When did someone’s personal preference in gear become a stated, factual mistake?
Is that some new internet thing the young kids are doing now?
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I wouldn’t call it new on the internet, decades of car forums and similar “boys club” structures instructing others on how their tools are bad (and they should feel bad.)
Gearspace has moderated somewhat better on that lately, at least. And the drama queens have burnt themselves out in the last year or so.
It’s really rare that i combine different things. I don’t know why but when I start a song on one tool I really don’t want to reach out for anything different, even if it sits right next to it.
I usually switch on just one device, leave the rest unpowered.
I hate saving, naming, organizing projects over multiple devices.
I can’t think of many tracks that feature multiple sources. All finished tracks in quite a while were Maschine only, OT only, Polyend tracker only, Ipad only, MC 101 only, OPz only…
I always dream of the super sophisticated multiple synths room, where everything is cabled up and controlled by one sequencer brain but I always end up with single grooveboxes. Quite a few of them though to keep it moving 
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I confess I’m piqued by this, but it’s probably best I leave it there.
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This is why I’ve been honing my skills to pick up where those valiant warriors left off, defending quarter million dollar mix consoles from the in-the-box peasants
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Akai and Alesis both generally have good builds and the same guts are in both, I think the main difference is the look of the chassis and the MiniAK shipped with a mic, but I hardly think you’d find a used one these days that still has the mic with it. And you’d probably not want to use that mic anyway because it’s probably not that good.
But yes, the Alesis Micron and the Akai MiniAK. People slept on it. It’s a pain to program but there’s 3rd party VSTs that deal with it’s incredibly obtuse NRPNs that support it’s internal values which are 65535 vs. normal midi 128 or 256 etc. (i.e. it sends 3 midi chunks between the opening and closing bits so it does take custom software or midi software that can handle stuff beyond normal NRPNs) and there’s also a few hardware knob boxes made specifically for hands on programming, but you still need to menu dive to poke around it’s 16 part patch matrix.
But it can pretty much convincingly replace a wall of expensive synths. Again, I saw a guy do micron vs. (insert famous synth here) where he made the same patch on both machines and gave blind tests to people who claim they can hear digital or analog or whatever…and most of them said they were guessing or claimed they knew for a fact one of them was the analog and the other was the digital and got it wrong.
So if classic sounds are your thing, get it. Ignore the digital aspect. In fact, it’s got assignable levels of analog drift both for filter states and oscillators so you can have a nearly dying machine with extreme settings or a nice ‘not perfect’ analog feel to the tones. And zero aliasing. And 8 voice, 8 part multitimbral with sequencer built in. And 42 band vocoder. And some FM even.
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I think the details are especially interesting. That he uses the headphone output of a cheap laptop with old freeware as a sort of granular delay is really cool. That is the true spirit of doing the most with the least 
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first: you definitely can - and likely should - make music AND jog. regular exercise is important for your body, mind, and creative energy. and painting birds on things is pretty 2007 I think; but maybe you can make a living doing it, I dunno…
second: I owned a micron once. it f*cking sucked. one of the worst interfaces I’ve ever used in my entire life. the Ion that it was based on… now that was a fun synth. and yes, the VA synthesis engine they both shared is fantastic; for the time it was made at least. if I were going that route I’d explore another option before committing to a 20 year old VA engine. it does have the significant plus side of being cheap though…
finally, while I don’t agree with your chosen “everything anyone would ever need” list, you make a strong point, and one that basically re-appears in this thread and others similar to it: a few flexible tools that you enjoy and feel creative/productive using should suit you just fine. for me, at least right now, it would be something like Digitone, OT, a Serge panel, and a Rev2. maybe you feel the same way about my list as I do about yours. and that’s fine. but to me, the intention and the mindset for why they were chosen is essentially the same; they’re just different tools.
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note though that that video shows Four Tet’s live setup only. I think he uses even less in the studio; but it’s centered around Live, with a quite nice audio interface, and a TON of records for samples.
this is his live setup in front of some of his studio setup:
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i’m pretty sure he has an A4 mk2 somewhere on the right side of this room
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he does indeed! I’m pretty sure that in his “ask me anything” when Sixteen Oceans came out in 2020 he said he only used it for one sound on that record. and that he barely knows it. I think he said he used Omnisphere a bunch too.
you can see it here:
side note: isn’t he UK-based? weird to see a Sweetwater box under the table and US-style three-prong outlets for his gear, right? unless he moved stateside and I was unaware…?
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I use a4mk2 and dt and ah
Only focus on a4, juist Some hh, perc, soundfx, oneshots on dt
This is the max for me to Juggle with
Happy with the results, struggling with a daw
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I wanted to say this too. I don’t think it sounded very good, either. I would now recommend a Hydrasynth Explorer for this role with zero hesitation - it’s more expensive but it’s also not full of sadness.
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He moved to the US, I think he is somewhere in the New York state.
Regarding using gear he has this method of jamming with hardware, recording when something feels good, and storing the recording in his massive archive of samples. Then when he decides to make an album, he goes back through his samples and make tracks putting them together, usually involving Omnisphere at this stage I suppose, but not hardware. His music is all sample manipulation. So technically he only really needs his computer, very in line with this topic.
He talks about all of this in this podcast: hanging out with audiophiles: EP 78 - FOUR TET
I think I remember him saying in it that when he gets a new drum machine, he records 10 beats made with it, and then he never uses it again.
PS: it would be awesome to focus less on what gear we use, and more on strategies we employ to get the most out of it, wouldn’t it?
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Rumour mill
He did a well publicised stream during the 2020 pandemic (although today I forget which platform hosted it, and which media outlet commissioned it). In the stream he walked from the woods outside into his house, and then into that room. I remember thinking at the time that the trees didn’t look like British species (not that I’m an expert; just going on intuition), and the architecture of the house certainly looked more American than British (e.g. mainly wooden frame + walls/cladding; US farmhouse style).
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that would be Boiler Room. funny I remember watching it but none of what you said dawned on me at the time. now I’m like “yeah those are definitely New York license plates.” 
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Skipable contentious opinion
I find the idea that using a computer is “using a little” misleading. Sure, it’s physically small portable and cheaper than equivalent hardware, but if you have Live and some plug-ins, you have the functionality of a £500k studio (albeit probably lower quality and lacking the emotional value of physical space). You have as many channel strips, as many compressors, as many synths and samplers as your imagination and processor can handle. It’s deeply, deeply complex. Setting up 5 harware synths, a couple of drum machines and a mixer is less in terms of sound sources, routing options than a bare Live or Reason install.
Are there techniques or tricks? What’s a pianist or guitarist really doing when they captivate a crowd and move them emotionally, and how can we do something similar with an 808 and a 202.
What do you do to create impact, or tension, when you only have one or two sound sources?
(I suck at developing tension; I keep relying on filter sweeps, infinite feedback delay, and turning up the detune params)
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Born and raised up here and Spoonman is a song Soundgarden should have never released. Instant skip.
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agree, I feel on myself, I know that I add gear to the setup to compensate lack of inspiration, and sometimes I’m impressed when (casually often…) I produce something really good with a minimal subset of the setup. Actually I have a (good) midi sequencer (toraiz squid) for (DN + blofeld + axoloti core) + a sampler sometimes used also as a sequencer (polyend tracker)
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Toraiz Squid sequencing Digitone Keys
headphones or sub recommended 
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