I'm afraid my GAS is terminal.
I've moved beyond merely buying things to fill the void where my talent should be. I'm now making my own stuff in a misguided attempt to get better at music.
I only know the C Major scale, because someone told me "Just only play the white keys and try to stick to this note to the left of the two black keys and you will seem like you kinda know what you're doing. Thats the C Major scale" while I was high on marijuana 15 years ago. I never learned anything else about the piano after that. My buddy Trevor told me that. Then I said I wanted to get a looper pedal to go with the keyboard we were dicking around on, so we could play a bunch of parts on top of each other. He told there was a thing called a "groove box" that could do that for you and many of them have step controllers.
I copped an MC-307 off craigslist for 100 bucks from some guy who needed meth money. I felt superior to him at the time but I now realize he was the lucky one. Over the years I dealt with GAS on and off, the sorta thing we all deal with. Buying a new synth or midi controller, every so often, maybe going overboard and buying sample packs on the weekend and scrolling through kicks until they all the sound same.
Over time it just got worse and worse. I'd buy something play with it for a while, realize I didn't like it and sell it.
But last week I hit rock bottom. I wanted a keyboard that you could just play C Major on and transpose it to any scale. I looked at a novation launchkey at a store near my house, but its keybed was fucking trash. I thought about the korg nano fold, but again trash keybed. Why couldn't the aturia keystep gathering dust in my closet do this? So i bought a midi breakout board a screen and raspberry pi pico. My hands trembling as I clicked the buy button on amazon. Was I really about to open this can of worms? There may be no going back.
The next few days are a blur of C++ and soldering.
Why now that I've done this I obviously have to make it smaller and give it a proper enclosure. That's hours possibly days of my time I won't be making music. I worry I'll be letting down my 11 soundcloud followers. My room is full of random components and lead vapor. Soon I'll be mad as a hatter buried under a pile micro controllers and of assorted lengths of wire. Crushed under the weight of my own hubris.
Or worse... I might get into modular.
Code if any of you are into that kind of thing
https://github.com/robertknutzen/arduino-midi-scale-transposer
