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Interview with the founder of Teenage Engineering

scandinavianmind.com

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Re: Interview with the founder of Teenage Engineering

#201

Post by prmoustache »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #200
prmoustache wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why don't you just leave the meeting if you aren't paying attention anyway?

In most companies that's not an option. You sound lucky to not have to go through this, but waiting through hour-long meetings while waiting for an interesting topic or hearing your name is part of daily work for many office workers.

Well I dutifully take part to a 30min daily meeting and a one 30min weekly one, from which I still sometimes excuse myself due to other obligations knowing that I will be contacted directly afterwards if a specific topic requires me, but these are short enough for me to fodus on them.

Any other meeting need to have a precise agenda for me to attend it, especially if it means 1h of an engineer time might be wasted. If you are invited to a meeting and there is nothing in the agenda that concern you, you should mention it to the person sending the invite. A meeting has to be prepared to be effective anyway, you should know prior to the meeting what kind of input you are expected to bring. If all they give you is a vague title you should refuse until the scope is more precisely expressed otherwise people are wasting your company's precious money.

Re: Interview with the founder of Teenage Engineering

#202

Post by kzrdude »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #99

These photos are carefully curated, real electronic labs are rarely that neat (unless he is only doing the high level design on EDA and letting his employees do the actual hardware and board work).

The photos are from his flat, not from the company.

Re: Interview with the founder of Teenage Engineering

#203

Post by chuchana »

bmitc wrote: post #196
Towaway69 wrote: post #71

Perhaps slightly OT but I found building my own synthesizer using a cheap midi controller with a few dials and supercollider[0] to be very enjoyable experience. Somehow I have a better connection to making music since it was my own virtual Synthesizer and it does just what I need it to do! [0]= https://supercollider.github.io/

Supercollider is unfortunate because it has a very restrictive license.

Is it the GPLv3 you're calling "very restrictive" or are we seeing different licenses?

Re: Interview with the founder of Teenage Engineering

#204

Post by chuchana »

sambapa wrote: post #168

It seems to me that hardware synths are like vinyls - people buy them because of connotations, a certain image. In almost all terms software is unquestionably better. And if you want to be a "quirky artsy synthesizer person", don't buy into this hardware shit, just download SunVox or Pure Data.

Depends on your definition of "better".

Having dedicated controls can make a huge difference, having limited possibilities, too.

If you know what you want and how to get it, both those points are probably much less important than when you are getting started.

Of course you could also design your ideal environment including controls, but that's still one more thing to do before you get started.

Re: Interview with the founder of Teenage Engineering

#205

Post by cfr2023 »

strawpeople wrote: post #79
cfr2023 wrote: post #73

I think the work of this company is fragile and shortsighted, encouraging creators to put their energy into a cascade of non-standard paradigms, but without creating any valuable new conventions. As such I do not enjoy hearing what their founder thinks about anything, or puff pieces about him, like this one. I'm open to being convinced otherwise but all of the new information I receive fits in with the prior assessme…

What’s so wrong with a cool looking toy? Once upon a time I worked a full time stressful job at a startup and was well paid. I didn’t have a lot of time for hobbies, but an op-1 would have been a great way to play around with music. I’d have been a perfect customer and very happy with it. Edit: Looks like this commenter is exactly the way I imagine myself back in the day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665229

In my view, "cool toy" in this case is a guise for a proprietary platform and a proprietary method of working on music, which can (alternatively) be the most open and free thing in the world.

Teenage Engineering goes belly up and your unit breaks, the pathway to creative activity you spent time training is lost, more than if you'd initially bought say, a harmonica, or spent the same $$$ on a conventional instrument, a conventional sampler or computer software.

Re: Interview with the founder of Teenage Engineering

#206

Post by cfr2023 »

Gracana wrote: post #74
cfr2023 wrote: post #73

I think the work of this company is fragile and shortsighted, encouraging creators to put their energy into a cascade of non-standard paradigms, but without creating any valuable new conventions. As such I do not enjoy hearing what their founder thinks about anything, or puff pieces about him, like this one. I'm open to being convinced otherwise but all of the new information I receive fits in with the prior assessme…

I don’t see the problem, though I am also not sure what you mean. What is standard? What should people be doing instead? Do TE’s products differ from other grooveboxes?

Standard = generic. The difference between telling someone to play guitar and telling someone to play a Black Les Paul Custom with Block Inlays through a Mesa Mark I head into a tall Marshall 4x12 cabinet. Both have their places, but telling someone just "play guitar" is an inherently more useful thing.

People looking for music tools that will serve them over time, or even a lifetime, will be better served investing their time into tools and practices that are not bound to the fate of a single company.

All of this stuff can be fun to play with, but they market these things as serious tools for creators, when they are better equipped for store window demonstrations.

There is nothing that a TE box can do that a DAW can't do out of the box except for be a silly dedicated box with cryptic controls.

Re: Interview with the founder of Teenage Engineering

#207

Post by fit2rule »

psychomugs wrote: post #93
smoldesu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people fall for it. It's crazy how many people blindly buy into TE's "homestyle" marketing like they're some hibrow synth company. The OP-1 tickles every American's "Product Cortex" in their brain though, immediately associating brutalist design and Corinthian leather with quality engineering. It doesn't matter if we're not the target audience, we just want to spend money on pretty things that make us feel good.…

So... you judge character based on appearances? No other gear company has tackled the all-in-one synth-sequencer-4trackrecorder-groovebox that is the OP-1 in the decade since its release. TE not capitalizing on this would be financially naive.

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