2020 gear purchase: Hits & Misses

Like all of it? Really? :wink:

@Unifono beat me to it.

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Hits:

Analog Four
Analog Heat
DOD Metal X
DOD Octoplus
DOD Vibrothang
Three Nine Of Swords fuzz pedals

Misses:
EHX Oceans 11 (sold)
Korg MS2000R (sold)
DOD Ice Box (for sale)
A bunch of different cheap guitar pedals that are waiting to get listed for sale

All in all a pretty good year, I lost a bit of money on the MS2000R but sold the Oceans 11 for a profit.

Hits:
Model 1 mixer (bought used for an excellent price)
MicroMonsta 2
Doctor A

Misses:
Faderfox EC4 (for me - could not really use it in my music making)
Audio Source Collider (excellent algorithms and versatility, but I found it too fiddly for live use)

To be clear, I didn’t mean to ā€œdestroyā€ anything. Instead, let’s all create, using the tools we like.

P.S. I now have a Squarp Pyramid and a labeling gun, so there’s no stopping me! :slight_smile:

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Oh absolutely, no point in keeping gear around that gets in the way of making music. I’m sure most people here could name at least one ā€popular deviceā€ that just hasn’t worked for them. I’ve had several this year alone: AS-1, Mood, Polymoon, the whole modular experience. Just weren’t working for me, so sold them and moved on.

You misunderstood
I was surprised to hear an honest feedback on the OT

I have amended my comment

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Update to my earlier post. Wavestate ended up a miss. Took too long to build patches and after being spoiled by Elektron workflow I cannot forgive UX catastrophies like copy/paste and inserting sequence steps being a submenu on The third sub page of a screen. Just too slow! Also, it’s got loads of great samples, but having to scroll through a flat list of thousands of them on every wave sequence step is… not fun.

I traded the Wavestate for a Sherman filterbank. Which is totally rad. Really enjoying running it in parallel to my drums and making an alternate, distorted/filtered copy that is AM’d against a monosynth. Sounds like Chemical Brothers.

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Hits:

Digitakt – sold the OP1 to get the digitakt. After 2 days, I made more useable music on the digitakt than I ever did on the OP1. The only real upside that the OP has over the digi, imo, is polyphonic samples (yea yea, I know about the retrokits cable, got one on the way, but until then…).

Octatrack MKII – the digi was so great, I spent weeks watching Youtube on the OT MKII and decided to make the plunge. Perhaps the best and worst way of coping with a covid winter. I’ve yet to completely finish a track on it (as I am still grappling with all its uses), but the results are promising, and it’s a prime distraction to get my head out of ordinary music making, and take it to some where else. Honestly, I am really not a fan of using the OT for drum sequencing… with pickup machines, and a master on track 8, it’s hard to create drum patterns the digitakt way with a sample-per-track approach, as you run out of room. I know people love chopping up drum loops, but to me the results are divisive, and I generally don’t cutting up a ready made beat, but rather building one from the ground up. Even cutting up my own digitakt drum loops on it so far hasn’t been really all that great, as I want more of a subtle sampler sound, not like a ā€œhey listener, this is a sampler so let me demonstrate every glitch it can do as a rhythmic part.ā€ So I really only use it for live recording, melodic samples, mixer, and I guess a brain for the whole set up? MIDI arp is definitely next on the list of things to explore with it.

Tascam 424 MkI Tape machines and loops were my stress outlet from March through August, and now have just become an integral part of my workflow. It’s given me a whole new appreciation of hi and low fidelities as textures, not as some hierarchy of sound quality. Get the MKI while you can – if you’re a producer, one of the most satisfying things is to take a sequence you want to ā€˜lofi,’ speed it up twice as fast, bring it up an octave, record to the 424 on highspeed, and then drop the speed back down, thus giving you a saturated, wobbly, and legitimately analog lofi sound. It’s easy to do this with things like a drum sub mix, synth arp, or something like a piano or guitar part. You will definitely have to tweak it a bit in post to make sure the timing lines up (it’s usually a hair off from perfectly in sync from the original)… To make it even better, but with more time and experimenting, use a loop so you get the beautiful tape gaps…

Revox B77 Reel to reel was the next endeavor, and I drove five hours one day to pick this up. Analog recording should be a right of passage for any music maker who wasn’t alive when it was used as a primary method (like me). It’s really worth the extra time to use it in tandem with a digital approach. For example, if you’re tracking a polysynth pad part, it’s pretty easy to just let the tape roll, nail your part over a couple of takes with a click coming from somewhere, rewind, and record all of that back into the daw. If you’re quick with audio editing, playlisting them and grid nudging will take you max 10 minutes.

Casio CZ101 - I’ve yet to give this synth it’s due time of learning, but I really like (surprisingly) Casio’s alternative form of FM Synthesis. It’s kind of a bitch to learn, but if you take a DX7 approach of preset switching, minor edits, and saving, it’s pretty damn cool. It has made it’s way on 3 tracks I’ve produced for other people.

Yamaha Reface YC Honestly needed a good hammond b3 sound and this just does the trick. It’s really easy to send sequences too, so you can focus on the leslie switch, volume swells, and tone bar adjustments.

MISSES

OP1 Thank god I’m not posting this on the OP forums, but I bought one in march, had a blast, but really only used it for my own samples to be played polyphonically. The sequencers are just not good on this device – creative and clever, sure but lacking the ability to make anything really specific or complex. The synths on this are so bad, with zero context of what any of the parameters really do to the sound. And the samples just sounded like a souped Casio 8 bit sampler. The digitakt kicks this thing’s ass in everyway. If it cost 400, I def would’ve kept it, because it is totally it’s own thing, and I do miss certain things about it, but I am much more at home with Elektron.

Ju-06a actually got this last december, and used it for a long time, but it really just doesn’t sound that great. Took far too many pedals or post processing. I think also four voices for what might be the one of the most popular poly synths of all time way a big let down too. It didn’t bother me at first, but it eventually just gathered dust… I am curious about the Jupiter Xm as a much more expensive alternative, but we shall see if another stimulus check arrives haha.

Thank you all for indulging me… I didn’t think I would like this thread, but it actually was really great reading user experiences from people other than Youtube gear guys. Wishing you all health and safety during this time!

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Employment and financial uncertainty kept my wallet close to my person in 2020 so I mostly took the year to dive into my 2019 purchases and learn them. That being said… at least what I did pick up all fell into the ā€œhitsā€ category:

HITS

Tascam Model 16: Not perfect (what mixer is?) but absolutely the best solution for my DAWless recording needs. I’ve gushed about this mixer in its own dedicated thread here but the Model 16 has been one of the most revelatory gear purchases ever, and has really helped emphasized the ā€œlisten with your ears, not your eyesā€ way of mixing that I’ve been slow to adopt in recent years since ditching my laptop for music-making.

Digitech Polara Reverb: Randomly saw this for $80 USD on Amazon and reflexively pulled the trigger on it. Ugly as hell but for a solid, meat-and-potatoes stereo reverb it can’t be beat for the price.

Korg Volca Drum: I just received this last week so I’m still in the honeymoon phase with it, but it’s still mind-boggling to me that this much functionality and just overall… weirdness was fit into the Volca form factor. Korg could have easily scaled this up to a future classic with pads, encoders, individual outs, et al. I’ve only scratched the surface with the VD but my 20-year-old ER-1 may finally get a well-deserved break.

Wishing everyone here best wishes and happy musicking for 2021!

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Oh man, I want a Sherman Filterbank really bad. The only thing holding me back is the fact that it’s mono, or if you want stereo it’s basically just two units stapled together. It sounds so sweet though!

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2 or 4 :sparkling_heart:

image

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Holy mother of god

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Hits

  • Model:Samples - made it fun to make beats again and made me want to upgrade to the Digitakt for larger screen + (re)sampling
  • Digitakt - love noodling around to make some beats and work with waveforms and re-sampling
  • Behringer RX1602 v2 - cheap line mixer, but works and let’s me play around without having to boot up my computer

Undecided

  • Digitone - haven’t had enough time to dig into the synthesis options, wish it was just a compact MonoMachine
  • Analog Four mk1 - also haven’t had enough time to unlock all it’s power

Misses

  • 1010 Blackbox - screen too small for touch, didn’t gel with the workflow, a bit buggy still, not a fan of the minijacks either
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(Limited Edition only 95 pcs made, all sold out)

95 copies when you need at least one per human …

I’d still say your comment isn’t quite right. Sure, there is a lot of buzz around the Octatrack at the moment (it’s a great machine), but who is to say that the positive comments are not honest? Just because someone has a negative opinion of a piece of gear that makes it honest? I actually disagree with most of that person’s comments about the Octatrack. Everyone can have their opinion, of course.

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You can do mono in -> stereo out with 1 unit, and have the 2 filters panned separately. Honestly I don’t find it a huge issue, I’m really liking to run it in parallel to a dry signal Which could be stereo. Been mostly running it on my drum buss to make crazy additional layers, but I want to next try just running single parts through it to warp them to something new. There is a lot of range to it without getting into the amusical FSU sounds. The YouTube video demos are mostly bad demonstrations of its actual strengths.

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What I found interesting is that he thought the OT has a grungy sound, where I thought it was just completely neutral? I can understand the rest of his criticism, but that one I found odd.

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I don’t have an OT, but this criticism about it imparting a grungy sound actually made me want one more (if it were true).

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Hah, well as much as I love grungy I could see how you wouldn’t want your 1300€ sampler to colour everything you put in it. That said I don’t think it colours the sound at all. Only explanation I could think of is that maybe he had the sample depth set to 16bit, but even then I’m too much a porridge ear to hear a difference.

Dunno, my OT doesn’t color when I disable the FX, neither when in Thru machine, nor when sampling. Not scientifically done, just by ears.