Seer Systems Reality
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0=0
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a drumkit is not one-piece by definition 
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Definitely the DAW. Everything became significantly more convenient to do, which also made it possible to spend some extra time on each and every part of the process without worrying about going back to a previous idea if whatever you had in mind didnāt quite work out the way you imagined it.
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Iridium Core. So many synthesis options.
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hardware wise the virus b i owned around 2008. no nonsense, with an easy interface and good usable results across all sound needs.
but i have to say a megaton more before that by learning pure-data (that max msp openssource equivalent).
felt like modular but you have to build every module by yourself. such a pain in the ass in the beginning but so rewarding and empowering in the creative process after a while.
ended up creating a chaotic controller device that translated the involuntary flickering of eyelids/lashes into synthesis parameters. fun timesā¦
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The thing about Rytm is that thereās really no limit to what you can do. I canāt imagine how good Octatrack must be for experimenting. I really liked the Moog stuff in general, but there is Mariana, which I just found, which makes it kind of obsolete because I only use it sparingly. Roland 100m Sequencer. Then i used the Digitone and it really showed that it can do brillant dungeon sound stuff. I love the sound of the Virus C but i never owned one i have the Emulation etc. they are all so different.
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The digitakt was my first box and I remember it teaching me the same lesson. I first started creating my own music through a DAW, and for the first couple years everything just sounded like an overcrowded wall of sound. The digitakt kinda used the knowledge I gained from the DAW and forced me reduce things down to only the most essential elements because of the limited tracks(and the general transition over to hardware-only).
Other things, like the feeling of programming onto a hardware step sequencer, versus clicking things into a DAW, also altered the way I write music. I was super stoked to have the lights flashing and to see the beat that I programmed dancing on the tracks, as well as having the tactile feel of the mech switches.
another thing I noticed- the digitakts sequencer is setup as two rows of eight, and the rytms is setup as one row of sixteen. Tiny details like this can influence the way we think about writing music, and all the small details add up to a machine that feels unique and in its own lane. I think thats something elektron is super good at! they package most of the convienient things that emphasize and bring out the character of a certain instruments focus- like sampling, fm, or analog synthesis.
Yup
Honorable mention: Live 8 and upwards.
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I think i will give octatrack a try.
Fostex X-15. It was there that I learned to write and record different musical parts that became full songs. Nothing was the same after 16 year-old me got one of those. By 18 I was a songwriter.
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Octatrack.
What!! Wow. Thanks for the intro to konnakol rhythms
Your welcome, its pretty awesome!
The skill level on those that master it is incredible.
Probably Reason V1.0ā¦
Skeuomorphism is pretty old fashioned now, it seems but that environment taught me so much about signal flow, CV/Gate, using extra subtractors to patch additional LFOs all over the place. Also in that first version, you only had what 5 sound sources? So there were no distractions about which synth sounded best for which kind of soundā¦ You just got on with it and made the best you could with the tools that you had.
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Octatrack, it teached me minimalism is good. And to not give up. Keep going, also when its hard.
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Probably Digitakt, followed closely by Ableton Live.
The Digitakt got my interested in sample mangling, filter envelopes, LFO modulation, and much much more. Those fundamentals I brought with me into Ableton and gave me a slightly better understanding of WTF I was looking at.
building a modular synth taught me the most
Propellerheads Reason! I knew nothing about music creation back then. 16 years old, YT tutorials didnāt exist yet. Pure trial & error. I still can feel the joy of exploring it when I remember these timesā¤ļø
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The Akai S5000 because I dreamed of learning to make big tracks with lots of moving parts, and at the time I only knew of ProTools and of how expensive it was. So I got it and learned to layer samples, multi-sample, resample in weird ways, use and sync long samples, audio edit, it gave me a better understanding of time stretching and BPM matching, because I could have so many sample tracks, I was forced to think about mixing, helped me think and consider sample rates and bit depths in audio, and a bunch of other stuff that became important when I got to move into DAWs.