Unpopular gears

What are the gears you have / had which give you pleasures and which are, were or become unpopular ?

  • Yamaha RX 7: 23 years ago (oh i’m old) i used it with my rock bands. I tweaked this box beyond spare even to create FX. I was able to create synt sound too. That was my unique electronic instrument as i was guitar player. I remember the other guys in the band hated the idea to play with a drum machine. But as drummers were rare in the place this drum machine became the sixth member of the band (do you remember the band “echo and the bunnymen”. Echo was the name of their drum machine)

  • Yamaha QY70: this litle grrove box was incredible. Sounds were not fantastic but The sequencer was powerfull. This box reavelled me the world of electronix music. A new page in my musical life.

  • Tenori-on: i still have it and love it. Of course, it sounds like if you play bontempi in toilets but i find this gear pure poetry. Sometimes when i’m tired of the complexity of my other gears, i just sit down in the sofa, take my tenori and plug headphones. Most of the time i get hypnotized in the dark night. Interesting machine to sample with OT too.

Hey guys do you know that monomachine and OP-1 are hated by most of the musicians in other forums ? Sometimes we have a special relationship with gears. Few people understand.

just admit it - you’re a yamaha hater ;)))
for me it’s the OP-1, I guess. on par with the Octatrack (which is criticised even on this very forum mostly due to the recent lack of updates, an incomplete midi sequencer and non-polyphonic tracks). myself, I fell in love with it and its overall quirkyness instantly.

different story with the OP-1 though. Always thought it was laughable - with the minijacks, reported high noise level and audible artifacts from the usb port, not-so-perfect sound quality, itself not being entirely sure if it’s a toy or a proper instrument… HOWEVER when I managed to get one for a test drive I was totally hooked in less than 30 seconds. eventually I spent my next bonus on it :wink:

There are a bunch of OP-1 haters on this site too… Not a bad thing. to each his own…

there’s nothing that shines as much as an OP-1 when you’re sitting up at 30,000ft with… >-------------< this much room to do stuff!

you fly in luxury!

I get >-<

I’ve always liked what NI has done with Maschine and Maschine iOS.
I don’t really use it, but it sure is easy.

The MPC’s I’ve always thought were kinda boring.

As far as the OP1 and MnM, I get it.
I don’t feel that way tho.

Haha!

For me it’s my Korg M3-61. It’s not that a lot people hate it -it’s just that it’s, well, not popular, which is the topic of this thread.

Korg’s best-selling workstation in history was the Triton, which implies the M3 never matched it in popularity even when it was at the height of production and sales. A lot of “first world” peeps who owned M3s dumped them for Korg Kronos or other newer workstations, in the quest for ever “better” sample libraries, especially piano sounds, and the modeled organ (based on Korg’s original Hammond clone). When I search on Youtube now, most of the newer M3 videos are by people from Greece, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or Central/South America.

Romplers seem to be only cool with peeps who play in cover bands and peeps who play the traditional/folk music of their countries. It seems more fashionable to have a “pure” synth these days.

I keep my M3 because its rompler sounds complement the unapologetically electronic tones of my “pure synths”, and it has its own “pure synth” (the EXB-RADIAS board - considered to be rendered obsolete by the Kronos’s VA, FM, and modeling engines). I also enjoy playing with the KARMA features, which in the past drew its share of hate, lol.

It’s one of several pieces of gear I have that I haven’t touched much since I got my Octatrack, mainly because learning my way around the OT has cost me so much time and energy. I’m sure J. G. Bennett had the OT in mind when he famously said "It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering’. But as I continue to gain experience and confidence using it, I’ve slowly started integrating other gear with it and I’m sure the M3 will get its turn.

And oh yes, I have an OP-1 too. Yeah, I know how some people feel about it, but they tend to be boring people with a very narrow view of making music (you can’t use sequencers, you can’t use samplers, only music made before 1980 is any good, etc… zzzzzzz).

I have a V2 Triton pro that is forever being mangled by one of my two Monomachine’s and is used for poly pads filtered via the Analog 4.
I also swear by the Roland Integra-7 which does exceptionally good composite modelling and the VA in it is none too shabby either truth be told. It replaced my JV1080, D550 and S550 rack units - so far so good.
People seem to hate on it but I use it in lots of my works - good for quality strings, brass, acoustic sounds and quite often gets granulized and mangled via processing with Reaktor for some really unique sound design.
I also love my E-Mu Audity 2000 which can throw out some stupidly huge bass end and it is relatively complex for a “rompler” - you can do rather weird things with loop point modulations of the internal waveforms also and the filters are very unique sounding.
The Analog 4 is now the only analog synth I own, though I am saving up for a Bass Station II at the moment.
I had a lot more analog gear but like bucking trends and am really enjoying what physical modelling, composite modelling, FM and granular synthesis bring to the table these days.

Casio CZ-1000

I like its unique textures, although it"s digital, it has this evil analog electric sound to it that I rarely heard on another hardware synth.

Has 8 step envelopes on two dco’s, dcw’s and dca’s

Editing 48 separate envelope steps with incremental buttons just to do a patch takes a while.

It’s 4 part multi timbral so I can do some nice layered sounds.
Good OT food.

They go for 175 $ and under.
But I’m trying to get the CZ-101, same thing but smaller with mini keys.

Yes! The Casio CZ range is really nice. Please someone revisit this method of synthesis!

I purchased a Nova desktop for the 2nd time yesterday. I always adored this VA. Magic if you delete all the presets and make yours. And it had a second life sound thr my A4. I get it for a 2nd time to make poetic pads but I was surprised by the quality of basses.

same goes for the korg poly800 and the yamaha tx81z and basically that whole generation of gear.

My first synth was a D X 11. I’m finally learning how to program the thing and am getting interesting results. It is staggering the number of similar synths from that time period that people never learned how to program.

i hated top gear australia

don’t like first gear on my car, too short

the gears on my pushbike are slipping going up steep tracks

lots of gears I don’t like

btw, not knocking the op!
technically gear (in our usage) is an uncountable noun so needs no plural ‘s’
a common euro addition

If I mentionned the Nova desktop here it’s because it is known (and used) as a Psytrance synth which is not right at all.

I’ve managed to pick up a few bargains over the past 12-18 months. Recently bagged a used OP1 for £360 which has been fantastic. I could never quite bring myself to part with the asking price (new or regular 2nd hand price) but with 2 hours of commuting to work each day it really has been great to have around. I’m still very much using it little more than a toy but learning lots. I can kind of see where the haters comes from. An iPad can do it all too I guess but there is just something very immediate and inspriing about the thing. Anyway, slightly off topic there.

I used to own a Yammy Fs1r. It’s a unit that is sort of the holy grail of FM synths nowadays but back when it was released it didn’t do well at all. Popular with those in the know and in reviews but generally very unpopular to the buying public. Sad I had to part with it. I’ve mentioned this a few times but I had to sell it to put towards a pram for my eldest kid 5 years ago. No regrets there and now, with the OP-1 especially, I have something that really appeals with the wee man. He hasn’t a musical bone in his body (yet) but he loves sampling and mucking about - usually sampling variations of “daddy is a poopoo head” or “daddy smells” sigh.

Is there any bit of gear that isn’t hated by someone?! Even the A4 has its critics!

I have a cousin of the Audity - an Emu Command Station XL-7 with Vintage Collection, World Expedition, and Protean Drums expansion ROMs. I intend to have it repaired someday soon. I was having fun sequencing 19-tone stuff on it and using them filters, and having all those knobs was nice. I didn’t get around to fooling around with modulating the sample start point and stuff like that, but I’d like to - I shouldn’t let the Patch Cord mod matrix with its generous number of sources and destinations go to waste. Indeed with the mod matrix and filters, one can make even nice acoustic instrument samples turn weirdly electronic in a hurry.

I think 4th gear is very unpopular. At least for me. I notice that I’m always shifting from 1st to 2nd to 3rd and then to 5th, skipping 4th gear entirely.

But I digress. I agree with an earlier poster about the Korg Poly-800, even though I love the sound of the thing, and it’s the cheapest analog synth you can buy, I think.