Humour me for a minute

Lets say, hypothetically, I wanted to fuck about with some hardware, make some tunes hardware only or mostly and I have no knowledge of where to start. I'm a dummy. I'm looking for a barebones hardware set up, what kit ideally would be good for someone new to this, kinda thing, and I'm not talking top of the range, amazing shit, I mean stuff that gets the job done soundwise and is reliable and easy enough to get my head around.

Suggestions would be great, cheers.

seriously...

cheap way - MC-303/505 all in one

wereas personally i like sperate drum boxes and sepreate bass or pads or whatever...synth... so my 'expensive way'///...

Expensive way - a boss/roland/yammaha/ style drum machine and maybe somthing like a Korg micro synth (prefibliy a midi style synth, then you;d need to get a 707 or some midi output on the drum machine to sync shit up.. unless you wanna play real time..)

though if you want to go well minimal.. and make music, i personally go as minimal as just a Sh-101 and Tr-606, give or take an ESQ-1 or tr-707,

when im full blown out.. i use xx ammount of tracks on ableton, 3 drum machines (zoom,606,707), 1 mono synth(101), 1 bass synth(303), 1 poly synth (esq1), A sampler (sk5), a commodore 64 with prophit 64 and other radicle c= music tapes(programes), and an external fx box (boss se-70)

^ that was my basic set up for v/vms cassette tape tracks vol.2

what about the electribe stuff, i see some youtube videos of people hooking up those and they are quite minimal, no idea how much they cost tho

the sp-404 is a good cheap purely sample based way to get things done.

laptop + midi controller + renoise + microphone(or field recorder)

if i had to get "hardware" then i'd look at a sampler with lots of flash memory and a TR-style sequencer

mpc1000 + whatever midi-capable gear suits your fancy. small mixer. some fx.

As an owner of the three MKII series of Electribes and wanting to do the same thing you want, I'd say go for the Electribes.

You can choose a 500 dollar EMX which has built in drum samples and waveforms, to be used on 9 drum parts and 5 synth parts per pattern. If you want sampling you can choose the 500 dollar ESX which has some more interesting types of parts such as slice parts, or 2 keyboard parts that let you play a transposed sample across the keypads, like the nnxt in reason. Oh not to mention the arp ribbon and slider are great fun, especially for live performance.

Then there's the 280 dollar ES1, a sampler. (No keyboard parts unfortunately, but there is a way to program melodies)

Also there's the EA1 (a two-part two-osc synth groovebox, though it's a tad limited as far as sound sculpting) and the ER1 which has 4 percussion synth parts that work based on taking a sin or tri wave and applying a pitch lfo with one of 6 waveforms, and wide range of control with the lfo speed, depth, pitch, decay, bass boost, etc. It also has a single set of OHH, CHH, crash, and clap. The ER1 is good for electronic music type sounds or retro 808 style drums.

If you can afford the EMX I would get that.

My favorite EMX vid:

  Vegeta897 said:

You can choose a 500 dollar EMX...

Oh, the same unit is over $1500 US dollars in Australia! :(

http://www.allansmusic.com.au/Product.aspx?p=93873

That's... ridiculous. Just eBay it.

  Vegeta897 said:

That's... ridiculous. Just eBay it.

Yeah. It's absurd. Especially when you can buy the same gear online from ebay or other online stores. Reason 4.0 is $700 Aussie dollars at the same shop, but I bought it for about $520 at the Propellerheads shop online.

Thankfully I also go to Japan about once a year, and gear over there is much more reasonably priced.

wow. i have that electribe, il sell it for 180, so 360 dollars. offers considered.

buy my SU700 its well pimpin

Get the electribes and a yamaha mixer if it is your first time. If you get all that new though, your still looking at over $1000. Hardware is expensive. I suppose you could check eBay though.

I have an Electribe M, it was the first piece of hardware I bought (well, after turntables and a mixer) and I still occasionally play with it. I also bought a boss sp-something and its fun as a sampler/effects processor, and it was pretty cheap, something i would recommend to someone that is just getting in to hardware.

i started out with a microkorg and an er-1 and ea-1 by korg.

all are fun but limited. should be cheapish as well.

i build my own synthesizers via spit and twine.