Boss SE 50

Who here has one of these badboys?

I got one cheap off a guy around 2007 and have been using it ever since.  It's pretty great for a lot of 90s style effects, although I'm not totally in love with the reverbs compared to some other similar stuff I've tried (the wholly unappreciated Boss RV-70 is a much nicer 90s Rolandy reverb to my ear, but not very tweakable).  For me the highlights are the choruses, the multitap delays and the 4voice pitch shifter.  It's a bit of a pain to edit but not too bad.  The battery is easy to replace.  Look for one that just shows a bunch of garbled letters on the display, buy it really cheap, and drop in a $1 CR2032 battery.   The SE70 is supposed to be nicer in some ways (and has a data knob instead of just +/- buttons) but it has different effects so I don't think the SE50 is superseded by the 70 (I've never used a 70 though).

I definitely recommend it if the price is right.  A couple years ago they were pushing $200 and that seemed pretty excessive considering how much other stuff is floating around in that price range, but if they're back down around $100 or possibly less then you can't go wrong.

I don't use mine as much as I used to but I also have no plans to sell it, because it does a ton of stuff and has personality.  The noise floor is there but has been greatly exaggerated and really isn't a problem IMO.

If you get one, print this out ant tape it to the wall and you'll be setting up tempo-synced, polyrhythmic multitap delays in no time.

http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-bpmtempotime.htm

Picking up an se-50 tomorrow, thanks Worms and RSP

What put me over the edge was this: https://www.gearslutz.com/board/electronic-music-instruments-and-electronic-music-production/698525-boss-se50-techno-fx.html GS thread (guess gs is still good for something these days).

That 3-phase track is right up my street as I spent my teenage years listening to mostly mid to late 90's techno stuff and the promise of flangy drexciya snares sealed the deal. 

I was planning on spending a couple of evenings coming week recording drum sounds with the ms20 to decide whether or not to keep it. The reward will be making a little drumrack and then sending stuff through the se50

  On 8/2/2018 at 11:44 PM, RSP said:

If you get one, print this out ant tape it to the wall and you'll be setting up tempo-synced, polyrhythmic multitap delays in no time.

 

http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-bpmtempotime.htm

Yeah, that's an invaluable little table right there. Got this audio calculator app last year but sort of felt stupid buying it after realizing that calculating delay times would be it's main use for me and I'd bookmarked this ages ago. Prefer to keep the phone as far away as possible while noodling these days anyway.

Ugh, fucking stoned double posting, thought they would be merged but guess I'm typing reaaaallll slow here.

  On 8/4/2018 at 10:37 PM, user said:

 

  On 8/2/2018 at 11:44 PM, RSP said:

If you get one, print this out ant tape it to the wall and you'll be setting up tempo-synced, polyrhythmic multitap delays in no time.

 

http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-bpmtempotime.htm

 

Yeah, that's an invaluable little table right there. Got this audio calculator app last year but sort of felt stupid buying it after realizing that calculating delay times would be it's main use for me and I'd bookmarked this ages ago. Prefer to keep the phone as far away as possible while noodling these days anyway.

 

Ugh, fucking stoned double posting, thought they would be merged but guess I'm typing reaaaallll slow here.

 

Yeah, audio calculators (or just doing the math on an actual calculator) always broke my workflow, and most other charts I've found don't include triplet divisions, so that's really the one you want.

Also it's THE box for stereotypical 90s industrial/EBM vocals:

There's a 16 bit version called Roland RSP 550.

The SE-50 is 16/48 too (Apparently some algorithms actually run at 32kHz but the converters are 48kHz).  There probably is a close relationship between the two, though.  It seems like the 90s Boss rack units tended to have the same algorithms as more expensive Roland units but with lower quality analog signal path and fewer actual algorithms available, like how the Boss RV-70 has the algorithms from the Roland SRV-330 but omits the fanciest flagship algorithms and has minimal front panel editing (although all of the SRV-330 parameters for the algorithms it has are available via sysex). 

my 808 bass drum runs at 50hz or so 

i like to use the pitch fx to turn it up to 64hz, much nicer sounding, subtle pitch changing works well on the se50

that 3phase dude is a very funny troll these days

he hates quicksilver cpu for tb303, complained about it a lot on muffwiggler

funny bloke, classic tunes

always the biggest trolls make the best music?

Have two SE-50. Love ‘em

Here are mine

  On 9/13/2018 at 11:48 PM, ftrgrphr said:

Here are mine

Fantastic. Got any samples? I need to whip mine out and try the vocoder.