Month: November 2019

I finally had to buy an external hard drive to house my music library. (I’d replaced the old Mac Mini’s internal one 5+ years ago.) Below is my current daily listening rig.

Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Mini (circa 2007)
1 TB WD Elements external HD
OS X 10.5.8
iTunes 10.6.3 (<– a version that’s still good!!)
160 GB iPod classic (<– best ever!!!!!!!!)
Library: 35,000 items; 100 days of music end-to-end

The iPod will die some day – it’s already been through a few total fritz-outs and and full re-syncs – but that’s survivable. (This will probably be the event that prompts me to enter the smartphone era.) I’m not sure I can go on living without iTunes 10 and my library, though. I probably need to investigate some kind of solid state drive machine that will boot Leopard.

Or maybe there’s library management software on Linux that could replace iTunes.

The other week as I read the liner notes for Fountains of Wayne’s Out-of-State Plates while importing it to iTunes (yeah, still do that) I realized the 20th anniversary of their album Utopia Parkway had come and gone this past April, and I hadn’t seen anyone mention it.

Below is a lightly edited version of the email conversation Cory and I had about it.

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A couple months ago I impulse-bought a Korg Monotribe synth. It proved even more fun than I expected to play, but its variety of sounds are necessarily limited.

After a lot of googling, planning, and testing, parts arrive tomorrow for a suite of modifications that will expand the Monotribe’s palette in some moderate but meaningful ways.

Enhancements include:

• Hi-hat, Bass drum, and drum mix (snare when the other two are used) direct outputs
• Hi-hat and snare noise decay toggle switches
• Bass drum and snare frame decay knobs
• Drum mix momentary mute button
• VCA de-click trim pot and toggle switch (the Monotribe’s amp envelope is notoriously clicky)
• VCO mute toggle switch
• VCF touch-sensitive cutoff control

Together, I hope these mods will take the Monotribe from the top end of the “fun-to-mess-around-with” bracket into the lower end of “serious instrument” territory. I fully intend to make a Monotribe-focused Night Mode record or two, and make it the centerpiece of a travel/jam synth rig with a very small footprint (think briefcase).

My hat is off to Korg for this incredibly creative and inspiring design. There are a lot of features that may not be obvious from the front panel, but that make the Monotribe incredibly musical, including:

• The various LFO modes
• Per-part active step (polyrhythms!)
• Gate length and amp level automation
• Wide mode on the ribbon controller
• Flux mode on/off on the VCO sequencer
• The interaction of the sequencer and the VCO active steps, which allows some really distinct sequences to be made easily

I could go on. Nothing could replace the MS-20’s place in my heart of hearts, but for instant playability I don’t know what beats the Monotribe.

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Thanks to Katie (who took the four of us on the street after the show) and Cory (sunset & indoor shots) for these pics from our August show in Crete.