Crappy gear that appeals to you for no good reason

  On 11/10/2016 at 11:52 PM, modey said:

Nice! I need to get a compressor for my live setup. I have a feeling that something gritty/slightly cheap sounding could be kinda interesting for my 0F stuff.

 

 

Speaking of gritty/cheap, I picked up a Yamaha DD-5 yesterday. I'm hoping to connect the MIDI out to my Machinedrum and get some wacky live synth drum stuff going..

I wouldn't recommend this one honestly, but look in to the Alesis Microlimiter.  With a bit of perseverance you shouldbe able to find one under $50usd shipped still, and they sound good.

  On 11/25/2015 at 6:03 PM, Lane Visitor said:

My beloved Yamaha YS200

 

it sounds so cheap and cheesy and looks so goofy and ridiculous

 

 

i love how the led display / preset chooser / edit buttons area looks like some kind of kid's learning computer or karaoke machine lol

 

 

when i heard around the internet that this obscure late 80s 4 op Fm rig is considered by many one of the biggest eyesores, and one of the weirdest of the fms, i knew it was destined to be mine, so i found one on ebay for like $100.

i got and resold a ys-200 once, for nice headphones I think? I'm not really into hardware but I made one track with it, will have to 'track' it down harhar

Edit: expert oversized knob twiddlers

I can't believe I haven't mentioned the Redsound Elevata.  Got one cheap about 4 years ago, went through the hassle of upgrading the firmware, and despite it still having all sorts of bugs and sounding... distinctive... I use it all the time.

I just traded for this thing and I'm way more excited to use it than is at all reasonable.  Weird interface, painfully cheesy early 90s sampled instruments, and some of the nicely gritty 808 and 909 samples from the DR-550, plus a completely useless pitch to midi converter.  Would I pay the $50 these fetch on eBay?  No way.  Trading a Synsonics Drums that I got as-is for $15 and fixed up nicely?  Absolutely.  My only complaints are that the sequencer only handles 4 velocity levels (and the pads aren't velocity sensitive at all), and you can't edit any of the voices, beyond assigning drum sounds to pads, so it's not a 505 replacement but it's close enough for me.

Plus I think the "guitar fretboard" layout with user assignable tunings is a completely unique interface to it, and it's always good to have alternative note entry options, I can already tell I'll come up with different kinds of stuff with this thing that I do with a regular keyboard or drum machine.

fuck yeah

I'd love an amiga (or a c64!) but I just don't have any space for one at the moment.

I've actually got a commodore something or another in its original box that I picked up many years ago for cheap, never even tried to plug it in so I have no clue if it even works. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I want a full blown, Amiga based Video Toaster system so much for no good reason.

yamaha psr-480. I can never seem to sell it

I kind of want one of those Rondo Music fretless ukulele basses.

some ppl tell me that jeskola buzz is a wildly outdated DAW

but i've been using it for nearly half my life (almost 27, downloaded it when i was 14 wtf time flies) & it's second nature to me. DAWs that don't look like microsoft excel overwhelm me

I love Buzz! I had to abandon it when I switched to a mac though. I did replace it with Renoise, which is similarly great, but my compositions became a bit less experimental as a result of the interface and workflow being different..

I guess my weakness is digital rompler/sample waveform style synthesizers that have a multi mode where I can have 16 instruments on 16 MIDI channels. I got started with a Yamaha MO6 and now I have a Korg MicroX. I like that I mostly only have to deal with MIDI recording and looping in my laptop, and I have instantly so many sounds and presets available to sample and mess with. I have never bothered getting to the bottom of the DSP engines in the synths so already I am quite happy with these pieces that are like 200€ used.

  On 1/24/2018 at 3:29 AM, thawkins said:

I guess my weakness is digital rompler/sample waveform style synthesizers that have a multi mode where I can have 16 instruments on 16 MIDI channels. I got started with a Yamaha MO6 and now I have a Korg MicroX. I like that I mostly only have to deal with MIDI recording and looping in my laptop, and I have instantly so many sounds and presets available to sample and mess with. I have never bothered getting to the bottom of the DSP engines in the synths so already I am quite happy with these pieces that are like 200€ used.

yes, for some reason I really want a bunch of romplers. I'm pretty happy with just having a JV1080 + SY22, but I would really love to have a Wavestation or some wavetable synth..

  On 1/24/2018 at 3:01 AM, Cryptowen said:

some ppl tell me that jeskola buzz is a wildly outdated DAW

but i've been using it for nearly half my life (almost 27, downloaded it when i was 14 wtf time flies) & it's second nature to me. DAWs that don't look like microsoft excel overwhelm me

lol

My Yamaha pss270. It's a kids toy trying to be a dx7. I don't understand it at all and want to circuit bend it

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I have like 10 new in box shitty things from the 80's that Roland made called the TB-303, that I got from some music warehouse sale.  Played with one, and it doesn't even sound like a real bass guitar, LOL!  Pretty crappy, but has some charm to it.  Prolly gonna toss these in the trash but keep one, just cuz it's so bad, I might be able to find a use for it as a joke.  But on the upside, the warehouse sale also came with a dirty Quasimidi Rave-O-Lution 309, which is nice.

  On 1/27/2018 at 10:56 AM, peace 7 said:

I have like 10 new in box shitty things from the 80's that Roland made called the TB-303, that I got from some music warehouse sale.  Played with one, and it doesn't even sound like a real bass guitar, LOL!  Pretty crappy, but has some charm to it.  Prolly gonna toss these in the trash but keep one, just cuz it's so bad, I might be able to find a use for it as a joke.  But on the upside, the warehouse sale also came with a dirty Quasimidi Rave-O-Lution 309, which is nice.

You laugh but I once met a guy at work, 18 or 19 at the time, who got an 808 for $70 at a yard sale around 2007 and decided since it was cheap he was going to circuit bend it.  It was his first attempt at circuit bending.  That's pretty much all you need to know about that story.  I never actually saw it so I can still hope that he was just making it up (plus there's a part of me that kind of respects it if he really did do it).

  On 1/24/2018 at 3:29 AM, modey said:

I love Buzz! I had to abandon it when I switched to a mac though. I did replace it with Renoise, which is similarly great, but my compositions became a bit less experimental as a result of the interface and workflow being different..

Same used Buzz for over a decade and switched to Renoise.

For me, my focus shifted from single instruments (patterns) to relational sequences since you can see other patterns being played horizontally. Not sure if it was more or less experimental but different and more satisfying.

  On 1/27/2018 at 6:09 PM, RSP said:

 

  On 1/27/2018 at 10:56 AM, peace 7 said:

I have like 10 new in box shitty things from the 80's that Roland made called the TB-303, that I got from some music warehouse sale. Played with one, and it doesn't even sound like a real bass guitar, LOL! Pretty crappy, but has some charm to it. Prolly gonna toss these in the trash but keep one, just cuz it's so bad, I might be able to find a use for it as a joke. But on the upside, the warehouse sale also came with a dirty Quasimidi Rave-O-Lution 309, which is nice.

You laugh but I once met a guy at work, 18 or 19 at the time, who got an 808 for $70 at a yard sale around 2007 and decided since it was cheap he was going to circuit bend it. It was his first attempt at circuit bending. That's pretty much all you need to know about that story. I never actually saw it so I can still hope that he was just making it up (plus there's a part of me that kind of respects it if he really did do it).

  On 1/29/2018 at 4:30 AM, peace 7 said:

 

  On 1/27/2018 at 6:09 PM, RSP said:

 

  On 1/27/2018 at 10:56 AM, peace 7 said:

I have like 10 new in box shitty things from the 80's that Roland made called the TB-303, that I got from some music warehouse sale. Played with one, and it doesn't even sound like a real bass guitar, LOL! Pretty crappy, but has some charm to it. Prolly gonna toss these in the trash but keep one, just cuz it's so bad, I might be able to find a use for it as a joke. But on the upside, the warehouse sale also came with a dirty Quasimidi Rave-O-Lution 309, which is nice.

You laugh but I once met a guy at work, 18 or 19 at the time, who got an 808 for $70 at a yard sale around 2007 and decided since it was cheap he was going to circuit bend it. It was his first attempt at circuit bending. That's pretty much all you need to know about that story. I never actually saw it so I can still hope that he was just making it up (plus there's a part of me that kind of respects it if he really did do it).

Fuuuuuck..... Dude was like, “SACRILEGE4LYFE!”

 

It's possible he was just trying to make an impression since he was in the record shop where I worked back then asking for a job when he told me about it.  But if that's true then it was a weird (but effective) way to make an impression. Stuff like that happens.

Same shop a year earlier was where someone tried to sell us a Triadex Muse that he found in the garbage (he was a professional trash picker - he cofounded a record shop in the 80s but sold his share in the late 90s when he realized he could do better driving around town in a van on garbage day and selling the stuff he found to other record shops) for $80 and the owner wouldn't go above $40 for it.

Triadex Muse for $40...  Ahahaha...  "Hold on- lemme get my Triadex guy.  -All right, just got off the phone-- he says we can raise our $7.50 offer to $40.  That's the best we can do.  We'll throw in a guitar cable, but it's really gonna hurt us.  We're basically losing money on this deal.  Hold on, it's my Triadex guy, again...-- OK, $40, a 6 foot guitar cable, a Korg keychain, and this bit of Auralex foam I have in my pocket.  I'm gonna have to sell my car to make money back on this deal, but you look like a nice guy.  We got a deal?"

  On 1/30/2018 at 6:30 AM, peace 7 said:

Triadex Muse for $40...  Ahahaha...  "Hold on- lemme get my Triadex guy.  -All right, just got off the phone-- he says we can raise our $7.50 offer to $40.  That's the best we can do.  We'll throw in a guitar cable, but it's really gonna hurt us.  We're basically losing money on this deal.  Hold on, it's my Triadex guy, again...-- OK, $40, a 6 foot guitar cable, a Korg keychain, and this bit of Auralex foam I have in my pocket.  I'm gonna have to sell my car to make money back on this deal, but you look like a nice guy.  We got a deal?"

He sold it to another shop across town for $80. Same day he also sold us an MG-1 for $25 but someone beat me to it, and then sold it to me a year later at cost, and I ended up using it for like 9nyears until I traded it for a string synth last spring.

This was in Boston so there was an unusually large amount of stuff like that floating around.  The Triadex guy worked at MIT and hand made them to order, if I remember right.

Sometimes I see electronics on the side of the road put out for trash collection. Twice it's been a full fledged electronic piano, mostly it's stuff like VCRs, laptops, dumb home electronics stuff. It makes me really sad that there's a lot of technology that is now utter trash and it is not even worth it to repair or recycle properly. So as my personal little feelgood project I will remember these lost pieces of gear and put their spirits into my music so they will live forever.

The first distortion pedal I ever bought was the DOD Thrashmaster when I was 10.  I've never heard seen or heard of anyone else using it, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but I sneak it into recordings every chance I get.  I have reasons for liking it, but not necessarily good ones.  Actually, it's a pretty good pedal for noise sets.  But as a guitar pedal it's not good for much... I just force it to work when the fancy strikes me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI25ChGtdeQ