2021 Gear Purchase: Hits & Misses

[Oxenholme]

2021 was a guitar year for me

HITS:

Fender Player Strat: My first Fender. Made me play a ton of guitar again, taking lessons, learning scales etc. Purchase of the year.

Red Panda Particle 2: Super creative pedal, awesome for weird granular guitar textures and I haven’t even tried using it on non-guitar stuff

JHS Charlie Brown: Amp in a box pedal vintage Marshally sounding thing, sounds great.

Bogner Burnley: My fav gain pedal at the moment, especially with the Palisades in front of it shaping it. Can pull a ton of tones out of the strat with it.

MISS:

Tascam DP008-EX: Not terrible and actually pretty good as a little sketchpad to record riffs etc. but the fact that it can’t properly loop a section (there’s a slight delay before restarting) hurts it a lot imo.

[sacguy71]

Roland TB-03 and Roland TR-8 are surprise hits for me that sound great, fun and easy to use, run on batteries and have classic dance vibes. Paired with my OP-1 the ultimate portable trilogy of beat making. Also my 1010 Music Bluebox is great for mixer, touchscreen, easy to record and use with modular gear and small footprint. My favorite go to portable mixer now. Makes life easier since I can export the audio files easy from sdcard to DAW for further editing into songs.

[chiasticon]

just had a look back at my private messages and Reverb history, plus a glance around the studio… f*ck I bought a lot of stuff this past year

I’m not good with “misses” very much, because I generally figure if something is a miss, I should have sold it (or be in the process of selling it). the only thing I sold this past year was a Make Noise 0-Ctrl. and I bought another one a few months later! the next closest would be the Digitakt, but only because I keep waffling between selling it or not, since I have an Octatrack and don’t think I need both… only other stuff I’d consider here would be the Strymon Volante and the Division Department 01/IV. I like them both, but I’m not in love with them or anything.

hits:

• absolutely 100% the Prophet 5. I adored it from the moment I got it, still do, and don’t see that ever changing.
• Matriarch. a surprise purchase (a deal too good to pass up popped up) but I’m enamored by it’s core sound, and love exploring it. I think it will be considered a classic some day, in the way the Arp 2600 is.
• Chase Bliss pedals. all of them are fantastic, and I bought like five this year. I think Dark World is my favorite of them.
• TR-707. such a gloriously simple machine that just sounds great all the time. prices are trending upwards too, so I’m glad I found one in great shape for a good price, before they get ridiculous.
• RYTM mk2 (black). I sold the mk1 a couple years back because the screen frustrated me and thought I wanted to be more sample-centric for drums. I’m so happy to have this back. it’s much better with the bigger screen and I really missed running samples through the analog engine and then combining analog sounds to round them out. used the crap out of it this year.
• GIK Acoustics 242 panels. I put off buying or making acoustic panels forever because I couldn’t find a solution I liked and thought my studio sounded good enough. these completely changed that. it sounds so much better, and they were super easy to hang, look great, and weren’t insanely priced.

there’s probably some other stuff I forgot I got this year…

[bwo]

M has been a total grand slam so far for me, had been think about getting a proper poly for a long time, glad I really waited for the one that fit. Really a more PPG like sound but then some more modern features taken from the microwave. Some legacy in the mod design but you get used to it very quick.

M8 is also a hit but honestly not as big as I would have thought given it’s amazing feature set, feel like the digitakt sounds better for the most part. M8 does excell at that sort of tracker glitchy IDM type stuff but I think it also carries a lot of legacy from LSDJ some good some bad. Getting a minimal groove going with subtle movements evolving isn’t really its strength imo. Still I am really enjoying it, and discovering new tricks with it everytime I use it.

I posted about strega quite a while back in this thread, it is still a hit for me, mostly used as a fun fx unit.

[BelterCremebrulee]

I got the Count to 5 this year as well. It’s become one of my favorite pedals. Just a really weird device. I find if I embrace the unpredictability of it then I always end up with something interesting.

[wickfut]

Mostly Euro.

Akai S5000. Love it. I’ve had 2x S6000’s in the past but the s5000 just looks that little better and fits in a rack better due to not having the poking out screen.

Elektron AH mk2. love this too , but it doesn’t get much use outside of me just playing through it.

Dreadbox Notstalgia - cheap delay. sounds shit.

Data Bender - does 1 thing very good which is adds subtle stereo movement to mono sounds and also does glitch retriggers. Easy to overcook.

MI Beads - A clearer and longer sampling time version of clouds which actually is worse than clouds in every other way. Well done MI.

MI Blades - What a boring filter. My doepfer Xpander filter is much better. Doesn’t squelch, doesn’t do psy blips n farts. It’s crap.

Sample drum - tiz nice. Limited but nice. Should have bought a 1010 bitbox micro instead.

Rampage - Envelopes aren’t as snappy as I’d like (make noise maths is fast as hell) but I like everything else it does.

Varigate 4+ - it’s growing on me. Hated it at first. Now I sort of like it. Wish it allowed me to hear the pitch of the sound while moving the slider rather than guessing and hoping.

Pachinko (marbles clone) - love this. Use it in everything.

Befaco Burst - strange purchase. Thought it would make ratchetting easier but it doesn’t. What it does do is randomly trigger gates to do some random arps n stuff. Nifty.

0_C - how did I go without this for so long? Everything it does is wonderful

Performer sequencer - Bought for 8 lanes of control voltages, use it as a midi - CV and drum trigger device.

Mordax Data - arrived today, had a play. does what it says on the tin.

Tip-top quantizer - love this. The ability to select your notes is a deal breaker, and the new arp firmware is quite nice.

4ms Ensemble - just arrived. If you’re on the fence about this , buy it.

[DonovanDwyer]

@wickfut

worse than clouds in every other way. Well done MI.

Blasphemy!

[wickfut]

well it’s true.

It misses out on most of the clouds modes, especially when you have the Karmel beat repeat firmware.

It doesn’t do that granular smear which clouds pulls off so well.

Doesn’t allow control over stereo field, just some half hearted attempt when you set density to the right side (or random mode)

Doesn’t allow you to affect only the grains , rather you add effect to everything including the input. weird choice.

but it has some attenuverters to make up for it.

[presteign]

Hit:

• Model:Cycles. I haven’t used it much yet (mostly owing to a current lack of space for my dawless setup) but this was my first Elektron gear, and I was all set to not click with the workflow… and it clicked instantly. As a groovebox, it fixes the things I’ve never liked about the Circuit (which I still quite like as a hardware sequencer) and as an FM synth, I love the design approach to its “machines.” It’s like they took some FM algorithms, extracted the sweet spots, and made a synth out of those.

Miss:

• Bitwig Studio 4. I skipped Live 11 at launch because it seemed like such a lackluster update, and a big crossgrade sale convinced me to take another look at Bitwig. I found myself taking quickly to the demo version, and maybe it was just that the sale ended right after Knobcon and The Grid seemed like a good way to keep myself away from modular for now… A few months later and I haven’t done anything in The Grid and I bought the Live 11 upgrade on Black Friday.

[darenager]

Hits:

Polyend Tracker
MPC One

Misses:
Not one

[blackincali]

Updating this post a few months on.

I sold my Chase Bliss Mood and Microcosm. I wasn’t using them enough because I have excellent verbs in my eurorack. And when I did use them with my tele, I craved a simple reverb without the “sparkle.”

I’m still on the fence about the M8 tracker only because I’ve lacked the time to get stuck into it. Modular adventures and minimal DT/DN keep pulling me away.

[JamesM]

Keystep 37
They took an already excellent idea and made it perfect.

Boss DC-2w
Got it along with several other new chorus fx this year, but didn’t expect it to be so perfect that it’s a permanent fixture on my mixer. Keeping it sub audible makes the mix sound way better than I’m deserving of (and usually on the #2 settings).

[chain25]

CraftSynth 2.0 is a funny little device that offers a surprisingly good and versatile sound. Running through the oscillators is so much fun!
However build quality, layout of the knobs and having to use the app (which was working flawlessly though) made me sell it nevertheless. Even though it was signed on the bottom by …

Summary

[subduct]

Reviewed my list above and still stands. Ran out of money and haven’t been able to buy anything else since then. But my final hit of the year is MIDI cables, patchbay etc to finally give me a stable and coherent studio/MIDI arrangement that I can keep in my head.

Everything can be sampled into the OT for later use, including vinyl/CDs/internet.
Everything has it’s own OT MIDI channel including 2 for sequencing FX & 2 for modular/semi-modular.
More FX pedals are available and patched in as needed via a mini patchbay.

[Skorheim]

Virus TI2 Desktop
Sounded beautiful, sweet spots all over, filter was a bit weak but not a huge issue.

Only problem was that i bought it for its multimode. Access boasts of 80-100 voice poly, however as far as i can tell that’s using only the init preset.
I was getting voice stealing and crackle after only 3 simultaneous sounds using max 8 voices.

Luckily i was still within return period, no harm no foul. Rad synth, but not for my purposes

[tallrobphilp]

Hits:

• Pioneer Toraiz SP-16. It’s easy to use, it’s fun and it sounds great. It’s everything I wanted Maschine MK3 to be but wasn’t. Amazed that this thing isn’t more popular, it’s a brilliant groovebox that has more depth than you might think, it’s just been badly marketed.
• Noiiz subscription on sale at $59 per year. Loads of sampling food, good for SP-16 and DAW.
• Samples from Mars “Essential Wavs from Mars”. I didn’t need the everything bundle, there’s no way I’d use all that. This is a great subset and the folder layout is so well considered. Loads of kits from classic drum machines that I can load straight into Bitwig drum machine and lots of great one-shots of drums and synths all smartly sorted by machine and/or type etc.
• No Black Friday stupidity. I didn’t get suckered into software except XO which was a bargain. I held my nerve and didn’t waste loads of money on soft synths and FX that I’ll never use. Bitwig has more FX than I can ever figure out and the factory library shows the impressive capability of the built-in synths. Plenty to keep me occupied already!

Misses:

• Dreadbox Typhon. It was an impulse purchase and although it sounds great I’ll never use it. My fault, I have to be more smart, I don’t have the time or space for a hardware setup except for a single groovebox which is the SP-16.
• Eurorack. I spent a little bit and then realised that I’d need to spend at least 5x more to even get close to what I’d want to achieve. It’s waste of money for me personally. See above comment about being more smart.

[Bamshoot]

Hits:

• ESQ-1. I’d previously had the SQ-80 and in theory I should have loved it. But something about it just annoyed me. The clacky keyboard and an intermittent display didn’t help. Recently found the ESQ-1 and it just seems right. Love the sound, modulation and the functioning VFD display. I find similarly emotional, warpy sounds like the CZ101 just fall out of it.

• Vestax PMC-25r. Finally found out the hype for rotary mixers. As well as the rotary gain knobs, the 3 band rotary isolator is a thing of beauty to hear and handle.

Misses:

• I’m really hoping this changes but possibly the Machinedrum II UW. Though hopefully that’s just me being overly critical based on how much I paid for it. Incredibly deep and very fun and intuitive to play with but so far, everything still sounds very Machinedrummy.

[plusn]

Then don´t listen to Anthony Rother´s latest albums…he has Waldorf Wave and Microwave XT all over those albums…

[plusn]

Do it…and if you need to sell something…you won´t regret it. It´s next to Moogs and Seqeuentials, one of the best synths out there.

[subduct]

@Bamshoot

Finally found out the hype for rotary mixers.

One day I’d really love this, and this. Probably set me back 4-5K or so, more than my car is worth!