Tomorrow marks the 6 month anniversary of my family (and a lot of us here in America) going into full lockdown mode. It has been a miserable and confounding experience that other people are better equipped to write about, but let’s talk about some good things. Here are three good things that kept me from totally losing my mind:

I recently picked up an Elektron Model:Cycles and I’ve been pretty impressed with it. One thing that didn’t fully come across from photos and YouTube videos is that this thing is pretty small and light! It immediately made me want their (possibly vaporware?) battery pack handle. But in the meantime that DC power port is right there, why not just use your own battery?

You probably have a USB battery pack lying around, but what cable do you need to hook it up? I AM HERE TO HELP YOU, FUTURE GOOGLER. Just buy this one: Onite USB to DC Cable (DC4+1).

Over at Wavparty I’ve been releasing sample packs that include Ableton instruments. These user-made Ableton packs are kinda weird. You basically package up an Ableton project and then other people can download and “install it” to open your whole project (or just pull out the tracks they want into their own project). Installing and managing the files is kind of confusing and I get a lot of questions about it so I put together this quick and easy guide: Installing Ableton Packs.

Over at Wavparty I put up a new pack of drum samples and instruments: Dinky’s Taiko samples & instruments. This is the biggest pack I’ve put together so far and also includes some Ableton instruments.