Commodore 64 with a tracker and later a Yamaha QY70.
Yamaha DJX / PSR: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-djx-super-dj
I lucked into it from my parents for piano practice, but it was both a sampler and had a decent filter and woooooooooo I made so much bad dance music with that. It also had MIDI out which started my DAW journey with Sonic Foundry ACiD
I’ve never tried any of the Volca gear but I’ve seen many people take them to a super creative place! I first started with a simple drum machine, the Arturia Drumbrute Impact. I instantly was hooked to making beats and rhythms, especially in techno. This was back in March 2020, after I had just started producing in a DAW for about a year. Fast forward now and my setup has grown to a full dawless jam setup. (You can see it in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKSfWf6Orxw )
But in short, I have a modular eurorack setup for leads and basslines, voices I have are the MCO MKII and the DPO. For Drums in my setup I use the Digitakt II (recently sold my Syntakt, samples for drums I find are a better workflow for me personally) I also have an A4 MKII next to the brain of the whole operation which is my Octatrack MKII.
All this to say that gear is fun and gear is life lol
Casio black tiny kiddy keyboard ![]()
But my first ”real” kit was a second hand Alesis QS6 bought from a store in the late 90s
Still have it. It’s a PITA to program anything on, has some nice sounds on board but pretty much never gets any usage
A single humbucker black Guild S60 from whatever the equivalent of Cash Convertors was back in the day. Cost about £50 in 1984. Weird looking, limited, but light to carry and easy to play. Got rid of it about a year later as I cycled through endless guitars trying to find something sufficiently forgiving for my lack of talent and sufficiently matching of my varying hairstyles and musical obsessions. Pretty much this but in black.
Alongside about the same time a beat up 1964 AC30 with no tolex on it from a TV repair shop near my house that had clearly picked it up and fixed it as well as they could, which I got for £40, including a new set of valves. It got played and gigged to death and I sold it to a friend in 1987 to buy something more practical. But then got it back from him 20 years later and had it put back together, serviced, recovered, reconed, the lot. Anyhow it now sits pristine in the front room, but sadly unused as who can use an AC30 in a small flat in London? FFS. Anyhow it’s a nice bit of furniture/art - photo below. Growing old, eh?
Meeblip Anode
Hmm…a trumpet, and then a bad upright piano I guilted my parents into getting me in high school.
First synth was a Korg DW-6000 in 1985 because who needs velocity sensitivity!
First sequencer was on the ESQ-1, I loved that thing. Other than some drum machines (DR-550, Korg S3) my first real groove box was an Elektron DN-1 (soon upgraded to a 2) last year. I think I have used most of the major DAWs at some point in my arc and owned way too much transitory “Inspire me, please” gear over the years. Currently happily hybrid between in the box and out of it!
Korg Triton for me. First piece of actual hardware after using Rebirth/Fruity Loops/Deckadance to noodle around on. JP-8080 shortly thereafter:
First piece of gear I bought myself was a Technics SL-1210 MK2 DJ turntable, quickly followed by another one plus some random Numark DJ mixer.
First synth was an Ensoniq ASR-10 ![]()
Mine was Novation Circuit and a Novation Circuit Mono Station.
Good times ![]()
Mine was this but I have no idea what happened to it. I think an ex took it to Goodwill after I had hung onto it for 30 years ![]()
Picked one of those up fairly recently and it’s like new!
I bought an Akai S612 together with a friend in 1989. We played it with his Juno-106. It was the cheapest “pro” sampler money could buy at the time. It was basically shit because it couldn’t multisample, but I had some fun making 8 second loops with the overdub function at 4kHz sample rate (!!).
Because of the lack of multisampling I ended up spending more time on my friend’s Amiga 500, but did perform a couple of local “gigs” with the S612, an OSCar and a Roland SH-09 ![]()
That was my second piece of hardware ![]()
My first non-guitar bit of gear. Those boxes punched WAY above their weight and the song mode taught me how to structure songs. Invaluable for me and they sounded great!








