i was a young boy, probably 12 or so when i asked my parents for a microkorg xl. bless their souls, they got it for me (maybe with hopes that i would pick up piano again) and of course i was too young and impatient to actually learn how to use it. ended up selling it.
then maybe six or so years later, after a couple years of dinking in Ableton, i bought a PO-33 from Patchwerks’ original tiny location here in Seattle and got hooked from there. still a sampler boy through n through ten years later
First music gear was a guitar. First gear I started to make electronic music with, was an Amiga 500 with a Sampler-Adapter early 90th.
Then came no hardware other than a midi keyboard, first Cubase, later Logic for ages, and when I started to really dig into electronic music, I bought a Digitakt.
I still have a pss-140 that I use on a regular basis just to figure out melodies in polyphony without using octave up/down on elektron trigs. I keep thinking about buying one of the midi retrofit kits but like you say, I don’t want to mess with it too much especially since I got it in the 90’s and it’s still working.
my first bit of gear was a Yamaha PSS-51, i was suckered in, believing it to be a synth because it offered “vector synthesis” which was actually a joystick that let you crossfade between the different PCM pianos, marimbas, and pipe organs. was a bit disillusioned but sold it and got a Casio CZ-3000. now that was a synth to put hairs on your chest
i loved the electronic kick drum on it but it didn’t doof hard enough so i used to layer four or five MIDI notes on top of each other in the belief it made it louder
i don’t think i used the sequencer, i did all my sequencing using Breakthru on the Atari ST, which i still maintain was the absolute pinnacle of MIDI sequencing and will never be bested
As a kid, I owned a handheld noisemaker that was a different oscillators, modulators, pitch knobs, and I absolutely can’t think of what it was called but I LOVED it until it died. It was the size of a longer tricorder, not the chip made famous for the 80s “ray-gun” and “blast people on the road” noises and later use in dub sirens
I wish I could find it! I’d probably be hella disappointed considering what I own now, but I would love to find it again.
Still have it. Frankly a great piece of kit and great for learning synthesis. Started having a weird parameter drift issue where the LFO depth would change when you weren’t touching anything – very annoying. Now it lives in my closet and I should probably sell it.
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