals, amps weren't selected by the guitarists who made iconic because they had some sort of secret sauce in them, but literally because they were the cheapest/most convenient thing available at the time.
Also, I love the sound of a good crunchy 15w practise amp. I think one day those old zoom pedals and the Line 6 bean will be highly coveted!
It was like that with Jazzmasters and Big Muffs. And even Les Pauls in the 60s and 80s. They were just cheap and widely available used and out of fashion, but then someone started using it again and the prices just exploded.
I think this can be generalized to any hobby.
When you sorta know you can't really aspire to the art for your own normal limitations, expanding gear knowledge becomes part of the enjoyment, as a sort of surrogate.
Nothing wrong with that, though, as it really keeps the economy of some niche gear producers going for the benefit of everyone! :D
> However, I do think there is a case to be made for falling into the trap of being more interested in the gear than the thing you're meant to do with the gear.
Is that such a bad thing? It’s supposed to be a hobby, if geeking out on gear relaxes you you shouldn’t have to feel bad for not being productive with it.
Many of my hobbies (mechanical keyboards, flashlights, guitar pedals) have been addictive and going as incredibly deep as I have has made me appreciate each item to a new degree.
I am a shitty bedroom guitarist that has pro-level gear that I get endless hours of enjoyment from buying/selling and "knob turning." I probably spend 50% of my guitar hobby time on non-playing activities and it all brings me much joy.
The fact that there are tons of consumers like me makes this gear more affordable for everyone, including low level artists.
I get a bunch of satisfaction purchasing used high end gear, owning it for a few months and then selling it for more or less what I bought it for. I usually get some nice social interaction with the seller/buyer as a bonus.
Very well said on gear-trap. Last night I was watching an old video[1] of the kind of gear Ólafur Arnalds uses.
I was amazed and aghast at the amount of expensive "outboard" gear and other vintage hardware such as "compressors", "filter banks", "levelling amplifiers", Korg PS-3100, a vintage analog synthesizer which costs more than 20,000 (!) euros,tape recorders, etc.
Many of these things I didn't even know existed. But I'm just a newbie to learning music.
It's a privileged position to be in, to just acquire whatever vintage hardware, instead of resorting to emulated software to create the sounds.
At least, he (and others like Nils Frahm) can justify it, as a highly successful professional musicians. But many hobbyist musicians seem to fall into the trap of, "if only I get that Roland Juno-60, I'll make more awesome music".
> "if only I get that Roland Juno-60, I'll make more awesome music"
But you might! A new instrument can inspire you and make you want to play more music and that can lead to improvement.
All things considered, the Medieval isn't all that expensive. All you are really risking is approx. $100 if buying new (because you can resell on eBay) and practically nothing if you buy it used.
I agree; a new instrument can inspire you. But many people tend to fall into the so-called "gear trap", especially those of us who work in tech.
I was not referring to the "Medieval" in specific, but just lamenting about losing the forest for the trees. It's a bit like the monthly, "the perfect note-taking tool" discussion cycle we get into here on HN.
If you're conscious of the potential gear trap, more power to you. :-)
Many performers use a semi-permanent patch. You effectively build a synthesizer with exactly the affordances you want, and carry the thing to the gig patched up. (Those setups tend to focus a lot of cable management too, lol, so that you can actually reach the controls)
Or, some do improvised live patching, in which the goal is NOT to replicate sounds.
I'd say most performances on these are accompanied by a DAW. Then you just record it and re-use sounds between performances. For some instruments/tracks you probably want the freedom to play it live and accept that it sounds different between performances. In fact that's the whole appeal of it in my opinion.
Two choices - either you record this and work with the recordings, or you accept that no two performances will ever be the same and make it part of the appeal.
I like to take photos and sometimes write things down! In a sense you're assembling a sound sculpture. But once you've found a great sound and lost it, sometimes you end up finding something very similar but not quite 100%! You see this a lot with live performances from any electronic musician to be honest.
Still, most of the time you find something incredible and it's gone as quickly as it appeared!
Teenage Engineering gear is not meant to last. It is an illusion created by how their product looks like and how it is marketed. Once the warranty expires, you won't be able to repair products like TX-6. I've gotten bitten by that myself. TE does not really provide much support to its users to help them maintain and repair this expensive gear.
I kind of have the same thought. This very much looks interesting and I like the whole folk/medieval metal scene quite a lot.
But the realist and the person in my who doesn't like spending money both agree: If $350 - $500 are on the table, I'm probably better off with a good keyboard with MIDI support, since it's a more open-ended and flexible tool. And my DAW can do a lot of the looping, looped recording, effects and such.
But enough negativity, this thing still looks really, really cool.
> Combining stories of dramatic ultralearning feats with the detailed science on how to learn anything effectively, ULTRALEARNING will transform how you work, live and learn.
It made me realise that for most of my life, the things I was doing to try and learn new skills, techniques or technologies was actually more akin to entertainment than actually learning the thing.
It also helped me understand why I have been able to learn really specific things really effectively, and use those patterns to intentionally learn other things that I'd usually find really hard to crack.
Excerpt from the book that summarizes itself pretty well:
"There are nine universal principles that underlie the ultralearning projects described so far. Each embodies a particular aspect of successful learning, and I describe how ultralearners maximize the effectiveness of the principle through the choices they make in their projects. They are:
Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily.
Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it.
Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable.
Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those parts and build them back together again.
Retrieval: Test to Learn. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively recall information rather than passively review it.
Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches. Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket. Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things not just for now but forever.
Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up. Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. Understand how understanding works, and don’t recourse to cheap tricks of memorization to avoid deeply knowing things.
Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone. All of these principles are only starting points. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet imagined.”
YMMV, but I did not find the book to be super insightful or particularly helpful for how my brain works.
It spells out a framework that (roughly) boils down to:
0) Pick one topic at a time
1) Learning by doing
2) The doing has to be exercises of deliberate practice that push you
3) Create some type of deadline or pressure to make sure you actually stick to the task.
My experience with being self-taught is that I tend to just bounce around arbitrarily to different subjects or interests and drop them when I get bored and then all that knowledge bouncing around eventually becomes cohesive once I repeat that cycle enough times. So the concepts of picking a single topic, creating a strategy for only focusing on that topic, and then executing were difficult to apply.
I think one advantage to bouncing around/being self taught (as I have most typically been too) is it lets you draw connections between seemingly unconnected things!
I think this is something lost in the act of being too focussed on learning one thing at a time!
As someone who has ADHD/Autism and identifies as neurodivergent, I found it specifically helped me unpick some ways that the way my brain works has created bad habits.
Note: I listened to the audiobook! The anecdotes about incredible learners (such as various language experts, the stardew valley dev as well as various other skills) was also really interesting.
I found that they were a lot of subjects I’d learned a lot about without directly engaging in the thing itself.
Learning about a programming language, vs actually building stuff in it. Learning the grammatical patterns of a language without speaking it etc.
There’s lots of videos, books and apps which first and foremost want you to be engaged moreso than actually teach you how to do the thing. This sort of context can be really useful, but ultimately one claim the book makes is that the best way to learn is to get as close to doing the thing you want to learn how to do as possible.
> If there are mods here who are willing to work towards reopening this community, we are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening. We would handle this request and any retaliation attempts here in this modmail chain immediately.
> Our goal is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is made available for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community, please let us know.
Classic attempt to break a strike. Would mods be employee, this would be illegal (at least in France). This shows how Reddit the company think how the people who work for them for free on Reddit the platform and make its value.
Mods don't work for Reddit. They volunteer for Reddit moderation. Much like you can volunteer to be the leader of the DND club at a local hobby shop. They are not an employee. People who don't like what Reddit is doing should stop showing up. Mods who don't like it should stop moderating. It's as simple as that, if enough people agree, Reddit will be no more.
It was hostile by mods to close a sub like r/nba the day after the finals, and hostile to close an important sub like r/science. A poll with a small fraction of the users that was only up for a few hours and potentially brigaded doesn't mean the majority of actual users wanted those subs to close.
Open for a couple days in advance and only for members of that sub. The indefinite one should have opened up for a new vote. Maybe r/nba could have provided a link to an alternative sub for discussing the nba finals on Monday.
>Mods don't work for Reddit. They volunteer for Reddit moderation. Much like you can volunteer to be the leader of the DND club at a local hobby shop. They are not an employee.
DND has no control over people doing DND at a local hobby shop, but if Reddit gets directly involved in hiring and firing and other such management of free labor then it is setting up to be viewed as an employer. There are many differences between an unaffiliated 3rd party club and direct corporate involvement in personnel management where the more Reddit tries to manage its free labor, the more it runs the risk of running afoul of FLSA. Under labor law there is a difference in working for free for a non-profit, government, etc versus a for-profit entity where they are not the same when it comes to providing free labor and FLSA rights cannot be waived away.
The club isn't IPOing. The real estate investment trust that hosts the DND club is. Ironically the REIT's main appeal to investors is that it's popular with DND clubs.
My mind immediately went to strike-breaking too. This isn't quite the same as they are targeting a volunteer group that has shown no interest to form a union, but this is so obviously a play out of the union busting handbook. Divide the group, make it seem like only a few select leaders want whatever they are negotiating over, and offering to elevate cooperative people into positions of power if they are willing to participate in a coup.
I think it’s something different than a strike and should thus not have any legal protections. Strikes are fair in some sense because workers aren’t being paid during that time (or at the very most by the union coffers) which goes up against the company’s ability to weather the lost revenue during the strike.
In this case, mods can keep subreddits dark without any cost to themselves because they aren’t being paid by Reddit. It’d be like if library volunteers protested by closing the library and stopping any new volunteers from entering by installing a lock on the door. OFC the library is within their rights to break the lock to let other volunteers in.
Mmmm I have an issue with the specifics of that metaphor applying to Reddit, but in general, people volunteer because volunteering brings them some non-monetary benefit, so I see it as basically the same dynamic. Of course you can’t lock the doors, just like you can’t physically obstruct/harm scabs.
In the near future when AGI eliminates scarcity (2025?) this will have to be litigated!
The analogy appears fitting at first glance, but it's crucial to note that the moderators in question aren't simply choosing to abstain from their duties—they're actively hindering others who might wish to take up those responsibilities.
I may not be an expert in French law, yet an analogy that comes to mind would be envisioning workers of a grocery store who've decided to go on strike. But rather than merely expressing their refusal to work, they also opt to seal the store's doors, blocking customers from entering.
Of course, customers might find the current situation unfavorable due to the absence of employees (think of barren shelves, paralleling communities overpopulated with off-topic discussions). Management, too, would likely find the situation objectionable due to a lack of employees to ensure transactions are being made legally (equivalent to the absence of moderators who uphold site rules, a scenario potentially hazardous to Reddit). Even though management might be compelled to shut down the store under these circumstances, it's essential to remember that closure remains a management prerogative, not a decision for the striking workers.
Kinda crazy how a lower mod can request a higher mod's removal. Pretty unhealthy precedent for a community where mods are already power hungry lunatics and your most obsessed power hungry mod who spends all day needlessly moderating the subreddit can appeal to reddit with "look how much more active I am than him; he barely does anything! So, gimme the subreddit pls."
They are still running the show. Making your subreddit private is, or at least used to be, a perfectly legitimate way of running things. Remember, reddit added that feature to their website.
> mods are already power hungry lunatics and your most obsessed power hungry mod
I mean, here you are just describing the mods that are holding these subreddits hostage. It seems appropriate for reddit to return these to the community in the case where the obsessed power hungry mod's behavior goes against what the community wants.
r/NewOrleans and r/SaltLakeCity voted to end it. There has also been rampant brigading from the pro-blackout side (see r/magicTCG, in addition to a Twitch stream brigade users on r/freemagic talked about voting in the poll despite being banned from r/magicTCG). I’m curious how r/FanFiction will go since they’re doing much more robust polling with karma requirements to stop brigades.
There’s been brigading from both sides, it’s just more noticeable when it’s an outcome you personally disagree with. I’m having to remind myself that just because a) my subreddit has someone who’s never posted there vehemently arguing to stay open and b) staying open is winning the poll, that doesn’t mean it’s a brigade.
(There would be more people voting if it was a brigade, so I’m pretty sure it’s not. But emotionally it bugs me.)
I guess the trick would be to flood Reddit with requests from allied mods that will keep the sub closed anyway. Presumably Reddit doesn't have the bandwidth to really vet these requests.
This is the way. Especially if the action can be more unpredictable than simply taking the subreddit private. Maybe remove all new posts or something.
If you can turn all of the subreddits into tens of thousands of problem children for Reddit that they can’t fix with automation, they will be unable to cope.
It sounds to me like there are Top Mods who want to continue the boycott, with others who don't and that Reddit is looking at giving the other mods a path forward.
One of the things I have noticed is that the boycott is not from the users but from the mods of the community. Even if the community had a vote, if you want to boycott fine but they are forcing others to go along with with them.
So either they are not the majority or they feel that the community has such little willpower to continue the boycott that they must force them to take part.
The same is true for the mods. Mods don't own subreddits, the community does. If they want to close down communities that aren't theirs, why not just quit Reddit? They are free to stop moderating.
No, just the ones that people are strongly motivated to brigade, and ones where I saw discussion of discord groups where links to such polls were posted to mobilize brigaders. But none of that should matter. If you claim your poll is representative, you need to demonstrate it. Don't make claims that outpace your evidence. It's not that hard.
That is (1) not true and (2) meaningless given most of those polls were brigaded by a small set of vocal whiny users voting in subreddits they aren't even involved in (3) even given both if those, I doubt you can find a poll for a large subreddit that shows even 10% of users supporting a blackout.
r/freemagic users who were banned from r/magicTCG talked about voting in the r/magicTCG poll. Apparently, mods of r/tennis posted in a Discord asking people to come help and vote to support the blackout as well. A lot of polls were mentioned in r/ModCoord which biases strongly in favor of the blackout. There’s much more incentive to brigade on the blackout side since users who don’t care about the subs in question lose nothing by those subs going private.
Eh, I gave you the clear out under #3 where you could show that these blackouts were really the will of the people. You haven't done that, if your strongest argument is about "oh, prove there was brigading", I think we're at the point where, at best for you, any polls are basically just meaningless (if they were meaningful you could use them under point #3 to refute me).
Ask yourself, who told you that was true? The strikers? Or the guy with the vested interest in breaking the strike and desperate to find anyone -- literally anyone -- to cross the line?
Valid point! But I strongly believe it depends on how you define success. On paper, you’re right, Reddit is the textbook definition of a successful company, with insane amounts of soft power.
However I think that it’s still valuable to look a level deeper at the specific decision making that’s going on at the management level, and how that’s affecting the overall dynamic which has caused Reddit to be popular for so long.
Specifically, these changes disproportionately affect power users and mods, two groups of people who are largely responsible for creating the content that most Reddit users come to the site for in the first place as well as moderating that content to ensure the quality is high (all unpaid!)
In any case, time will tell if these decisions help or hinder the IPO. My personal gut feeling is that reddit will be around in 5-10 years time, and possibly even growing in terms of popularity but we’ll probably see a decrease in quality of content and moderation and potentially a few competing sites existing on the fringes.
As an aside, if you have the sentence "This is Lewis' reply to the parent comment" the ' at the end of Lewis is used to avoid Lewis's with the extra s at the end.