A question for musicians

[demagogue]

Re: Hydrasynth

Bloody hell, it's £1,299. That is out of my price range.

Well we were talking about it because it's brand new. The other upcoming one we were talking about was the UDO Super 6, but the pricing for that was even worse, over £2,000. I mean these are fun just for watching their demos. I only ever get used cheaper equipment myself.

If you're looking for something more economical, the first one that comes to mind is what I just mentioned, the Minilogue. You can allegedly find it as cheap as $350 usd/£280, maybe even less used.
For the price it's great. Well it was great when it was still $500. I almost bought it new then.
It's made for experimenting and playing with, very old-school tactile, wysiwyg, easy to control sounds, easy workflow.
This video puts it in context: Minilogue 2-YEAR Review - IS IT STILL WORTH GETTING?

I found this video on budget older synths which is tempting me too--
Synth Price Drops: 5 Used Synths Going Down in Price .
That video makes the Deepmind 12 stand out in comparison.
That shines with the "wall of sound" you can make with all the voices going; everything is patches in menus, though, no console workflow.

It's all about what you want to focus on.
The Roland System-1 looks awesome and has a great and intuitive interface where everything is where you can see it.

Edit: While I'm posting demos, the recent Moog Matriarch demo was practically a religious experience for me.



It shines with the creative arpeggiators and how easily you can make a good sequence and play with it in real time. The budget version is the Grandmother, similar features with less voices, which is featured in that video above.

Yes it's hard to make a decision. But we're in a special time with all of these choices, and all of them are great in their own way. So I can't complain. You just have to find the one that speaks to you. Think about how you like to spend time playing with a synth and which one shines in that respect.

[Gray]

The UDO sounds very good, but yeah, it's out of my price range. The Minilogoe is very tempting. Anything labelled Moog will almost automatically make me drool like a Pavlovian dog, and that Matriarch sounds awesome.

It seems I have some thinking to do.

Thanks for the suggestions.



[Edit]

The MicroBrute seems more more achievable to me, and in that video, that guy is pretty much saying in plainspeak what I'd use it for, hard sequenced basslines and noisy crap. But perhaps it'll prove to be a little bit too limited over time.

One reason I made this thread is that I've not really paid attention to new hardware for the last 12-odd years, so there's a lot for me to catch up on, stuff you may think is obvious, I probably missed.



[Edit again]

For reference, once, a few years ago (*cough cough* 26 *cough*) I very nearly bought a Korg MS-20. It seemed like such a cool old machine at the time. It was already old, but it seemed to have so many possibilities. The only reason I didn't buy it at the time was a lack of money. It was even owned by a band I'd seen using it live on stage, Stahlwerk 91 (a synth tribute act, ranging over many genres, both hilarious and awesome), with beer caps to replace broken knobs. I toyed around with one (not theirs) and I really wanted it. But as a lowly student, I decided it was probably more important to eat that year than get a new toy.

The hardware I already own, but is mostly in another country, is as follows:

Roland Alpha Juno-1, I have two of those, and the MKS-50, the rack version. So three. I like that sound. One Juno is with my brother the actual musician, the MKS is here with me but I don't think I've even powered it up yet since I took it here 4-5 years ago. It's needs a keyboard controller and MIDI cables, and I've been too lazy to deal with that. One Juno is in a box.
Roland Juno-60, awesome bass, but no MIDI, but I got a converter for that. My brother the actual musician has borrowed that for the last 10 years.
Korg Poly-800. It was cheap, but it does some stuff pretty well. Again, brother has it.
Roland D-110, rack. Annoyingly tedious to program, but I've used it on so many tracks and tried to bend it to my will, and make it do what it isn't supposed to. Sometimes you just find the limits of your hardware, and I certainly found them on this. In a box far away.
Yamaha TG-55 rack. Fairly decent thing that I used lots, but it took ages to program. In a box.
Yamaha TG-77. The cooler more versatile version, which I haven't actually used much yet. In a box. Better than the 55 because it has so many FM options I've not yet explored.
Akai S-700 sampler. Decent machine, but terrible storage media, 2.8" floppies, I spent more money trying to track down this obsolete floppy format than I did on the machine itself. Turned out it was only used by this machine and old word processors. If at least it had only been 3.5", they were everywhere. Gave it away when I moved to Scotland. And all the floppies. Hundreds of samples. Maybe the guy I gave it to can never again find more 2.8", but at least he now has a vast library of drum machines and noises. I was very thorough back when I had a brain.
Akai X-7000. Keyboard version of the same sampler. Same problem. Same solution. Gave it away.
Nord Micro Modular. Probably the coolest bit of gear that I own. Got it with me here, but I haven't used it lately for the same reason as the MKS, need cables and a controller.
A four octave controller keyboard I can't even remember the name of now, but with 8 assignable knobs that I could map to important settings on my Nord, the two of them made a great pair. In a box. It might be the next thing I bring with me to Scotland. No onboard synthesis at all, but lovely knobs. That is not a sex joke, it just sounds like a Carry On double entendre.
Zoom RhythmTrak RT-123 drum machine. Pretty good for quickly getting things down, but terrible for syncopation. Got it less than two feet away just now.
Yamaha CS1x virtual analogue, given to me for free by one of my Scottish friends. It is so far my only current main controller keyboard, and I haven't fiddled around too much with the onboard synthesis just yet, I've only had it what, four years..? It's 5 octaves and a bit too big and clunky to move easily, but it helps me to get chords and melodies down.

So you see, it's mostly 80s/90s digital crap, with a few exceptions. No wonder so many of them are in boxes in a country far, far away.

The thing I've used recently is an Android app called Caustic. It lets me do several things fairly easily, but is also quite limited in other ways, hence my urge to buy new hardware.


[Edit yet again]

I very nearly forgot. As a fan of the Juno-1, many years ago when I still had a functioning brain, I wrote a program for a PC to save MIDI data and store patches. Suddenly I had unlimited storage and could save all my noises, and was no longer limited to the 64 onboard patch saves. This section means nothing for the theme of the thread, I just want to point out that, many years ago, I wasn't quite the moron I've become over the last 20 years of CFS, and my brain could actually do useful things. I'm way too thick for that stuff now. I miss my brain. Maybe some day it'll send me a postcard from wherever it is, and we can reminisce about the time we spent together. Good times. We got a lot of work done.

[Aja]

That Juno 60 is likely worth a fortune now; you should get it back! I’ve got a Minilogue, and I love it, but you sometimes have to work around the four-voice limit. Otherwise it’s very versatile and fun to play with, and they just released an upgraded version with some nice extra features. I also have the MS-20 reissue, and it’s one of my very favourite things for making drones and vintage-sounding leads. I’ll never part with it. I’ve made entire tracks with it.

[Gray]

Perhaps "fortune" is overstating it a bit, but it's probably gone up a bit. If I asked my brother for it back, I'd get it, he's very reasonable, but also in a different country. On the other hand, he knows that when I die, he'll inherit it, so... cue Columbo style plots.

I'm still leaning towards the Roland System-1, or the Reason softsynth, I just have to decide if it's worth it given my apparent lack of talent.

[Gray]

I made a more concentrated effort on 6-to-8, and retitled it to suit what I was thinking as I was working on it. It's now called Small Boat, Big Waves, and I hope will evoke images of someone in a small rowboat struggling against a storm to get back to shore. Maybe that's not what you hear, but that was the intent. I'm not perfectly happy with it yet, I need to tweak a few bits here and there, but it's more resembling a proper song now. Except without singing. It's quite tricky to get the distortion levels just right, the dials are very sensitive. I took on board some comments about the piano, and I tried to fix it, you tell me if I succeeded.

Here it is. Small Boat, Big Waves.

I'd still like to add some guitar to it at key moments, but I haven't got one at the moment.

[Edit]

As I listen back to it now, the noisy drum break at the end isn't noisy enough, it sounded better in my headphones, I need to fix that and make it sound worse.

[Gray]

I wasn't gonna post this new track I made last night, until my brother the actual musician persuaded me to.

Last night I was watching a BBC documentary on Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Cage, Karl-Heinz Stockausen etc, all those guys that inspired me way back, and I was yet again inspired, so I started to fiddle around in Caustic. Only a few minutes in, I lost track of my purpose, and it came out more like a poor man's Autechre wannabe thingy, but I still liked it and kept fiddling with it. I'm quite pleased with it now. It's not what I intended, and some details still need to be fixed in the next version, but I'm not yet ashamed of sharing it with you. It's another one-chord rhythm-based lengthy piece of crap, I tried to make it more melodic but that just somehow made it worse, so I deleted that. Or perhaps I should say it's noise-based, the rhythm takes the backseat to how the sounds actually sound. In v2 I'm very annoyingly proud of just how the distorted bits, um... distort. Like a proper music nerd, little bits like that are quite important to me for some reason. The bit I'm the most annoyingly smug about is actually the title. It's four jokes in one. It came to me in a dream as I was sleeping, after having finished most of the track, and bam! Of course! That must be the title! Is it Autechre? Näe.

https://soundcloud.com/user-188042036/nae-v2

Now proceed with the mocking.




[Edit]

I only now realise the comedy potential of starting this post in a Scottish accent, saying "I wasnae gonna...". Curses! Too late for that joke. It would have made five. It would have topped my single-word sarcasm joke of four in one. Ach, well, ye cannae win them all...


[Edit again]

Oh yeah, and about that Juno-60, tonight I donated it to my brother, the actual musician. He's been using it for years anyway, and probably can put it to much better use than I can. And they're both in the same country which kind of helps.

[faetal]

I'm super late to the party here, but totally down for talking synths any and every day.

In case anyone is interested purely from a nerd perspective, my setup is:

Access Virus TI
Prophet 6
Novation Nova (rarely used these days)
Behringer Neutron (amazing for the price - highly versatile)

On the software side, I use:
Native Instruments Komplete 12 (covers pretty much everything you'd ever need in truth, so long as you have the CPU oomph to spare)
Arturia Pigments
IK Syntronik
GForce M-Tron
Ozon Iris 2

I've previously owned:
Roland D-50
Korg DW-8000
Roland XP-60

I produce in Ableton Suite 10 (which in itself contains most of what you'd ever need to make great sounding music)

[Gray]

Ableton Suite 10

Interesting. I've been recommended the very same thing by a guy I trust. Would you say it's a good piece of software? Versatile? What exactly do you do with it? My friend is a DJ and only uses bits of it, not using its full potential, I'd like to hear more from someone who uses it more.

[faetal]

I find it great to use - really easy and intuitive audio routing. Great stock plugins. Doesn't bother with the whole skeuomorphic thing, so the interface is really clean.
I'd recommend getting the lite version from somewhere - I may even have a key you could use if you are interested.

[Gray]

Can you please elaborate a bit on exactly what you do in Ableton? I still have a very fuzzy idea of what it does, I just hear good things about it. Can you perhaps walk me through how you'd write a song in it?


If it is what I think it is, maybe it's the tool for me. What I need is a virtual synth with various different modes of synthesis, a range of drum machines, a stack of FX, MIDI, and an ability to import/export samples. Can it do all that? I'm pretty sure Reason can, which is my comparison for this. Ableton is a bit pricier, so perhaps it can do more, I don't know yet, which is why I'm asking.

[demagogue]

I produce on Cubase, mostly just because it came on a USB with my Mox8. (Back in the '90s and early 2000s it was Cakewalk, but that's kind of a dinosaur now.) I used Ableton and Fruity Loops before, but they never really stuck. But I think it's just a matter of using what you know best. Once you know the UI you can do a lot more even with a lot less.

Cubase is really pared down and simple for me. I've got VSTs I like, my favorites being Absynth and Modo Drum, and I'll just hook them to my keyboard through Cuebase and play them directly into a track. And the native patches for the Mox8 sound good. (I'm just now realizing the synth options on the Mox8 are also pretty versatile, which I had no clue about until very recently. It has atrocious UI, but if you dig there's a lot in there.)

Then I'll just play in music track by track. If there's a sequencer, I don't use it. And there's quantization which I don't really use either. Like if there's a thubbing base line, I'd sit there and just literally thub the key every time in real time. At best sometimes I'll just drag in a sample whole cloth, like a drum track, and just copy/paste it in a long ass line, with bloc fills and alt versions interspersed.

In that respect I'm old fashioned maybe, but I like just looking at all of the tracks and wysiwyg. IMO it makes my music a lot more improvisational, more likely to have flubs, but at least more unique sounding.

[Gray]

Your method is quite different from mine. I'm quite untalented, so I need stuff like sequencers and quantization. If I was just to record using my actual hands it'd come out like crap, I'm clearly not a gifted musician. I see myself as, um, I hate to sound pretentious but I will anyway, more a composer than a musician, in the sense that I dream up stuff in my head that I can not actually play, and try to make machines do it for me instead. I lack the manual dexterity to perform well, my main instrument is keyboards but I suck at that, and when trying to learn how to play the guitar I quickly realised I'm a much better keyboardist. So, what I would need is some convenient software that can do that. However, the more I look into what my options are, the more I'm seduced by the idea of getting the Roland System-1. Not only because it sounds awesome and can do all sorts of neat stuff, but also because it will force me to play it with my actual hands. I know I suck at it, but that is sometimes how I come up with the melodies I like and the backbone of a song. Perhaps it will force me to take a different approach on how to make music. Or more likely, just be another expensive toy that I will find new and dull ways to suck at. I'll have to ponder this for a while. Perhaps it'd be wiser to get Ableton or Reason instead. I'll have a think.

[PigLick]

stop telling yourself that you suck, thats the first step to greatness!

[demagogue]

I should add that I don't think continually thubbing an electric baseline in real time is actually a good idea. I think I probably should be using a sequencer and quantization but, you know, old habits die hard. There's always new things to learn, if you want to put it that way.

That's something I love about music. No matter where you are, there's always something you can be doing to learn more and develop yourself. It's a bottomless well.

[Gray]

When I say that I suck, it's because I mean it. I've been making pretty bad music for over 3 decades, and I know that I'm not talented. The main reason I keep saying I suck at it is because I want to make it perfectly clear that I'm not one of these clueless, deluded pretentious fools who think they're the next rock star. That's not me. That was my bandmate back in the 1980s. I know that whatever I can come up with will be mediocre and a mishmash of whatever stuff that inspired me, it will never be original and groundbreaking, and I'm fine with that. I just make music to please myself and nobody else. By saying early that I'm terrible is my way of not getting people's hopes up whenever I post new stuff. I may love how it sounds, that's the whole point, but chances are nobody else will. Hence the frequent sucking mentions.

Right now, I'm working on v3 of Näe, and I'm really in love with the new and improved noise level of the bass growl, but I seriously doubt whether anybody else will notice the change or care. I'm making it for me. If someone else likes it, good, but I'm not expecting it.

[Edit]

Right, v3 of Näe is up. To the casual observer, it's not better, just longer and more tedious. To me, I'm getting really pleased with how I got the bass growl to distort the way I want it to. I keep turning up the distortion FX every time, until it sounds too horrible, then have to dial it back down a bit. I'm very pleased with it just now, but for v4 I might yet again go nuts with it. Also there's some added crap near the end that almost nearly has a melody, but don't get your hopes up. It's just more of the same old shit.

https://soundcloud.com/user-188042036/nae-v3

[demagogue]

Well I've just found a new drug, VCV Rack.
I have like 800+ modules already downloaded, and the crazy thing is they're all open source and freeeee.
I've already got ideas to make some of my own.
I'm not making too much music with it yet, or let's say I'm making a lot but it's still kind of bland, but I'm learning a lot and it's amazo-fun!
This is what someone that knows what they're doing can do with it.

[Jason Moyer]

I'm a shit keyboardist, I'm not a performer, more of a sound technician and programmer. I can only pretend to be an actual musician for so long, but give me a noise machine with knobs and I'll twiddle away until I starve to death.