Indeed. M.I.A. made his debut album only with a Roland MC-303.
EDIT: Roland MC-505.
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a4 mk1
again
theres a dude on youtube who totally slayed with this - canāt remember his name but loads of incredible tracks made with just the mc303
Yes agreed, BUT - that being said, we also have to consider the genre of the music as well. I think a lot of people may discard a groovebox thatās perfectly fine to make music, for the wrong reasons.
She?
It was also a 505 I think.
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I would like a thread of albums (or even EPs) made exclusively with a single groovebox. Would be very inspirational to see how people extract so much from basically a single piece of gear.
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I was excited to try to do drums with my A4 when I acquired it ages back, but quickly put that to bed given the lack of a compressor, and single stereo output (mk1, not sure if the mk2 fixed that).
Sure, I could hard pan to get two monos, and that worked in principle, but negated the stereo FX.
Never heard any great drums out of the box either. Digitone 2 probably would surpass the A4 on all these fronts today.
Perhaps not quite the same, but I was under the impression this EP was done on a limited collection of Elektron gearā¦ (edit: according to an article, this is JUST the Analog Rytm).
Plaid treat us to three brand new and exclusive songs, created using the Analog Rytm.
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Yeah, thatās a good one. My internet buddy Nate just got one as well. Heās been rocking a lot of old samplers lately.
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Iād likely cite an Elektron box for the best āall in oneā box, but when speaking to classic boxes, I had a fondness for the Yamaha RM1X.
Justin Berkovi put it in my radar (UK 90s weird techno), and people like Cristian Vogel used one purely to sequence other boxes (e.g. Nord Modular).
I sold mine because I disliked the mute/pattern change workflow, but it is notably the last box I ever used that had a midi based delay fx (each repeat could be a different note numberāthis could be wild when fed into a drum box).
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Check out At Home With the Groovebox
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yeah the 700 was an revelation for me when it came out
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I was already in Japan when it came out it looks like, but I didnāt start buying music gear until a few years later. Strangely by that time they were really not in the shops by me, so it totally slipped by me. With those pads, knobs, and screen, I may have copped one!
Japan was way behind in the internet during that era, so I was basically cut off from the world for a few years. Sounds kind of idyllic right now. Haha.
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Midi FX is something you donāt see much of anymore. The other one I was just thinking about from the DR-202 I got not that long ago is all the crazy kinds of drum rolls you can do. A whole page in the manual!
These days it seems like sub step is what every machine does, but the DR-202 can do all sort of crazy complex rolls, some with wild pitch and volume movements. You can create some cool drum breaks, but on top of that you can do wild sound design stuff if you choose a melodic sound. This is the kind of thing I was thinking about when I said the old machines from that era were more feature rich.
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Made this EP on Roland MC-505. A sampler and 2 mono-synths were sequenced by the groovebox, drums and any other sounds came from the 505 itself.
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Interesting. My friend made some amazing tracks with the RS7000 that got released and played by rather well known house DJs at that time. He used the sampler engine of it mostly.
And there were some amazing additional producers involved like Diplo, Switch, and Richard X. Itās not about the tools, itās about the ideas and skills.
I love the midi fx on my RM1x. The problem with midi fx though is that itās easy to overload the bandwidth and/or processor. Which of course can also create happy accidents.
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