social.noyu.me

the problem with owning an instrument is it is just too much fun to play around with in a completely directionless fashion

‪i'm like fairly convinced that my keyboard noodling is actually getting meaningfully better and more interesting with time but it's like the only complex things i can actually do musically are the more or less completely unconscious ones that i can't really control or explain‬

‪i can make vaguely jazzy two-handed chord shapes on a keyboard in my sleep but i could Not write a chord progression to save my life‬

side note i am once again lost in the beautiful sounds of the roland sc-7. why do i have so much affection for this ancient low-budget rompler that sounds like a slightly-higher-fidelity and less dry microsoft gs wavetable synth. i couldn't tell you. i love the electric piano tho

‪gremlin appears next to you, turns on keyboard, selects the “Orchestra Hit” preset, plays‬

‪G‬
‪D-G‬
‪D-G-D-G-B-D!‬
‪C‬
‪A-C‬
‪A-C-A-F#-A-D~‬

‪synth brass + the pentatonic scale formed by the black keys + power chords is instant cliché‬

man maybe the problem is just that the keyboard makes interesting harmonic movements difficult to do intuitively. i guess we'll find out soon

‪a thing that happens to me constantly is i'll mis-finger something on the keyboard and arrive at an interesting chord, and then i want to play around with it, but the only movements i can do without having to Think a lot are boring, and before i know it, it has lost its salience‬

@hikari have you tried using only black keys you will not regret using only black keys

@nina_kali_nina i do it not that infrequently! it can be fun but they're still a bit limiting

@hikari from my experience making and noodling on my own isomorphic keyboard, yes

@aeva omg send pics

@hikari https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/113763737329548722 it's a virtual keyboard I play with a touch screen monitor. remarkably, the latency is low enough that it is very playable. what's especially great about it is I can easily experiment with different layout patterns. this one might be my favorite so far

@aeva ooh. no velocity/pressure tho i guess?

@hikari that would be the primary downside to using a touch screen. I might add it in with a little dial on the side later but so far I've just been using synth patches that don't really need it

@aeva i think some touch screens can sense pressure, but it's a niche feature so getting this info may be difficult. actually, it might be the case that all or most capacitive touchscreens can, they just don't generally expose it?

@hikari interesting. I think even if I had such a screen, I don't think touch pressure is exposed in pygame's event system.

@hikari put another point in dicking around, shouldn't hurt

(also the shouldn't is doing more work than i've done in 2024) /aside