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Cake day: November 7th, 2023

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  • scrion@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldPsychedelic Truth
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    2 days ago

    For what it’s worth, I’ve been actively involved in psychedelics for almost 51 years, so I trust even you will be able to deduce that I’m unfortunately the opposite of a teenager.

    I already admitted that I opted for a rather inappropriate way to express an opinion that was (rightfully) misinterpreted and tried to better express what I was trying to get at.

    You are free to completely dismiss that attempt as well, but please don’t try to bring seniority into this.




  • scrion@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldPsychedelic Truth
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    2 days ago

    As the meme says, there are no bad trips. If you’re serious about psychedelics and not simply taking drugs for entertainment, you’ll always get the trip you need, but not necessarily the trip you wanted.

    A “bad” trip just means you either needed to process some difficult stuff, or you might have violated a bunch of rules regarding set and setting. In both cases, you get the expected outcome.

    Honestly, difficult trips are often the most rewarding since they help break up stuck patterns of thinking and behavior or bring things to the light you’ve been trying to hide from yourself whose repression caused internal suffering etc.

    This always assumes you’ve done your homework and you don’t suffer from e. g. preexisting medical conditions. If you’re schizophrenic and take psychedelics, you might have an actual bad trip, that’s a completely different story, naturally.




  • The stylophone is probably not a very good choice if you actually want to make a musical track, it’s quite a bit limited.

    Also, please don’t assume that hardware is simpler than plugins. A lot of hardware has plenty of menu diving or arcane shortcuts due to the limited hardware controls, tiny (or absent) screens etc. You should be looking at “one knob per function” devices.

    If you just want to explore a bit and make tracks, get a groovebox l. If you are looking to dive into synthesis and a bit of sound design, look at the Arturia Microfreak.





  • I tried to give a genuine answer, but maybe not to the question you really had in mind.

    No, I don’t think ease of play and reproducibility should be the goal when designing each and every instrument.

    Let’s talk about another, modern synthesizer as an example, SOMA’s Lyra 8. While you can manually tune the instrument to play a scale, it is infamous for modifying any initial tuning due to its internal feedback loops and won’t stay tuned for very long. If you tried to always keep it in tune, you’d be arguably using it wrong. It’s also rather hard to integrate with other instruments since it’s so hard to control - it has a reputation to play it’s user, not the other way around. I’ve heard people say they need a cigarette after a 20 minute session with the device. Yes, it’s hard to play, sometimes maybe even frustrating, but it also is a unique experience and one of my favorite instruments.

    Let’s switch to a completely different example. Digital photography, both photo and video, is without a doubt a much more advanced and much more predictable alternative to analog, film-based photography. Still, people are actively looking to shoot film, sometimes even using expired film for its certain look and to explicitly seek the unpredictable.

    About 20 years ago, I was asked to repair a Soviet film camera. The shutter timing mechanism was broken, so I replaced it with a completely predictable ATTin85 controlling the old electronics that time the shutter. The artist didn’t like this approach at all and refused to use it.

    I hope this gives you a better insight into what I was trying to say.

    Finally, as I said earlier, I don’t even believe a good, modern Theremin played by an expert is even be unpredictable to begin with.