Umbriel

More music. One of the most entertaining things I own is an Arturia BeatStep, a control surface / step sequencer / MIDI-CV converter. It's simplistic, with just sixteen steps, no ties, no velocity, no swing, and if you want more than sixteen steps you have to manually switch from one pattern to the next. But it's fun, and immediate.

But! Arturia also sells the BeatStep Pro, which is posher, and I was irresistibly drawn to it. It's the chap at the top here:

Arturia also sells the KeyStep and KeyStep Pro, which are similar, but with keys. I wanted pads.

I'll write about it at greater length later on, but the piece of music at the top of the post was recorded entirely with a mixture of BeatStep Pro and Logic, with the BSP generating the sequences and Logic layering them. The synthesiser noises were all created with a Behringer Model D MiniMoog clone, and the rest of it is a mixture of GForce's M-Tron and samples of a TR-808. The bubbly, wobbly bassline was created by feeding different gates into the Model D's filter and amplitude gate inputs.

On a musical level I was inspired by Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. It sounds nothing like it! Except perhaps for the fact it has unsubtle drums over an ambient backdrop. I don't know why I was thinking of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

The BSP is essentially two BeatSteps in a single case, plus an additional drum sequencer. It has some good things. The sequences can be up to 64 steps long, not just 16. It has masses of analogue outputs, including a velocity CV port for the two sequencers. It also has a screen that shows you which notes are being played, whereas with the BeatStep Non-Pro you had to work it out by ear, or simply go with the flow. It was easy to work it out because I also have a Behringer RD-8 drum machine, which has a similar interface because Behringer cribs extensively from Arturia convergent evolution or something.

On the negative side the Pro doesn't have the Non-Pro's random step function - a baffling omission - and the sequencing method is fundamentally different. With the Non-Pro you create a pattern with the pads and assign notes to the pads with the knobs, which have an obvious visual mapping with the pads. It's easy. I like to make pretty patterns with the pads, e.g:

With the BSP pro however the pads are a one-octave keyboard, and the steps are actually set with the row of sixteen green buttons just above the pads. You can't draw pretty patterns with the pads any more because they don't change. The fundamental problem is that the knobs still set the note values, and they're divided into an 8x2 matrix, but the pads are a 1x16 row, so you have to remember that the third knob on the second row is step eleven, because there's no longer a visual mapping between the knobs and the pads. There are numbers next to the knobs, but they're tiny.

Tiny, tiny numbers. I would have preferred it if the pads set the steps and the row of buttons acted as a little keyboard, not the other way around.

Did that make any sense? It has a control strip that retriggers notes in a dubstep styl-ee and a probability function that's much less useless than it appears, because you can't assign it to anything. It just does its own thing. And it uses a full-size-USB-to-micro-mini-USB instead of the more common, and more solid-feeling, albeit not much more solid-feeling, breathe in, full-size-USB-to-mini-USB that the Non-Pro version uses.

Tiny, tiny numbers.

MRE Menu 15: Mexican Style Chicken Stew

Toys wasn't a very good film, but Joan Cusack was sweet. Unfortunately you can't make a film entirely with Joan Cusack, so today we're going to have a look at another MRE. Menu 15: Mexican Style Chicken Stew. In bold. Later on I will merely use italics, but today I will use bold.

Chickens predate human beings by millions of years. When they first appeared they couldn't have known that people would one day breed them for food. Instead they prayed that whatever creatures ate chickens in the Paleogene period would leave them alone instead.

They got their wish! They outlived their original predators, only to fall prey to a new breed. Us. We. You and I. Humanity. But perhaps they're playing the long game, and millions of years from now they will be the rulers of what remains of the Earth. I'm digressing here. The text has fallen out of sync with the images. I'll have to post one of the pictures again. Let's have a look at the contents of the MRE:

Don't worry, I didn't have to upload that image again. That would have been a waste of electricity. All I did was create a second link to the original image.

Menu 15 contains Mexican chicken stew, cheddar cheese pretzels - they are fantastic - a packet of mixed fruit, a pair of MRE crackers, some cheese spread with jalapenos, a First Strike chocolate bar, a chocolate drink, and a lemonade drink. Lots of chocolate.

The accessory packet has a moist towelette, iodized salt, crushed red pepper, indifferent and almost tasteless MRE gum, and some quote toilet paper unquote that might possibly be useful as a wound dressing - you could use it to seal off a chest wound - but is no use as toilet paper.

Let's try the drinks first. I've had MRE lemonade before. It's awful, it tastes like mouthwash:

I drank it as quickly as possible. I've said it before, but MRE lemonade is probably formulated to mask the taste of water purification tablets. In that respect it's a success, but it's not much fun to drink. Let's try the chocolate hazelnut beverage:

I've had several MRE chocolate drinks before. They're odd. The instructions specify cold water, but they're essentially hot chocolate, and they only mix properly if you use hot water. This time I used warm water and it still didn't mix, but it tasted nicer. I don't know why they put cocoa in a military meal. MREs aren't supposed to put soldiers to sleep, they're supposed to keep them alive in the absence of alternative food.

At this point I put the main meal in the flameless ration heater, along with the mixed fruit. It wasn't until I played The Long Dark that I realised you were supposed to heat up mixed fruit. Until then I had always eaten mixed fruit cold. That must be a UK-vs-North America thing.

Some MREs come with coffee creamer, and I wonder if it goes well with the mixed fruit. You could mix it in with the syrup. While the meal is cooking, let's try the crackers and the cheese spread:

MRE food exists on the same level as Sunday morning hangover food, e.g. it's crap, but tasty. The cheese spread bears very little resemblance to cheese, but if you put it on the crackers the result is wonderful. It's not good for you, it's not healthy, it would horrify a professional chef, but it's tasty.

Let's try out the cheese pretzels.

On the subject of tasty crap, the pretzels were excellent. They're crunchy biscuit things with cheese sauce in the middle:

They are the best crunchy MRE snack I have tasted to date, much better than the trail mix and the mixed nuts, even better than the baked snack crackers. They are apparently sold on the civilian market in the United States as Combos. Sadly I've never seen them here in the UK.

By now the main meal has heated up. Let's see what it's like:

It's nice, but anonymous. A lot of the MRE main courses I have tasted are very similar. Chicken in an anonymous, salty stew with bits of vegetable. The mixed peppers were a mistake and just made the meal unpleasantly tart. Nothing about the flavour of the chicken suggested Mexican cuisine. It's a pleasant but anonymous meaty stew that might go well on a tortilla, if you have one. It would also be good dumped on a plate of chips, but the same is true of lots of things.

Let's finish it off with the First Strike bar, which has military-style packaging and is, again, also available on the civilian market:

It's essentially a chewy, flexible block of sugar with chocolate flavouring and bits of cereal. It's like a parody of a health bar. In fact the name sounds like a parody of military food in general. First Strike! Tactical Response! Warfood! It's okay, but too sugary for my taste. It has fewer calories (282) than I expected, but is probably bad for you in other ways.

Almost forgot the fruit. Let's try out the fruit. It's paltry:

I've tried MRE fruit before. You get a small amount of fruit with some juice. It's just mixed fruit; no better or worse than mixed fruit from a can, but there's less of it. I wonder if you could combine it with the chocolate drink. Apparently US service personnel have super-secret MRE recipes, because there are only two dozen MRE menus and they get monotonous. Top Youtube chap Steve1989 has talked about "army mochaccino", which is a mixture of cocoa and coffee powder, but there must be more.

That's enough about Menu 15. It's one of the most consistently decent MREs I have tried. None of the individual elements are bad (except for the lemonade) and the cheese pretzels are excellent. The only downside is an overabundance of chocolate and a paltry main meal. If only the First Strike bar had been strawberry, and the chocolate drink had been banana milkshake or something, there would have been more variation.