TubularCorporation

I've been trying to convince a musician friend of mine who lives a couple blocks away and is starting to get the synth bug to buy one so I can go over and sample it. But I'm at the point now with synths that I got to with guitars 4 or 5 years ago: from here on out if I want to own something new I have to build it myself.

My first real synth was a Poly61m I got for next to nothing and sold for $80 when I moved and I die inside a little every time I hear about them now. They really have their own personality, even though the interface is kind of garbage.

get the octatrack imo. I had the same worry until I got it and realised it's still super futuristic. Of course there are still things that people on elektronauts will complain about, but I think it's a beautiful instrument that goes way beyond just being a sampler. Same here. Still very new to it, but all the "you don't really know what it's about until you actually use one" line is pretty on point. I was very skeptical and only took the plunge because I absolutely needed a modern-ish sampler to be able to start playing out again and this is the last time I'll actually be able to afford any big purchases for probably a couple years, and it definitely is more than the sum of its parts. The MIDI sequencer, for example, is kind of a joke on paper in the context of the whole OT workflow it's just right, an the stuff that seemed like it would be completely crippling (really limited polyphony per track, no note durations so all of the notes of a chord have to be the same length, only 8 tracks) are no big deal at all in practice, because it's jsut not at all about the kind of traditional "play parts in and record them" tape machine style sequencing you get in a DAW or an MPC or something. Its MIDI sequencer is more or less an 8 track tracker and when you work with it on its own terms it's pretty special. My first love is the MPC but so far there's almost no overlap between the two for me, they're completely different things. The digitakt almost seems like a middle ground between the two worlds of sampling drum machine and esoteric sample mangling mystery box from the demos I've seen so far. Not something I'd need but I think it has a lot of potential and it's cool to see them releasing something a bit less expensive. As far as charging for Overbridge, Roland used to charge $500 for the software editor that you needed to get all of the functionality out of the ($3000) VP9000 back in the day and that ended up working out fine for them. Oh, wait a second... EDIT: I have a gut feeling that the OT will hold its value more than the Digitakt, too, if you decide it's not for you and sell it.

I can sort of understand that producer. I generally love the music I'm making while making it, and for a few days afterwords, then I absolutely hate it, then maybe after 6 months...I either like it again or wish I never gave it out or uploaded it. Weirdly, after many years, even the stuff that I thought was absolute shit sounds good again. I love listening to the psych rock and punk I made way back in the day, but I practically disowned most of it for a long while. Same here, exactly. The one thing that's been stressful these days is that for about 10-12 years I was always in one or two bands that played out a lot and practiced/wrote together at least once a week, so there was always a lot of immediate feedback from other musicians and nonmusicians about what I was doing. Since I quit the last band I was in, I think three years ago now, and went back to concentrating on producing electronic stuff solo more seriously than I ever had before it's gotten pretty frustrating at times to just be doing everything by myself for myself, because it wasn't until the last year or so that I started to really get on the level where I was comfortable sharing much of it with other people (although who knows, I've got 4-6 hours of tracks that are firmly in the "practically disowned" phase right now but in another year or two I might love them and regret not just putting them all up and telling everyone I meet to listen to them this whole time) so I've been almost completely on my own as far as figuring out what's actually good and what isn't. That's been pretty frustrating and alienating at times (and it doesn't help that almost all of my local music friends coincidentally moved away back in 2013 and so far I haven't really met many other people who I clicked with on that level - but a few of them are moving back this summer, so suddenly there are a bunch of vague plans for new projects and collaborations floating around again), even though it has also really forced me to trust my instincts in a different, more analytical way than you do when you're in a band.

Yeah, the time to think about it is before you start working on it and after you're done and are sifting through the results. While you're actually working there's no time to thing, you've got to just react. At least that's how it has always worked for me. Or as an old jazz guy I took lessons fro years ago said put it, when you make music you have to bring more than you need (i.e. all of your ideas, skill and experience) and the real artistry is in what you DON'T use. He was talking about improvisation with other people but so much of making electronic music is improvising against the real-time feedback from the machines you use and refining it incrementally that I think it's a relevant way of looking at it it here, too. That's really good... It's also good as a justifcation for spending money you can't really spare on gear you don't actually need too, unfortunately. Literally bringing more than you need. His other really good one was that you can think of creativity and technical ability as two different lines on a graph or thermometers or something (I forget the specific visual metaphor, but the point was that you think of them as two quantities) that both rise at different speeds depending on what you're focused on at the time. If you're having a lot of ideas but struggle to actually realize them it means you should focus on developing technique, if you're playing (or producing or whatever) well but aren't that inspired by what you're playing you can forget about technique for a while and focus on writing and ideas. When both are at about the same level, that's when you will do really good work and that's the zone you want to be in as much as possible. It sounded a lot better the way he said it.

Nah I have just been working on this MIDI project for a couple years now and I had to learn a little about those clocks. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3523442/difference-between-clock-realtime-and-clock-monotonic https://www.softwariness.com/articles/monotonic-clocks-windows-and-posix/ It is kinda cool to think about at a low level, though. Like, yeah, there's a little crystal in the CPU that provides this super useful feature for doing proper timing. TIME CRYSTAL. That reminds me of some old William Gibson interview I read someplace where he talks about how when he wrote Neuromancer he had never even seen a computer in person and when he finally got one years later he was shocked at how primitive it was, he thought it was going to "run on crystals or something." EDIT: take the second hand ex-Akai employee stuff with a grain of salt, too. There are a lot of them in this town and most of the ones I know are a bit disgruntled so they aren't exactly unbiased.

Could it be something to do with the FIN/FOUT settings? Having said that, I had a quick look on elektronauts and it seems like a common problem, even with appropriate FIN/FOUT. I haven't come across it since I haven't really tried looping with it yet—my initial attempt was very confusing and resulted in me saying "fuck it" and going back to using track record trigs lol.. currently the only thing I've found confusing about the OT. Nah, it's definitely some weird bug. I think a few samples of junk data might get left in the record buffer at the loop point or something. It only seems to happen if I record a new loop into a buffer that already has audio in it, and like other people over there have reported it stops happening for a while if you reload the project (also sometimes goes away on its own). My only new contribution to the mystery is that I'm confident I've conclusively shown that it isn't a regular clock that you would get from a bad loop point, sinceI can make it happen when I'm recording literal digital black into the pickup machine (nothing plugged into the inputs, gate pushed up all the way to catch and self noise - only thing I didn't try was recording without any inputs selected at all. Later this week I'm going to put together a little case file kind of thing with the audio files, some screenshots of the clicks in an editor, and a detailed step by step description of how I produced them, and post it over on elektronauts. Maybe if enough people care, can replicate it and open support tickets Elektron will address it while they're still supporting the OT, although with something like 2 years since the last update I'm not holding my breath. it's not anything like a deal breaking issue for me, I rarely use pickup machines either so far, but if they didn't click so much maybe I would - on paper they act the way I've always wished other loopers did, and I find them really easy to use bt not that relevant to the kind of stuff I'm working on right now. The manual doesn't explain them that clearly but if you've ever used an Akai Headrush for looping they're not much different (other than being able to quantize the loop length if you want)

How did I miss this thread? Love Italo Disco. I don't think two guys from Sheffield count by any stretch but I've had this on heavy rotation all winter and I think anyone who likes Italo will appreciate it: Italo-Goth?

Two of t he three knobs had been smashed in and instead of breaking they had actually pulled chuks out of the PCB where the solder pads were, so I had to scrape off the insulation o some of the traces and solder from the pots to the scraped parts. Wouldn't be too bad except the traces are pretty small so there wasn't much surface area to solder to, so it would probably be pretty easy to break it again if you weren't careful. But it works just fine now, I just don't want to push my luck. EDIT: you may have already found it, but I just dug up a thread on sp-forums about that error. Doesn't sound promising:

Oh hey, you posted this while I was typing the last wall of text glad to see I'm not the only one who has noticed how tracker-like the OT is. Makes sense, with Elektron's history with the SIDstation and all. My other post about jitter in DAWs is a mess because there were at least three different things I was trying to compare that are all called clocks, but what I was getting at is that historically the MOTHERBOARD clock tended to not be super accurate simply because manufacturers typically used the lowest priced crystal oscillators they could get away with and that cascaded down into the rest of the system, and one of the side effects of that (plus, much more importantly, how multitasking operating systems prioritize CPU cycle requests) was that the system clock was pretty far off from any kind of international reference and would drift a fair amount. Not quite the difference between an atomic clock and the battery powered alarm clock you'd buy at a drugstore but same concept. Anyway, digging around a bit now it looks like the technology has changed even more than I realized and that's even less of an issue now than I thought although I've still been able to clearly demonstrate MIDI timing innacuracies on my system (hardware is from around 2011) just out of curiosity - I don't actually care about it in practical use so much as I find it kind of abstractly fascinating. It sounds like you know a lot more about this than I do, though, and I'm probably wrong about a lot of it.

*Album title My fingers are apparently more witty than my brain. I have to admit, the discussion that was, I think, earlier in this very thread (too lazy to search for it) about my skepticism about the OT made me reexamine them since, realize that almost all of my concerns had been addressed by the 1.2 update years ago, and I ended up blowing most of the unspent remains of all the extra cash I earned this winter on a unexpectedly high paying editing contract, and for the most part it's really, really nice. I'd already decided that the last big block between the way I've been working right now and being able to actually perform live without a computer (even if I liked performing with computers my laptop is so old and fussy I'd still have to make a pretty big investment to get one that I could rely on) was a sampler with the kind of realtime sampling and sample-manipulation capability that the OT has and the MPC2000xl definitely doesn't have. That's pretty much why I don't have any interest in getting any new stuff now, it feels like I could spend the next decade just sampling what I have and making music with an MPC/OT combo (or even just the OT, although I don't think I can give up the things I love about the MPC workflow, especially for drum programming, even if I only use it at home and resample the stuff I program on it into the OT for playing out) and not run out of ideas. It clicked with me right away, although not in the same way the MPC did. I get why some people have trouble grasping it at first but for me, as soon as I actually used it I realized that more than anything it's like a powerful hardware version of an oldschool tracker, especially the sequencing. When I was reading up on it and deciding if I really wanted to take the plunge - I've literally never spent more than $800 on a piece of gear before in my life (the $800 was for the used rack server I've used for all of my recording since 2013 and even that was an unusually big purchase) - it sounded like it would have a really alien workflow that took a lot of time to adjust to, but then when I actually had it in my hands it felt totally natural, like a 21st century version of Impulse Tracker created in hardware. I'm back to being pretty much broke after living expenses for at least the rest of this year but it was absolutely worth it. I'll probably be selling of some stuff over the summer that I just don't need to have around anymore (anyone need an almost unused EHX Hog II with all of the accessories and a hard case? I got it below wholesale a few years ago so I could offer a pretty low price on it; the ebay buyer never paid). I think you're going to love it when you get yours. I do still wish it had another pair or two of outputs, though.

Daw's clock doesnt drift/jitter midi messages. It only jitters midi signal if you send midi out over interface to a hw synth but when working in the box it's 100% precise. If you're rendering your mix of-line that's true, but when you're playing back in real time the MIDI timing can get pretty rough simply because of how a general purpose OS works. I's easy to test, just set up a few bars of quantized short MIDI notes playing a soft synth with very sharp attacks (like a hi-hat sample or a burst of white noise or something), route it to an output on your audio interface, loop that back out of the box (with an actual cable) and record it onto a new track, then line up the leading edge of the first note of recorded audio with the leading edge of its matching MIDI note in the DAW to account for interface latency, and look closely at how well the rest of the audio lines up with the MIDI track. Maybe you'll be lucky and they'll all line up dead on but that's never happened for me, there's always some jitter between the MIDI sequence and the audio recording of the MIDI sequence. Of course, if you're 100% ITB unless you're using Pro Tools there's no reason I can think of NOT to render your final mix off-line so it's kind of moot (and I think Pro Tools finally added rendering in v11 but I never upgraded past 10 because I really don't like it and only own it because I needed it for work for a couple years). It's also not nearly as bad as it was with old, slower computers. That's supposedly part of why a lot of older producers stuck to their Atari STs well into the late 90s, they didn't have a multitasking operating system so there were no OS-induced timing irregularities, but that was before my time, I was just a kid with a tape recorder back then. Anyhow, these days I use almost all hardware and only use the DAW clock to sync arpeggiators and drum machines and things when I'm recording in multiple takes. I don't actually bother with the SMPTE business because for what I do I don't need to worry about clock jitter anyway, it's all pretty loose anyhow. But if I was producing with just samples in the MPC and then recording them into the DAW in multiple passes I'd definitely use SMPTE over Midi clock. EDIT: I don't think DAW cock jitter is much of an issue anymore, though. I don't really know, but I get the impression that general purpose computers have much better clocks now; back in the golden age of MIDI (90s) they were REALLY cheap and drifted a lot, and all of the internal timing of everything the computer did was based on that clock, so anything happening in real time could only be as accurate as that (and in practice was a lot less accurate because of how multitasking operating systems handle requests for CPU cycles etc. combined with the much, much lower processor and bus speeds and other factors I only vaguely understand). But I definitely caught enough of the tail end of that to remember it. Even computers from the mid 2000s have internal clocks that are loose enough that the OS system clock (which, if you aren't syncing it to something external like we all do now that everyone is on line all the time, was derived from the computer's clock, basically just a cheap crystal oscillator) that they would drift wildly and need to be reset regularly. Even now, the coputer I record on isn't connected to the Internet at all and it loses maybe 6 hours a year.

I'd like to say that this is what made me finally register here - it's what made me lurk for a year or two for sure - but the sad truth is that I registered to post in the "Post a Terrible Track" thread. EDIT: pardon the post flood there.

Never used a 404, but Limpyloo sent me his broken 303 a couple years ago and I fixed it up and use it constantly. I don't actually build tracks on it much but I use it for sampling and resampling and just running stuff through the effects all the time, t really has a great raw sound to it, especially at the middle quality setting. The PCB actually had cracks in it that I had to sort of bypass though, so it's too fragile for me to play out with it or anything (not that I've been playing out much lately, although two unsolicited show offers so far this month so maybe that's turning around).

I like this theory, it's a no-nonsense explanation of why the MPC's timing feels more precise than forgiving but you can still get bang on with enough perseverance. edit: Whereas with the Octatrack it's always, always off for me when I real-time record. Of course, it's probably more my shitty timing than anything else. Well, if that Gearslutz thread is right and alternate 16th notes are consistently something like half a millisecond behind the beat then I'm throwing my hat in with the "90s MPCs impart a magical 'swing' to everything" camp after all. Mostly, though, that thread confirmed that the timing on the MPC2000 clock is tighter than any DAW Ive used, so in theory there's still a strong case for slaving the old MPC to the DAW via SMPTE and then slaving any other MIDI gear to the MPC's clock output. Even though I'm too lazy to do it that way unless I'm already using the MPC anyhow. One day I dream of actually having the table space to set up more than two or three pieces of gear at once. True, that's ostensibly below the threshold of human perception but so is tape flutter on a high end machine and it still imparts something into the sound that you don't really perceive but you definitely feel (as evidenced by that col-but-ridiculous audiophile oriented process from a few years back that isolates the bias tone on a high resolution digital recording of a master tape, and compensates for the inaudible pitch variations that come from resonance in the tape itself from the friction of passing over the heads during recording and playback - you don't actually hear it when it's there but when it's compensated for there's a noticeable change. Kind of a tangent I guess, but I find that whole thing really cool from a technical standpoint, even though it's mostly just used to sell "better than the master" 1/4" reissues of Fleetwood Mac albums to rich audiophile types for $500.

The more I've learned about the OT the more I respect it, it seems like the mid period (2000/3000) MPCs and the OT fill in almost all of each other's gaps. An MPC1000/2000/3000 + an OT + an s3000 or Kurzweil k2000 or k2500 with the sampling addon would be a pretty incredible setup for sample based music. The OT is really great, but in totally different ways. It really is apples and oranges. Those two together are a lot of sampling & sequencing power. WNY/Winnie the Shit was using this setup recently, and he said they are a great combo and complement each other beautifully. I personally haven't got into it personally beyond arpeggiating MPC kits with the OT (which is good fun, btw!). It's tempting to imagine the two controlling and sampling each other along with other synths, but the routing and the hemming and hawing about which machine gets sampling duty gives me a headache, lol. If I went with that setup I think any other gear would be relatively simple or menu-free synths and processors. I've only used an OT for a couple hours in my life but from that I think I'd use it for drum programming and polyphonic MIDI parts, and do everything else on the OT. Incidentally, on your OT how do you deal with clicks on pickup machines? I was able to make it click at the loop point with nothing plugged in to the inputs at all (not even cables) and the record gate threshold set really high to catch any self-noise. Definitely seems to be a bug, and I could replicate it on the OT I used - if there was no input signal it wouldn't click, but if I kept recording audio into the pickup machine (using the manual's recommended settings, with or without the gate on) until I got a click and then unplugged everything from the inputs and recorded an empty loop of the same length, it would consistently insert a little spike at the end of the buffer. I even saved the audio from the buffer for both steps of that process as evidence that it wasn't just user error. Have you found a way to dodge this or has it not been a problem for you?

The more I've learned about the OT the more I respect it, it seems like the mid period (2000/3000) MPCs and the OT fill in almost all of each other's gaps. An MPC1000/2000/3000 + an OT + an s3000 or Kurzweil k2000 or k2500 with the sampling addon would be a pretty incredible setup for sample based music. I hadn't really thought about it like this before, but getting that underpriced 2000xl on a whim back around 2010 has absolutely impacted all of the music I've made since then, even when I'm not actually using it. On the other hand, maybe it's also because my first (and for a long time only) real electronic instrument was a DR660 and those things really are like baby MPCs in a lot of ways. So using an actual MPC, especially one that's still very close to the Linn era of MPCs, is just putting me back in the head space of first learning how to sequence. The 2000xl workflow I have really is just a fancier version of "program some patterns, record them onto one track on the portastudio, and then overdub on the other three tracks." Whatever it is, I definitely have an emotional connection to the MPC I don't generally get from electronic gear.

That's not the same thing I was talking about though, unless I'm mistaken those are based on the shuffle parameter in the MPC, which is no different than any shuffle parameter. There's also a sort of mythical inherent shuffle to the MPC's clock that I never personally believed in but that thread I posted above suggests it might actually be real. Unless I'm wrong and those groove templates are actually derived from MIDI clock taken from an actual MPC or something, in which case if it really is a real thing they should do the trick. Personally I think a lot of it is down to 24ppq resolution still being coarse enough that even with quantize off there's still just enough quantization happening to affect the feel, but this is all getting in to mpc-forums superstition territory.

Yep shouldn't be a problem. Note however that the PO-series don't respond to start/stop messages, so they will be in sync tempo-wise but you'll still have to hit play manually. It's slightly better than just syncing it by ear but it's almost not worth the extra cabling. Yep, in JJOS you do it in the step sequencer as well. Kind of tedious with anything more than a few bytes but it's there in a pinch and I think it can be copy+pasted just like notes/CCs. I think in theory you can also manually dump sysex to/from external gear (by just recording it into the MPC and then playing it back into the synth later) but I've only tried it once or twice and it never worked right and I didn't really need to do it so I never figured out what was going wrong.

You can enter sysex data manually on any step in the 2000xl sequencer, no idea if the 1000 can do it. I've never used a Korg ER-1 but they seem really cool. I wish I'd known about them back when the older Electribes were really, really cheap.

Oh, the other thing on the 2000 that I'd like is more comprehensive mute groups, but that's all stuff that JJOS fixed as far as I know. Yeah, I definitely come up with things I'd never have come up with on my own by playing chopped samples from records. To be honest, I've never really been very personally inspired by sampling from other people's tracks on other machines or in software, but on the MPC it's just great, I think not being able to easily match pitch and tempo on it like you can with more modern samplers is a benefit for that kind of stuff, too. You either have to really put a lot of thought into your sample preparation, or just do it by ear and let some of the surprising juxtapositions that come out of it be part of the writing process. A few years ago a local music store had an MPC3000 in good cosmetic shape with a hard case for sale for $500 because they didn't have a boot disk to test it, and I kind of regret not getting it but I'd have had to sell the 2000xl (which I got for $100 and put another $300 into to add the 8 out and effects boards, so it would have been an even better deal - that thing would have fetched more than $500 back then, not sure about these days) to raise the money and I like it so much I couldn't bear to part with it. Probably a dumb move but it's one of the only pieces of gear that I'm attached to the way you might get attached to a guitar or violin or something. It really feels like an instrument in the classic sense. I've definitely had plenty of days where I sat down in front of the MPC at like 10 in the morning, and then the next thing I know it's 7:00 at night and I still haven't eaten lunch yet. It's nice to be able to actually send SYSEX commands from a hardware sequencer, you don't seem to see that on a lot of more modern gear.

I literally dreamt of having an MPC for a long time, and enjoyed working with the MPC1000 for years. As far as the original line (haven't really looked into or cared about the latest models), a lot of enthusiasts/apologists wax poetic about the converters or the swing algorithm but I think its true appeal is almost the opposite - its transparency, its garbage-in/garbage-out nature. It does what you tell it, it doesn't butter up your expectations with empty promises, it doesn't really get in your way too much with the menu diving (unless you're really anal about sample/program editing and in which case you're missing the point), and it doesn't flatter you. It records and plays back audio at the sampling rate and it records and plays back events at 24ppqn. It's got some filters and some utilitarian effect processing. And if you're a disciple of 80s/90s tracker modules (or hip hop), you know that's enough tooling to create a masterpiece. Just add samples, inspiration, skills, and free time. This is all pretty banal but the thing is that when magic starts coming out of the MPC, you know that the magic came from you. I was using an MPC2000xl as the center of my setup from 2010 until last summer and there's definitely something there. I didn't find its converters transparent AT ALL but I like what they do and even though I'm not using it as much anymore I still sample on it a lot to get that sound, and I still program drums on it a lot because the pads are so nice to play on. I don't know if it's true but I've heard for years that the 2000/2000xl OS has a bug in the filter that keeps it slightly resonant even when the resonance is turned all the way down and that gives it its sound. As far as "mpc swing" I always thought that was just some myth but yesterday at work I stumbled on a thread where reproduced the Innerclock Systems jitter tests on an MPC2000 and one of the interesting things (other than it performing really well - not up to the level of the MPC3000 but almost identical to Elektron machines and way better than most other hardware that has been tested, which surprised me even as a big fan of the 2000's) was that with quantized 16th notes, every other note was slightly behind the clock, so maybe the "MPC swing" isn't a myth after all. The 2000xl sequencer is still my favorite for tape machine style, unquantized sequencing, quicker and more fun than any other hardware or software sequencer I've worked with (including a few I've used for a lot longer than I sued the MPC, so it wasn't just down to practice). The sequencer is actually my favorite thing about old MPCs, t be honest. They're good sampling drum machines, but they're fantastic hardware sequencers. For quantized, TR-like patterns it' kind of uninspiring though. Haven't used the newer ones much, the 1000 with JJOS seems pretty great and has a lot more functionality although the pads aren't as nice. Never tried one with the stock OS but I know pretty much for a fact (from people who were there) that Akai deliberately crippled some OS features in the 1000 to try to force professionals to buy the 2500, and that's what created the market for JJOS in the first place. EDIT: point is, MPCs are cool.The only thing I really wish the 2000xl had was more RAM and something along the lines of how you can sample in real time over a sequence on the Octatrack with qrec and recorder trigs. If it had that it would be the perfect machine for me. EDIT 2: also clock swing.

I've heard from an ex-Akai friend (almost everyone I knew there has left for better paying jobs in the last two years) who still follows that stuff pretty closely that you're still pretty much tied to the computer for most of the advanced features, it that helps you resist. It's a lot more money but that new Pioneer SP-16 sampler thing looks really good to me.

Yeah, the time to think about it is before you start working on it and after you're done and are sifting through the results. While you're actually working there's no time to thing, you've got to just react. At least that's how it has always worked for me. Or as an old jazz guy I took lessons fro years ago said put it, when you make music you have to bring more than you need (i.e. all of your ideas, skill and experience) and the real artistry is in what you DON'T use. He was talking about improvisation with other people but so much of making electronic music is improvising against the real-time feedback from the machines you use and refining it incrementally that I think it's a relevant way of looking at it it here, too. I can't speak for anyone else, but personally I just like bullshitting about process (I guess that's probably part of collecting "more than I need") but when I actually sit down to make something, all of this is right out the window. It's like Lao Tzu saying "the Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way" and then going on to speak about it at great length.

Consider an 80s Peavey guitar. Back in the days when they were still making them in their original USA factory they were quite good budget guitars, and you'd probably get more for your money on a USA made Predator than a new Squier. If it was made after '91 or so don't bother. A Peavey T-15 is even better but probably more expensive these days. Those oversized soap bar Peavey pickups are kind of great, and it's one of my all around favorite budget guitars.