If you had say £2-3k what would you buy?

Anything from the Korg PS series.

  On 11/2/2010 at 12:08 AM, kakapo said:

The Korg X5 is a bit of an odd inclusion, but everything else would be useable in some way.

i've never owned one but two reasons for it in the list. 1st is nostalgia for when i first wanted to start writing electronic music and it was advertised on the back of Future Music and £500 sounded like a kings ransom. secondly, more importantly. one friend has an 05/rw i've played with good few times and another let me borrow his X5 for a few weeks before he moved to america. i really like the sound of early 90s romplers, especially when you play sounds at the "wrong" end of the keyboard. basses up high, shimmery pads ultra ultra low. it's great for creating textural starting points for feeding other stuff (e.g. some granular processing in Reaktor).

another example of where synths like this can sound good is the Autechre track on the Daniel Hansson tribute. obviously i don't know exactly how they did the song but there is a lead that sounds suspiciously like the slap bass sound you might get on something like a Roland MT32 or a General MIDI module that's been pitched right up. In the context of the track though, it works. part of me likes to think that Autechre have a sense of humour that geeky...

  On 11/1/2010 at 10:56 PM, Diao said:

  On 11/1/2010 at 12:28 PM, soundwave said:

an AKS or VCS3 when they're reissued in Jan

 

We can all wish. People have been putting down payments on them for years and only a handful have been produced. The waiting list is well over twice as long for how many synthi's they can make with the original components too, and the price tag is also over the 2-3k mark the OP was talking about.

 

We can all dream though...

erm I think you've missed the point dude, this isn't the old built to order waiting list this is a large production run thats available in Jan

  On 11/1/2010 at 11:57 PM, jeyemusik said:

  On 11/1/2010 at 9:35 PM, soundwave said:

  On 11/1/2010 at 9:11 PM, jeyemusik said:

Kawai K5000s

Korg X5

Korg Z1

Quasimidi Polymorph

Yamaha DX200

Redsound Darkstar

Roland XV5050

 

apart from the UW that list is pretty gash dude

 

 

i've looked through it a couple of times now, and i can't figure out what's gash. i can see that they might not be to some/many people's taste. where am i going wrong?

Kawai K5000s - Overly complex to program the Virsyn Terra does what it can do with a fraction of the effort

Korg X5 - Obsolete Rompler

Korg Z1 - old hat next and thin sounding next to Nord Modulars

Quasimidi Polymorph - badly aliasing wavefroms, awkward with only 8 steps to edit at once

Yamaha DX200 - not bad sound wise but the sequencer can't play the first note of a new pattern, a major flaw of the 200 series

Machinedrum UW

Redsound Darkstar - cheap synth, cheap sound

Roland XV5050 - workhorse ROMpler, why not just get a decent sampler?

I've had loads of kit over the years and from my experience it's better to have a few of flexible decent bits of kit you know really well than horde a load of cheap stuff you buy as you can afford it or chase stuff that looks amazing on paper but is a ball ache to use

Kawai K5000s is a pain in the ass to program, it takes fucking ages even when you know how to do it. Mine was used primarily as a dust display unit before I sold it.

• new laptop (probably a nice Macbook)
  
• new studio monitors
  
• new video monitors (fairly large)
  
• VCI-100 (SE probably)
  

I love these fantasy money spending questions

Build new PC £600

Oberheim SEM-Pro £1000

Moog Slim Phatty £700

Elkorus 2 £350

ART pre-amp £179

TOTAL £2829

That's pretty much my current wish list

  On 11/2/2010 at 2:17 AM, soundwave said:

I've had loads of kit over the years and from my experience it's better to have a few of flexible decent bits of kit you know really well than horde a load of cheap stuff you buy as you can afford it or chase stuff that looks amazing on paper but is a ball ache to use

i appreciate your thoughts but this is a bit of fantasy, i've got more than enough gear that i don't ever *need* to buy anything new. *want* is a different kettle of fish. to me these are synths that pique my curiosity, i'll try and explain in some weird attempt at self-justification.

> Kawai K5000s - Overly complex to program the Virsyn Terra does what it can do with a fraction of the effort

Thanks for the tip on the Tera, I'll look into it some more but it is a different synth with different synthesis methods to the K5000s. Perhaps you can get sounds that are analogous from the Tera but they won't be the same and the nature of the interface means the process of how you get to the final sound is different.

> Korg X5 - Obsolete Rompler

I don't see how any synthesiser can be considered obsolete. Context is important and I could see that if I made a track using only an X5 it would sound of a particular era. But I think it can be a great starting point. I'm sure plenty of people thought of the C64 as obsolete prior to the likes of Elektron and the "chiptune" bands.

> Korg Z1 - old hat next and thin sounding next to Nord Modulars

i have both a Prophecy and a Micromodular. Love them both. Would like to have a polyphonic version of the Prophecy and that's before you even consider the other differences. It's an apples and oranges comparison anyway. The Nord's don't do PM in the way that the Korg's do. If you were comparing their VA capabilities then again I'd say there are enough differences to warrant having both (say, for example you randomly found a £2-3k bank note lying on the ground and had no other money worries that month).

> Quasimidi Polymorph - badly aliasing wavefroms, awkward with only 8 steps to edit at once

The aliasing of the waveforms don't bother me. If it didn't suit the nature of a song I was writing I have other options I can go to. With the interface that is part of the process and can help avoid staleness in writing. Example -> if i was to write a bassline to fit in with a drum beat and melody. The bassline would be different if I played it on a midi controller versus using the MIDI out mode of my Monomachine versus clicking the mouse on the piano roll of my sequencer.

> Yamaha DX200 - not bad sound wise but the sequencer can't play the first note of a new pattern, a major flaw of the 200 series

Was not aware of that flaw but you can probably guess that's the kind of anomaly that floats my boat.

> Redsound Darkstar - cheap synth, cheap sound

i know it's cheap and i know it's never going to sound like real analogues or more expensive VAs but that's not what I would want it for. Part of the appeal is the interface again, but also what sounds can be coaxed from it that are a little less obvious and what they would sound like when processed. i suppose another thought that in the days before Acid when the 303 was still shiney and new that's what exactly musos of the time said about it. BTW, that's not a weird prediction of a future cult status.

> Roland XV5050 - workhorse ROMpler, why not just get a decent sampler?

Because I've never owned a JV/XV series sound module and I do like their sounds. I have Kontakt 4 as part of Komplete6 so I'm sorted as far as a decent sampler goes. Actually, I bought the Emu Proteus Kontakt library that Digital Sound Factory produced and I find the Virtuoso's samples in it as inspiring as the VSL stuff in the main Kontakt Library - never got around to using either. Anwyay, you can probably see from the stuff I've written above why that distinction would interest me.

Anyway, if anyone got as far as reading hopefully I've gone a little way to explaining what motivates my choices and I've not come across as some clown with borderline aspergers.

  On 11/3/2010 at 12:03 AM, jeyemusik said:

 

> Roland XV5050 - workhorse ROMpler, why not just get a decent sampler?

 

Because I've never owned a JV/XV series sound module and I do like their sounds.

If you ever do get one, back in the early 00's soundonsound did a series on advanced JV/XV programming. They're up on their website.

TR 808, TR 909, TR 727, Synthi, Casio FZ-10, System 100 and an Atari running Creator.

gold. buy gold.

ems gear

http://www.ems-synthi.demon.co.uk/emsprods.html

The best used piano I could fit into my apartment.

  On 11/5/2010 at 4:47 AM, Wall Bird said:

The best used piano I could fit into my apartment.

i moved a couple months ago. new place, the guy was like, do you mind if i leave the piano here? otherwise i'll have to move it, put it into storage.

I DO NOT MIND AT ALL SIR!

People around where I live are always giving away free pianos & electric organs. As soon as I'm living somewhere with space, I'm going to be all over that.

  On 11/5/2010 at 10:00 AM, Cryptowen said:

People around where I live are always giving away free pianos & electric organs. As soon as I'm living somewhere with space, I'm going to be all over that.

organ's from dead people

  On 11/1/2010 at 1:22 PM, Boxing Day said:

303

303

303

I love you