WAit a minute! You can synthesize sounds with synthesizers? Back to drawing board for me… 
And yeah good move, who needs drugs when you got synthesizers… 
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Didn’t work out like that unfortunatley. Still suffering from pain of separation 
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Alright, El Paso on the digits then… 
I was going to say some comforting words, but you know, those sad heartbreak songs do really well…
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Working on it 
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Hah, that video. I wonder how many OTs have been purchased because of it.
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me too. Many I guess
cool thread!
i was in college studying electric bass and picked up the upright bass at the behest of a russian professor.
i bought this cheap chinese hunk of wood and tried my damndest to make it sound like music. wasn’t happening for whatever reason.
then on a summer bike ride I rode past a local music shop (thought it only did repairs) that i’d never been to. I thought, what the heck? might as well go in.
i walk in. the guy is standoffish at first. then i see this old-ass bass in the back under blacklight, so I started asking questions.
it had been a broken and decrepit hunk of junk for the entire 27 years the guy had had the shop to that point. it came with the shop when he took it over. 27 years later he’s bored in the summer and decides to fix it up. i walk in during that period, fall in love, and constantly check back with him and the bass. he was trying to dry some weird varnish under the black lights but it never dried. he eventually covered it in casey gun stock oil. (super non-traditional but looks beautiful).
we became friends. he sold me the bass for something like $1 an hour of his labor put into it. i couldn’t believe the deal. I still can’t believe i have that bass. it is now how i make most of my money.
fate? i think so.
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Destiny… 
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I hear you’re not supposed to get it wet or feed it after midnight.
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my slip into electronic music happened in college as well.
i was going to my buddy’s house to jam. id bring my bass and he had maschine (can’t remember which one…).
i thought, meh, this thing is not for me.
over our jams, though, i was getting jealous that all I had was my bass and the sounds I could get out of it while he’s over there jamming on tugboat horns (yes that was the sample that converted me).
then he got a Push 1. i thought, jeez, doOd, more “DJ toys?!”
he’s pounding away on the scale layout mode where there are no chromatic notes, and I said, "see? it’s a toy, dude, you can’t even play “the wrong notes” if you tried.
he switched the scale layout, and my brain asploded. i could see all my scales! ahhhhh. i was at his house every other day until he took an electrician’s job out of town.
I didn’t even wait to miss it. Sweetwater.com —> PayPal credit --> ableton and push 1 on the way immediately.
this lead to a whole new world of sound experimentation and many many more electronic purchases. i fell out of the box into hardware land, explored, bought (never sold), and now I’m happily enjoying all worlds. hardware into the box and the box out to hardware. couldn’t be happier.
now all i need to do is start finishing tracks and it will have been a glorious ride.
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it does occasionally get beer spilled on it after midnight. =/
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I was somewhat of an analog snob with my all tube amp and assortment of analog floor pedals. Ableton broke me in 2008… For the first time I ran my guitar through a computer and it didn’t sound like a cheap toy keyboard, and latency was workable… It actually took Intel joining with Apple and then the silver MacBooks and then ableton… All of the sudden I could have a warehouse full of gear from the past in a notebook, and reconfigure and set up any amount of combinations of gear and routing for save and recall…
Game Over…
At one point I remember not liking electronic music, and I also recall a time where I started to like it but was embarrassed to tell my friends because they thought it was shite, and listened to it in secret…
Years later now still being a guitar player at heart but also fully diving in to the electronic realm, I can see just as fine of an art form in working with the machines as there is in playing an instrument, they just use completely different sides or parts of the brain or something. Love putting them both together…
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There’s a lesson to be learned here…
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I must say, this thread feels very heartwarming for some reason. It’s nice to see people have very specific memories with their gear.
So, my strongest memory, and what got me really started into music, is when I got my Korg volca keys.
I already had a somewhat light musical background at the time. I had my first guitar just before highschool, and learned a few songs, and when I went to university I tried learning music theory on my own (I don’t know why but i never took a single music class in my life, but always wanted to).
At he time I also had an old yamaha psr400 lying around, that I had pretty much my whole life. I never really got into it too much, I only used it a few times while trying to learn to play the piano, but I always ended up not playing it for years afterward.
Anyway, fast forward to 2 years ago when I was speaking about music with a colleague at work and he talk to me about these really inexpensive synths (the volca series) and it got me hooked right away. I spent the mandatory “demo watching” month before finally ordering it online.
And then, one saturday night it finally arrived (it arrived sooner in the day but i wasn’t home when it did, haha). I was just about to go to a party and a friend had to pick me up. I really did want to try it before going out so my friend ended up coming to my house.
And then it happenned, I hooked up the volca keys to the psr400 and pressed play on the built-in sequencer, and to my (and my friends’) amazement, the volca keys sounded amazing, and combined to the psr400 built-in drums it was a really fun moment. We were so into jamming that we spent more than an hour playing and ended arriving really late to the party.
The rest of the night, this jam was probably the only thing we talked about. This got me and my friend really hooked up, and we’ve been in kind of a gear race ever since(which is pretty cool because we end up having a pretty complementary setup).
Well, i got too much into it, I hope this isn’t too long a read x)
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Well my electronic music baptism of fire wasn’t pretty.
In 1997 I wanted a synthesiser but didn’t have a clue about one from the other.
So I went to my local music store at the time in Bondi Sydney to check some out.
I remember there were a bunch of keyboards in there and the two that looked really cool that I narrowed down to were the Roland JP8000 and the Kawai K5000 additive synth.
Didn’t have a clue which to buy so asked the salesman which is the better synth to learn the fundamentals on, and he heavily advised the K5000 
Now I have been tweaking synths ever since and think I have a pretty good handle on any synth out there, any synth all but probably one, that being the K5000.
Holy shit, talk about straight in the deep end. Quite sure you need to be either a mathematician or NASA scientist, or preferably both to understand the architecture of that synth and how to program it.
So I bought the K5000 and was tweaking knobs aimlessly for about 6 months, creating random fart noises and laser zaps, always thinking to myself ‘what the fuck am I doing?
Then a mate just happened to buy a JP8000.
Sat down and had a tweak of it, and oh man it was like I had gone from trying to study quantum physics to studying categories of beer flavours at my local pub.
‘Damn you dodgy Bondi Music salesman’ I remember thinking
Sure enough, within a few days I guiltily sold the K5000 to some other poor unexpected newby and have been having nightmares about that synth ever since
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Haha, classic…
Reminds me how every once in awhile I come across an acoustic guitar player that is pretty determined and practices but doesn’t think they’re that good and thinks guitar is just super hard to play… I’ve played guitar for 25 years and I’ll pick theirs up and not be able to sound too good on it either…
I then get to explain to them that their guitar is a piece, and if they can round up $300 they will instantly be ten times better…
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Late to the party on this thread, but just read all the stories while having my coffee. Very heartwarming stuff, actually
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I got a few more tales for this thread but it’s easy to forget that it exists and when I do remember I gotta be in story tellin mood… It’s on slow burn… 
Glad you found it…
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