I have a fairly nice synth workstation.

Well, it’s alright. I like that I can load DX7 patches in it. It has some convenient knobs and serves as an audio interface and midi controller. It does everything just well enough that when I contemplate selling it for a different solution^[1] I’m restrained by the fear of seller’s remorse.

One of the things it does ok is piano sounds. They’re good for quick, immediate auditioning of ideas^[2], and bad for recording a decently-accurate piano. I don’t know, maybe it’s me, but when I try and record a superlative performance I come up disappointed.

After some years of saving^[3] I realized my dream of owning a baby grand piano, and I think it has a really warm, lovely tone. (My piano tuner agrees with me.) Wouldn’t it be nice if I could somehow record an actual piano rather than settling for a digital facsimile?

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Somehow I stumbled into an obsession with headsets. Specifically gaming headsets. I’ve owned probably a dozen. The intent of this post is not to examine my problem, but I’m acknowledging it. The upshot of my semi-exhaustive survey of headsets is that I’ve learned a thing or two about what makes for a good headset. Now I invite you–willingly or not–into my world.

My latest acquisition is the Arctis Pro Wireless premium gaming headset by Steelseries. It makes sound and has a (retractable!) boom microphone. It connects to my PS4. But the luxuries are where it starts to distinguish itself from the pack…

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As mentioned elsewhere, I use Hexo as my static site framework. It does most of what I want out of the box, and it has plugins for most everything else.

On my homepage I’ve embedded the SoundCloud widget in a Bootstrap flexbox. But it would be nice to put audio directly into a blog post as well, without too much hacking. Fortunately, Hexo has plenty of audio plugins available, and in less time than it took to write this post I added a couple.

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