TubularCorporation

I ordered some canned baked beans from Amazon Prime Now yesterday and ate them last night. You've got to make those baked beans from scratch if you want the deepest bass and smoothest, creamiest mids.

I'm actually pretty psyched to get it, although I'd never have bought one. The person who gave it to me says she has some "old analog gear" and she might have more things for me later (serious hoarder who is finally getting proper therapy and unloading stuff) but I assume in this case "analog" actutally just means "hardware from the 90s/not a computer" which is still fine by me. The 909 snare sample is maybe the worst sample I've heard on a professional piece of gear, though. There's a fairly high noise floor on it and then they apparently didn't bother to trim it to a zero crossing, because there's an audible click at the end of it. Haven't dug in deep enough yet to know if you can adjust the decay time on the drum samples to get rid of that. I'm mainly interested in it as a stripped down step sequencer/arpeggiator though, I probably won't even use the internal sounds at all. I have an EG-101 which is a 303 and 202 DR Sample sort of hybrid with a keyboard and D-Beam :) The amount of control on the synth is limited to a few knobs for filter etc but you could edit more synth options on them with a suitable controller - back when I used mine a lot I had a Phatboy controller which could send the necessary NRPN midi. However, I don't think you could edit the drums in the same way as they are just rom samples AFAIK all mapped GM channel 10 style. Anyway, I'll stick up for them (the EG & MC) as at the time I had it a Pentium II 350mhz was a pretty high end pc and the VSTi options were Steinbergs Neon and a little synth from Muon (Tau???) - while there is plenty of crap in the Rolands by todays standards they delivered at the time for certain duties like pads and synth strings etc. The 303 sounds wasn't great ironically and of course they sound nothing like the vintage analogues either but the price had already gone up on those. Cubase VST, Rebirth, Soundblaster Live with the EMU ASIO hack and the 101, I was happy :) Yeah, I've got to say, having been inside it to change the battery and clean the scratchy volume pot, it's pretty overbuilt for a fairly inexpensive piece of 90s gear, and I like the feel of it. I've never owned an 808 or anything but I've got a second-gen RS09 with the same kind of buttons and I'd take the keypad on the MC-303 over the 808 style buttons any day, they feel pretty great. Hell, I'd take them over my high school guitar teacher's old TR-707's buttons. So that's cool. And frankly, I do like cheesy sounds. I traded a Synsonics that I got cheap and repaired for a DR-5 Dr. Rhythm Section last fall and even though I don't sequence on it I actually love using it as a sound module (and also as a controller, it has a pretty unique interface and the chord mode is really fun). I'm not sure the sounds are even multisampled at all, it gets into 16 bit console sound chip territory. Not sure I'd pay ebay prices ($50 last I checked) but I'm glad I have it around. I'll probably use the sounds in the MC303 sometimes for similar reasons, although they're maybe a bit too good for that. Roland's late 90s/early 00s effects are pretty great. Limpyloo, I've got to be honest I use that SP-303 you gave me more as an effects box than as a sampler these days (I really like it as a sampler, way rawer sounding than the MPC, but I don't do much sampling these days) and I love it for that. It's got the Roland algorithms but something about the converters or something, I don't know, it just sounds uglier than other Roland gear from that period I've used, in a good way.

I feel like that varies a lot from keyboard to keyboard. I was using an Alesis QS7.1 as a master keyboard for a long time and the aftertouch response was really nice on that. Last year I found a Korg 130 (arranger version of the last-gen AI2 keyboards from the late 90s) and I prrefer the feel of the keyboard but the aftertouch response is kind of awful. No matter how low you set the sesitivity it jsut jumps from nothing to pretty high almost instantly and you can't ever really feel it in the keys. With the Alesis, there was actually something like a millimeter of play between key down and full aftertouch, with some kind of stiff spring or pad or something giving resistance so there was an obvious, tactile line between no aftertouch and aftertouch, but there was also so much range that you could use the aftertouch as a secondary pitch bend and it was really playable even for a keyboard hack like me. Completely out of the question on the Korg. If you're a guitarist, think of it as the difference between sliding up a fret (Korg) vs bending up a half step (Alesis). So your experience could be down to the keybeds you've tried.

I'm actually pretty psyched to get it, although I'd never have bought one. The person who gave it to me says she has some "old analog gear" and she might have more things for me later (serious hoarder who is finally getting proper therapy and unloading stuff) but I assume in this case "analog" actutally just means "hardware from the 90s/not a computer" which is still fine by me. The 909 snare sample is maybe the worst sample I've heard on a professional piece of gear, though. There's a fairly high noise floor on it and then they apparently didn't bother to trim it to a zero crossing, because there's an audible click at the end of it. Haven't dug in deep enough yet to know if you can adjust the decay time on the drum samples to get rid of that. I'm mainly interested in it as a stripped down step sequencer/arpeggiator though, I probably won't even use the internal sounds at all.

Bold words, my friend, bold words Well I did get a DR660 since that post but it doesn't count because my first drum machine was a 660 back in the day and I always regretted trading it for a C64 back in the mid 00s, so that was more of a replacement than an acquisition. Also the price was good because the encoder needed cleaning. Totally doesn't count. EDIT: also an MC-303 but that doesn't count because it was completely free and it's an MC-303.

No Indian, but I bet some folks in this thread would like The Sultans Middle Eastern Band. They were actually active in NYC in the 80s, mostly immigrants from Iran I believe (my old copy is buried or I'd check), and are a good kind of pan-middle-eastern version of a bar band, lots of extended traditional belly dance tunes and things. What makes them stand out is that, at least on the album I linked, they have a custom made, quarter tone organ and make really good use of it.

Hey, thanks for mentioning these. Noclue when I'd have anywhere near the budget to afford something like that again but if I do, monitors are something I really need to improve and I really consistently prefer sealed designs in my experience but those are pretty uncommon in modern speakers.

Nice, I love the sound of those things.I'm done buying gear (other than parts to finish a few things I'm building) for the forseeable future but an SY22/TG33 would definitely be high on the list. Something kind of haunting about every sound I've heard from one.

Still need to clean the faders on the left hand control board and bender board, and the replacement switch and button/fader caps are in the mail, but all of the other "broken" stuff that made it cost way less than a Juno 6 usually goes for these days turned out to just be a few very dirty (so dirty the read as open on the multimeter!) faders, an hour or so with canned air, cleaner and fader lube brought it all back and it works perfectly. Even with all the parts, the canned air and the Tubbutec mod I'm about to order, it's still going to clock in at about $100 less than a Deepmind 12 but a lot more than $100 cooler. I take back everything I ever said about Junos being overrated, I just hadn't had one around in way too long (and was a little bitter that I thought I'd missed my chance to get one at a non-extortionate price). The filter sounds so nice, the chorus sound somehow both colder and lusher than the chorus on my RS-09 (which is also really nice but more different than I remembered) and it really is impossible to make it sound bad. Also got the Korg i30 for $50 and the little Mackie for free this summer, so all in all not a bad year.

GAS ha been severely reduced because I got a beater Juno 6 for Christmas (well, it was more a "choose any synth we can afford because you know them better than me," "oh wow, there just happens to be a good deal on a Juno right now even though they're usually out of the budget" situation)! It's still in shipping and will need a bit of work (that I can do myself) but it really quenched the gear thirst, I'm already putting together a mental list of stuff I don't really need anymore and can eBay. The crazy thing is I found a good enough price (for 2016, still seems really high for a Juno but whatever, it's a lot less than they usually go for and would be a deal in far worse condition) that even after restoring it and buying the Juno 66 mod kit (which looks incredible - full MIDI implementation, sequencer, second ADSR, chord memory, unison mode, voice detune, etc. etc.) it will still be about $100 less than a Behringer Deepmind, so yeah. Pretty good. Just needs a couple button caps, a fader and a switch, and now that people seem to have figured out the Juno voice chip issue (and it turns out to be something I could easily fix at home for free) it really is a low risk buy.

I guess technically.

I want to be lazy.

Got the resistors in. Still need to order a couple more pots and some pin headers.

Yeah, I buy maybe 4 or 5 a year these days, this year I got a couple Legowelt reissues, an early Neuronium album (which is basically a first-generation polysynth demo) and the Twin Peaks OST reissue and that's it. PArt of that's because I did audio postproduction and editing professionally for about a year around 2012/13 and ever since then listening to ANYTHING has felt like a bit of a chore, it kind of sucks. It's nowhere near as bad as it was (I basically stopped making listening to music entirely while I was doing it, and didn't listen to much for about a year after) but some of the joy of listening for the sake of listening never came back, it still feels kind of like work.

made in China! Dammit came here to post that. I'll post this instead: Umberto Eco on Fascism. Great read. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/ Eco rules. Check out "Travels in Hyperreality" when you have a chance.

Seriously. I cancelled my cards a long time ago when I was deep in record collecting (worked at an old-school crate digging shop, worked at a thrift shop, was bringing home sometimes 50 or more cheap records a week and swapping them for other records and gear, making my girlfriend insane with all the records, etc) for a while and it was a good move. I was up to like $1200 in debt at one point, which is a hell of a lot of debt for me.

Going to be getting about $600 of unplanned extra income in about a month and I'm torn between doing the sensible thing and getting the parts and custom panels I need to finish some back-burner projects, or do what I'm probably actually going to do and grab a 0-coast or Korg Odyssey module (probably the 0-coast becasue it's smaller, more likely to be hard to get down the road, and I already have a couple modest east coast style synths). Too much (relatively) inexpensive, good gear out there these days.

Cenk sometimes reminds me of Alex Jones.

Finally got around to doing the power supply mod on my x0xb0x. Last straw was hearing some comparisons somebody posted on Gearslutz a long time ago that were supposed to show that it wasn't a useful mod but actually sounded better with the mod than without. Very easy, just removed r1 on the output board and replaced it with an identical 100ohm resistor in series with a 500ohm trimpot (the typical mod calls for somewhere between 200 and 300 ohms combined but 500 was the only trimpot I had handy that was even close) and it actually works and sounds good over the whole range, but I ended up on about 10:00 (it's set for stock 100ohms in the photo), which probably works out to right around 250ohms between it and the fixed resistor. Only thing that wasn't totally smooth was using my cheap stepper bit instead of a better twist bit to do the hole in the panel, and having it come out kind of rough and a little off center. Also the resistor could have been placed more neatly but I cut the veroboard as small as I could make it so I wouldn't have to even think about clearance when I drilled the mounting holes. The difference is definitely subtle but it's there, as you turn it up you definitely hear the "warble" in the filter that 303 purists are always going on about, and the low mids get kind of slightly blurry, for lack of a better word, in a nice way. It's one of those things where you probably wouldn't notice it at all if you just turned it on and use it, but it's pretty obvious when you adjust it while a pattern is playing with the resonance, envelope mod and cutoff all the way up. Subtle but definitely not placebo effect subtle, maybe comparable to the difference between a DCO and a very stable VCO (in terms of subtlety, not what it does). I think it's worth doing if you have one and solder - the only real challenges are where to put the trimmer and desoldering the spot where R1 is, because there are some capacitors close enough to it that it's hard to reach one of the holes with either an iron or a desoldering pump from the component side.

So in the process of figuring out the best way to replace the Sony CR2032-HE2 battery (HE2 = unusual pin configuration with a second + pin that nobody other than maybe Boss and Korg at certain times in the 90s actually used, so there's very little support for them now) in a piece of gear with a clip so I won't have to solder in the new battery, I found this and I think it'll be of use to some of you, especially Yamaha owners (it also converts standard 20mm clips to the 15mm pin spacing that Yamaha batteries use): MTG CR2032 PCB Saver, Rev A I ordered one, it came to $4.50 with free shipping in the USA, and according to the email receipt they are actually sending me three boards for that price rather than one, which makes it a pretty good deal.

So what does "Vaporwave" actually entail these days? I haven't been paying much attention to it this year but over the last 6 months or so I've heard it used as a label to describe everything from Italo Disco to New Jack Swing to the soundtrack from Stranger Things (no, really), but not much of what I'd always known Vaporwave to be.

Bumping to let people know there will be a 4th run. Still haven't built mine, my Mouser order was delayed for like 8 weeks because of a couple backordered parts. PCBs are excellent quality though.