Picked up one of these this week:
... mostly because I'm scared to spend the money on what I really want:
and wanted to start out somewhere.
Who else has the fever? I almost considered picking up a soooooper cheap used Roland R-8 as well. Ae used one, so hey, it can't be all bad, even though the built-in PCM sounds are pretty crap. It's one of those ones you need "ROM cards" to expand the palette with, though. And that is totally gay.
A synth might be a better option, but... everything out there (that's less than $500) seems kinda disappointing. I know TWH loves his MicroKorg (or used to), so... what pieces of sound-generating hardware have you known and loved, and possibly still curl up next to on a stormy night? sqrt, this is your opportunity for an entertaining MC-303 story. Saw one of those, too, btw, but $150 was a bit much to go for on nostalgia alone.
Lust with me. You know you want to.
Gear lust? This post is going to have mad amounts of comments. My current fetish (electronic music wise, not recording wise, that is a whole other long story) are effects. Moogerfoogers are phat sounding, but a $350 delay is steep, just for a delay. All of those pedals are sick. The line 6 green delay box is dope too. This kid I jam with got an alesis Ion, and it looks and sounds cool, but doesn’t have enough knobs.
ReplyDeleteI ran across this article the other day, and now it seem proper to mention. http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2009/11/18/9-dirt-cheap-vintage-synths-that-dont-suck/ I would like something old and cheap, mainly cause I am cheap.
Don’t drop more than $50-75 on a MC303. It had it hey day with me, but that was before I used computers. The sounds are “classic” but intuitive is not a word you can associate with this device. I did enjoy this a lot though, we hooked a cigarette lighters adapter and a tape adapter up and used to roll around and make beats on the road (back when you lived with your folks, you drank, smoked and fucked on the road too). That shit was fun. I will say that that machine was pretty sturdy, cause I absolute treated it like a cheap crack hooker, and it still functions (I did mess up 3 pots by dropping it in month long benders, but I know how to fix those). The pads sound like cheap crack hookers screaming during their work, so, move on up the road. But drum machine wise, I gives you what you need. And it has a res filter that is hooked to everything.
I am sure I will think of more shit I want later.
how is that korg sampler so far? i've been eyeing the synth version of that for a while....
ReplyDeleteBen - this is actually the ER-1 (the drum machine), not the ESX-1 (the sampling workstation). Alex has had an ER-1 since back in the day, so he could probably comment on it more lucidly than I. That ESX-1 seems kinda gimmicky though. Particularly the voltage-starved tubes in the output section to give you that "warm" sound. :\
ReplyDeletethat brushed red stainless threw me off...i didn't realize the mk 2 of the er-1 was so handsome compared with the original. that "valve force" hogwash on the esm/esx series is the main reason i'm skeptical about that line, but feature-wise they seems pretty cool.
ReplyDeletebut if i'm gonna be completely honest about my gear lust, the piece that makes me all wet is the ensoniq fizmo - gayest looking synth of all time, but the "evolving" patch concept makes up for the magenta color scheme.
i had never heard about the fizmo until recently. the transwave synthesis thing sounds like the wavetable synthesis that was used on the waldorf ppg wave and microwave synths where you have tables of multiple single-cycle wave forms laid out next to each other so they're similar but change gradually from end to end. i think it's definitely an under-utilized synthesis method. you should try ni massive if you haven't already. the oscillators are wavetable oscillators that work in this same way, and you get 3 of them plus some filters that are pretty rude. it's the only current commercial plug-in synth that i know of that uses wavetable synthesis, other than the ppg wave emulation, which has kind of a crap sound unless you're after 80's nostalgia. you can get similar effects with the morph-wave oscillators in absynth.
ReplyDeletethe er-1 is definitely lots of fun. just using it for percussion synthesis is pretty limited (i find the lack of filters on a drum synth kind of confounding) but you can get decent sounds if you layer up a couple of parts, especially if you throw in some detuned hats or claps from the sample parts. the sequencer is probably the most fun part of it. using the sequencer to program gates on the audio inputs is pretty awesome, especially since you can ring mod the audio inputs with the synth parts. the delay is really unusual sounding, and is pretty awesome when you start modulating the delay time with the sequencer. back when we were doing dps shows, i ran my master outputs through the er-1 inputs and just did weird gate and delay stuff with it.
i also have a huge boner for the machinedrum, but likewise have a hard time justifying the $1500+ that they cost. if money were no object, though, a machinedrum and an alesis andromeda would probably be the first things that i'd get.
oh yeah, and a yamaha cs-80. give me one of those too.
ReplyDelete