For anybody looking to remix some music and/or art, I’m setting up The Uncarved Block as a forum on my Discord server. The goal is to provide a place for people to take a track or idea, and remix it into something new, and get some feedback from the community on what worked well, options for other ideas, and suggestions for what to do next. This will come together as a Soundcloud playlist to put all of the tracks together and a live stream to go over as many tracks as possible to listen to as a group and provide some constructive feedback on what to do or try next. ...

Most importantly (for me at least) is I’m still kicking! For those who have been paying attention, I’ve been slowly branching out into other instruments on my YouTube channel, and starting to look into things like the Dirtywave M8, Roland P-6, and Ableton Move. There’s plenty of cool gear out there, and certainly not enough free time to cover it all. That said, I do try and keep the Guide going as new thoughts come to mind. ...

Hey everybody, it’s been a long time coming to get the guide updated for firmware 4.04, but it is finally here! What’s happened in between? Well I dropped the Quick Reference for the SP404 mk2, which was a lot of fun to make, but super time consuming. Plus within just a few days of releasing it, Roland dropped the 4.04 firmware update. I decided to invest the effort into updating the Quick Reference for 4.04 rather than the guide, and then I sunk time into getting some 4.04 videos out. It’s been a crazy couple of months! ...

This is a weird one for me for sure. I got an email that congratulated me for being in the top 2% of earners for buymeacoffee.com. Before you all start celebrating me and my “wild success”, I’m going to drop some details, some thoughts, and probably a few opinions. Let’s start with where I am today. My online digital “footprint” is kind of a mess, where I have accounts for all kinds of services, and I sort of know why I put some content somewhere, but also feel like I’m probably spread a bit too thin if I was trying to make a living out of all of this. I’m not really trying to make a living out of all of this, so that’s a good thing, but due to my “anti-capitalistic” behavior, I also get a peek into understanding why all this social media stuff is so hard from time to time. ...

First up, about half of the samples are available for free at , and an SP404 mk2 ready project is available with included patterns at . Check out the content ahead of time to see if any of it interests you before you pick up this pack. The Free Samples file is just samples, and the Sp404 mk2 Project is for the SP404 mk2 only. NearTaos Acid Drop Free Samples Download ...

Here’s an updated version of the guide. At this point, it is mostly changes coming in from people asking questions on my YouTube videos, and my curiosity to dig in and see if I can find suitable answers, solutions, or in some cases workflows. So the update is again an accumulation of a lot of minor tweaks and things I have learned about the SP404 mk2 from people asking questions that I didn’t know the answer to. ...

Hey everybody! I’ve been working through deciding what project management software to setup for myself personally, and I’ve been looking through several options. There’s a lot of interesting paid software, open source software, and a lot of opinions of what is best to use, how they integrate together. It’s a lot to dig through, but understanding others’ experience with a tool is certainly helpful. I’ve used Atlassian Jira, Redmine, Microsoft Project, Smartsheets, Bugzilla (though this was a freakish hack), text files, Cultured Code Things, Apple Reminders, and a boat load of other options. ...

Just a few simple tweaks for today based on some information I learned while running a few experiments (and answering questions) on my live stream at https://youtube.com/live/LT8YEWt7zuY?feature=share The plan was to figure out a few volume maximums/limits, especially for recording. I decided to use the USB-C audio interface connection from the SP404 mk2 to my computer since it is a digital connection and I assume (a bit grossly perhaps) that it should be consistent for us. From here, I spent some time recording test tones, tried to record as loud as I could through the line ins and mic/inst jack without clipping, and then did some comparative analysis through Ableton Live to see how these various recordings compared to normalized audio. ...

session-54.5-by-sa-samplepack Download These samples were recorded as part of my In Five series for the SP404 mk2 Session 54. I used a Teenage Engineering OP-1 and a Chase Bliss Audio Mood to do a bit of sound design/exploration and to have some fun. Nothing fancy here, but since Spicy Boi asked over in the YouTube comments for the samples, I’m providing them for anybody to grab. ‘Session 54.5’ by Greg Sterling at http://www.neartao.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. ...