Time flies out the window when the foundation is shaken. Good habits lost. Bad habits forming fast. Summer starting, kids out of school and there is very little time for keeping focus. And when family members are sad, you get sad too. (Nothing serious). Very little music gets made, very little anything gets made in fact. I bake bread. It’s a comforting thing.

I was thinking about tools. My first little synth was the Arturia Microbrute. They got the name right. It’s small and it’s pretty brutal. It’s not a synth for making soft, sweet sounds – like plucked harp or mellow marimba. It’s good for mayhem, raising hell and piercing eardrums. It’s also a very good synth for learners figuring out how a synth works (lots of knobs!).

In my collection of instruments it’s become an ugly duckling of sorts. My taste for sounds in general is probably quite mellow. I favour clean guitars over distorted ones, I prefer Fender Rhodes and old muffled upright pianos over crispy grand pianos. But just combining warm, mellow muffled instrument sounds might not make for a very interesting mix.

There’s a need for sounds with more edge and bite too. A saxophone is something else than a flugel horn. And this might be how I need to view my Microbrute. It offers a different flavour, a different hue than my other instruments.

I listened to yet another Tape Notes podcast episode, this time with Flume. And I realized I’m a wimp when it comes to sounds. I seem to have very tender ears.

I’m not sure I’m the professor Higgins to turn Microbrute into a fair lady, but maybe I can accept it as a black swan. (Or a gremlin. it’s definitely no mogwai).