Akai gear is solid, I have the MPK Mini and the software alone is worth the price point, a bigger one for more DAW work would be nice but then I remember my laptop is about fourteen years old and billows smoke if I put more than six tracks in Reason
Yeah, I'm running that Alienware 18 in the picture. 13 years old. Working on a song right now with 29 tracks, and it is struggling even with an SSD and ram upgrade. Love my MPK249, though.
from what I understand it's more or less the same sound architecture as the microKORG but there's something decidedly more futuristic and sophisticated about this bad boy
It’s the first one I ever really saw and it was at a music store on the way home from a high school. We’d all stop frequently to look at pedals and I’d spend as long as I could playing it before the shop owner would make us all go. I still dream of marching in there and buying it from his dumb face
there's such a gulf between borderline broken and 'broken,' as long as it outputs a signal it's a tool you can work with, and sometimes the final track is better for it
I remember being an absolute beginner at synths, seeing models like this and trembling, much like peasants of old would when confronted with the face of God
synths are wonderful because you can learn about them by getting a masters in electrical engineering and music theory, but you can also learn about them by tweaking rotaries and seeing what happens
At the beginning of the pandemic I took hours and hours of Ableton courses and was so bored and got nowhere and then I bought a Moog Grandmother and learned more twiddling knobs than I did in the previous two years
Favorite one that I own is my Mother 32. When I patch it with the oscillators and envelopes from the Neutron, I can get pretty close to a minimoog sound
I just got a Crave, which IS a Mother-32 but with a dope orange casing - still confronting what I *don't* know about modular but that's never stopped me before
Literally the only way to learn is to make noise. People love to talk bad about berhinger, but their shit is cheap and made as well as low end Roland or korg stuff if not better.
as desk space gets cluttered and name-brand gear gets pricier, I'm finding myself a lot more appreciative of small-form gear made by boutique makers, not everybody's got the good fortune to have a 'rumpus room'
These things are powerhouses to begin with, then you add the keyboard and it's the sort of Leviathan that sailors of old would have nightmares about, I would be fine sleeping in my car if it meant rocking one of these
Long time before I can afford one but I love looking at these models, I also like anyone who tries to present a different way of 'interfacing' with music, makes you think of how many other concepts we'd have if gearmakers didn't decide "yeah, keys and only keys are best"
I like the aesthetic, I've got a Novation Circuit which is basically two of these, but really I think I'd rather have one with a much simpler editing workflow. These things can sound thin but you mess with it enough and it becomes a juggernaut
messed around on one at the shop yesterday, they're pricey but it's neat to experience a very different tactility while making keyed music, it feels like you have more of a 'relationship' to the instrument
My usual go to is TONTO but that feels disingenuous here since its a gigantic modular system more than A synthesizer. So heres maybe my favorite standalone synth, the classic
Lol yeah i have an old univox that has the same circuit but its also in my repair pile. Having the ability to use it as a standalone small stone phaser and chorus means i probably will still keep it when i finally fix the univox
Vangelis said words to the effect of 'more than any other piece of gear, this one needs to be approached as a unique and singular instrument' and pal, I believe it
more modern, the Waldorf Blofeld (keyed and non-keyed version) is very aesthetically pleasing, maybe because it looks like it was built out of walls ripped from a high end European department store, or a hospital
I'll also always have a soft spot for the PSR-12 - most Yamahas have the same layout and aesthetic, this one has zero MIDI connectivity and a tinny built in speaker and I recorded the whole Aquaman musical on one of these running off a Sega Genesis AC adapter
Then there's the microKORG which I actually *DO* own. The original mark 1 has fewer features but makes up for it with charm, plus after a decade I discovered just *how* expansive the soundshaping and virtual patching can be if you don't mind menu diving and reading acronyms
Its modulation matrix is incredibly powerful and incredibly annoying to use. There's i think software to make patch editing easier from pc? I really need to fix mine up
Funny enough since I took this pic I swapped out my Clouds for a piston Honda mk 2 (gnarly wave table oscillator). Me and clouds did not see eye to eye
I like modular and how you can plunk down a thousand for a module that sounds 'pretty alright' or pay fifty bucks to some guy doing DIY homemade modules and end up with the fattest pulse signal you could ever imagine
I think a lot of the modular scene is driven by pure GAS - there's so much YouTube content that is essentially "hey guys, I just bought this thing, lemme read the marketing materials at you while I fiddle some knobs nonmusically" and that's it.
I'm still learning, so still feeling what I "need"
Agreed, seems a lot of guides are more geared towards 'future expandability and optional outputs,' whereas most people really just want pointers on 'complete and functional starting setup'
There's a local guy I know that only talks about the gear he's bought and sold in the last month, not anything he's recorded with this stuff. Really nuts behavior
my uncle had one and let me and my cousin fuck around with it. we had a shoebox full of our floppies of samples. it had a really cool lo-fi sound from the kinda low audio quality (8-bit and I think sample rate topped out at like 30k?) and the transposition of the samples. thing ruled
I had a MiniBrute 1, I spent a few lovely months with it but one of the buttons was broken and only worked about 1/3 of the time, so I sent it back for a refund and traded up to the newly-released 2 and have always regretted this, just a little
One kind of silly reason for this is the MiniBrute 2 is *just* barely larger enough it no longer fits easily on my desk, but like, that's the difference between it being out all the time where I can play with it and it being in a box in the closet all the time, which is actually significant
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And who doesn't love the humble smoothness of the OG Mini?
Very versatile tho
Then I saw what dudes can do on one of these and realized that I'm pretty dumb most of the time
yeah we got Minimoog coming outta LAX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-e5W9cr4ZY
I'm still learning, so still feeling what I "need"
(I have very specific opinions about this, if the name has a "2" or "SE" after it that is a less interesting device.)