Spiralexical @spiralexical - Tumblr Blog

Hey, wanna make music? Yeah? Got a buncha money? No? Well that's perfectly fine, check this free stuff out:

Vital - A powerful wavetable synth, my personal favorite VST synth, very easy to figure out creating new synth sounds, with the help of the plenty of tutorials that are out there for the plug-in. (There are paid versions but they are completely unnecessary to get 99% of the features of the plug-in.)

Synth1 - A classic piece of synthesizer software.

Pendulate - An interesting, chaotic synth that you can make weird little sounds with.

Native Instruments' free plug-ins - Various cool VSTs, including the Komplete Start pack.

The Free Orchestra - A set of orchestral instruments for Kontakt Player (see previous link).

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - More orchestral stuff! This one has its own player so you don't have to download a separate VST to use it if you don't want to.

Magical 8bit Plug - A chiptune plug-in, intended for producing sounds like that of 8-bit systems like the NES and Master System.

Genny - A synth VST made to emulate the soundchip of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.

MT Power Drum Kit - A nice rock n' roll style drum kit plug-in.

This guy's weird VST collection - 6.4 gigabytes of weird VSTs, including some you might know, like Delay Lama and MeowSynth!

sforzando - A free player for soundfont files.

Musical Artifacts - A resource I mainly use to find soundfonts, on which you can find other various things as well.

Kilohearts Essentials - 30 effect VSTs including reverb, delay, compression, pitch shifting, transient shaping, ring modulation, phase distortion, and more.

Xfer's freeware VSTs - Exactly what it says on the tin, including the one and only OTT compressor.

Illformed - The good ol' dblue Glitch 1.3, Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop.

Hysteresis and Fracture - Two interesting glitch effects, one being a delay and the other being a buffer.

Codec - A cool digital audio degradation effect.

Le Phonk - A slick distortion plug-in.

MAIM - An effect that mimics the sound of MP3 compression.

Soundly Shape it and Place it - One is simply an equalizer VST, the other is an effect that emulates a speaker (ex: a radio) and a space (ex: a cave).

Fresh Air - An effect that adds high end information to your sounds, to provide brightness.

ValhallaSupermassive - A combo reverb and delay plug-in that sounds quite big.

UnplugRed - A collection of various interesting VSTs, most of which have free versions.

Chowdhury DSP - I can't personally speak for all of these but their tape model effect is great for some lo-fi style effects.

TAL-Chorus-LX - A thick sounding chorus, good for "retro" sounds too.

Polyverse Wider - A great effect for widening sounds up, really simple too with only two controls.

Freesound - A good audio file resource, mainly for foley recordings.

Cymbatics Dubstep Starter Pack - A little sample pack with some good drum and synth samples.

fishmonger drum kit - A pack of samples from the album 'fishmonger' by Underscores!

WangleLine's sample packs - Free samples put out by my awesome mutual WangleLine!

aaand I might as well include this set of drums I made awhile back :P

As for DAWs, it's been a long while since I've used anything other than FL Studio (not counting Audacity, which I still occasionally use for specific purposes), which, while being the only one I can directly recommend, is paid. However, I've heard good things about Reaper which has a "free trial" that you can technically use forever, akin to WinRAR. Additionally, I've also heard some good things about Waveform Free.

theelectricdreamsofddx

(tags from @secretroomba) Ok saving these tags for later for myself

theelectricdreamsofddx

MORE because there are some additional little things I forgot about:

Geonkick - A drum synthesis VST, especially simple to get kicks going, but capable of producing a multitude of sounds.

plugdata - A visual programming environment for plug-in projects, that people produce their own plug-ins for, such as infamous plug-in the gusher.

SoundThread (info in description) - A really cool node-based audio editing interface based on the Composers Desktop Project, great for sound design, although it currently only supports .wav files.

OpenUtau - An open source software for UTAU voicebanks like Kasane Teto, much easier to work with imo than the original UTAU software for a beginner to vocal synths like UTAU and Vocaloid.

Famitracker - More NES style chiptune stuff, this one's a classic standalone tracker program.

Furnace - Another tracker I've heard fantastic things about from chiptune artists, more fully featured and capable of producing a wider variety of sounds.

theelectricdreamsofddx

I would really suggest looking in the comments and reblogs for additional resources if you would like even more, but I'm coming back some months later for my own personal additions of things that I've played with!:

Tuğrul Akyüz's gumroad page - A multitude of free plug-ins including TugSpect and TugImgSynth which turn the brightness values of lines of pixels in images into unique spectral EQ shapes and wavetables respectively for an interesting form of sound design.

PaulXStretch - A few different people have suggested this one! It's a great, smooth time stretching effect that comes in standalone and plug-in forms, good for ambient textures/soundscapes.

PanCake 2 - A panning modulation effect with easily customizable LFOs (or, panning patterns).

Minimal Formant - A formant shifter (and also tilt EQ), an effect that's kind of like a pitch shifter but for shifting overtones rather than the base tones of a sound, altering the timbre but not the true pitch of the sound.

Youlean Loudness Meter - A plug-in that analyzes sound as it plays and gives you the values of perceived loudness, loudness range, and dynamics. Has a paid pro version but it's not necessary to pay for it. This one has become practically essential to me in mastering my next album for consistent perceived loudness.

PeakEater - A waveshaper/clipping plug-in that's great for gently shaving the top off of some sounds that are too loud without reducing their punchiness.

I'd also like to suggest going on Archive.org for sample CDs and other various things you can find on there. I've gotten some use out of Discovery Firm's Breakbeat Ammo and Zero-G's Jungle Warfare Collection, although be aware of the momentary silence at the beginning of the samples (you can cut that fairly easily but, y'know, just as a heads up).

#free

bemusedbibliophile

I usually tell my students that “close reading” means looking at what is actually on the page, reading the text itself, rather than some idea “behind the text.” It means noticing things in the writing, things in the writing that stand out. To give you some idea of what this means, I’ve made up a list of five sorts of things that a close reading might typically notice: (1) unusual vocabulary, words that surprise either because they are unfamiliar or because they seem to belong to a different context; (2) words that seem unnecessarily repeated, as if the word keeps insisting on being written; (3) images or metaphors, especially ones that are used repeatedly and are somewhat surprising given the context; (4) what is in italics or parentheses; and (5) footnotes that seem too long. This list is far from complete—in fact, no complete list is possible—but the list is meant to begin to give you an idea of what sorts of things we notice when we’re doing close reading.

What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.

Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.

Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Close Reading: Close Encounters,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol.16, No.3 (Fall 2000), pg.7-8 (x)

#writing

dark-hues-blog

wizardarchetypes

i know it's been said on here and said again but people do so desperately need to genuinely do intentional work to build distress tolerance and start figuring out how to recognize the differences between danger, discomfort, and when a situation that is merely uncomfortable is triggering an emotional flashback in your bodies because it resembles a past situation that actually was dangerous which makes it difficult to realize/believe that this moment is merely uncomfortable.

wizardarchetypes

i spoke to an allistic person who said their autistic classmate had a meltdown in class, during which the autistic classmate collapsed to the floor in the middle of the room, screaming and crying. they said it was "terrifying" and they were arguing for the autistic student to be removed permanently from the program.

when i asked whether their autistic classmate's meltdown was dangerous or merely uncomfortable, they said, "i felt like i was in danger!"

i understand that. but that's not what i asked.

wizardarchetypes

"i shouldn't have to experience that."

yes you should, actually. that's life. upsetting things happen. no one should have to experience any discomfort. but we do. we get stung by bees and sunburns and headaches. we live in bodies in the world.

autistic people are human beings who have the right to exist in society, including during meltdowns. having one class of your entire semester interrupted by a singular meltdown is not anymore of an infringement upon your entitlement to education than having your class interrupted by a fire alarm or cancelled for a snow storm.

one of my peers once experienced a cardiac event 10 minutes into class. it was terrifying. it was desperately upsetting. i was contacted by the school and offered counseling because i happened to be the one who managed the situation until paramedics arrived. everyone was worried about my classmate first and foremost, and then about me. no one blamed anyone, and certainly when my classmate happily recovered and returned to school, no one thought they should be removed from the program.

the difference being that people believe a disabled personal, especially with cognitive disabilities, in crisis are not experiencing something outside of our control, but instead that we are in fact making a choice to make a scene, out of malice.

tobiasdrake

A detail I find really interesting about Chell, GLaDOS, and Wheatley's first confrontation in Portal 2 is when Wheatley starts gloating about taking over the facility. "I did this! Tiny little Wheatley did this!"

And GLaDOS interjects like, "You didn't do this. She did all the work!"

I find that interjection fascinating because. Like.

GLaDOS doesn't actually know anything about what happened behind the scenes. She lost track of Chell and Wheatley after Wheatley opened up a wall panel and they bolted off together into the facility's inner workings. She doesn't see them again until Chell falls for her fake door trap, at which point GLaDOS is unpleasantly surprised to discover that Chell's disabled the turrets and neurotoxin in the meantime.

She has no evidentiary foundation to base that accusation on.

This is also before GLaDOS recognizes Wheatley as the Dumbass Core, so it's not based on an assessment of him.

The only explanation it leaves is that it's based on her assessment of Chell. Despite GLaDOS's enmity towards Chell, the one thing she rarely goes after Chell for is her intelligence.

When she does, it's an admission of her high standards for Chell; Like when the fake door trap works and GLaDOS concedes, "I didn't actually think that would work. I already built a much better, smarter trap up ahead for when this one fails." That's a backhanded insult. It's calling her dumb, but in a disappointed way rather than an affirming way.

Chell tests very well. Between the two games, GLaDOS has developed a strong understanding of Chell's aptitude for critical thinking and problem-solving in stressful situations.

And so she takes it on faith, just from what she knows of Chell, that Wheatley is stealing Chell's credit.

voidpengin

tags by @phidelta

aby-thebee

I feel like this was absolutely made for them

adz

i laid my head in her lap and she started rubbing and scratching it in gentle rhythmic circles and within minutes i was on the verge of falling asleep. i groggily looked up and said “this feels so nice, i almost fell asleep” and she looked down and said “i did a bunch of research into scalp stimulation and found the most comforting speeds, forces, and patterns, and then i practiced on different girls until i had dialed in an effective technique”

adz

t4t because you just dont get this sort of autistically optimized treatment from cis girls