TubularCorporation

It's only actually come true once, unfortunately, but that $50 Korg i30 has made a really nice master keyboard and the access to all of those cheesy mid 90s ai2 sounds is an added bonus. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the only AI2 synth with a touchscreen, for what that's worth.

I thought I was the only one.

Got it too, very impressive compared to v3 (the last one I used). I already posted at too much length in the freebies thread but short version is: -Blocks is a huge CPU hog -no multiprocessor support, so loading an ensemble (running the VST version in Reaktor) that averages around 5% of my total available CPU on an 8 core (16 core multithreaded) system from 2010 completely overloads one core and makes Reaktor shut itself off. Regular, non-Blocks ensembles work a lot better. -closing the reaktor window lowers the CPU load enough for the same ensembles that don't work at all when their GUI is visible to work fine, so if you have a decent modern video card instead of an 8 year old, low end NVidia (only thing compatible with my video capture card that will also physically fit in the cramped rack server I use as a DAW) you might not even notice. But, it sounds great and seems like a breeze to use compared to the older versions, so if you have an 15 or 17 computer it's well worth it; older than that you might want to try the demo first to be sure.

Its probably more for the "crappy gear" thread than this thread, but for the last year or two I'd been kind of wanting to replace the old DR660 that was my first non-Casio electronic instrument back in the day, but didn't want to spend money on it, and it looks like after a month of silence a trade for the not quite as playable but vastly more ridiculous sounding DR-5 Dr. Rhythm Section is about to go down this week, so I'll have mostly scratched my 90s Boss drum machine cheese itch soon, and gotten a crappy guitar DI and pitch to midi converter too.

aww man, i want one of them so bad.... Fuck yeah This thing single-handedly restored my obsession with synthesizers Yeah, they look really great. It's been a great few years for affordable analog and it seems to keep getting better.

I got the Red Panda bitcrusher back when they were doing Line6 Tonecore modules and it's really good (even with just a mono Tonecore pedal), I bet their new stuff is fantastic.

In the spirit of not helping, I built a P6 a few years ago and it is pretty great so I bet the Micromonsta is fantastic.

Ignoring all of the unreasonable stuff like a serviced Arp 2600 or a fully loaded synclavier II system or something, I'd really like to pick up and build a Serpent Audio SB4000 this winter. Looks like the easiest way to build a Gyraf SSL clone with all of the mods and it's not TOO expensive considering.

Beyond the Congo vinyl reissue came out recently.

He'll probably pass the TTP, if Obama doesn't push it through first.

TYT of course didn't help matters a bit over the last month or so, and are well on their way to being the progressive Fox News (on a smaller scale of course). But hey, at least Jimmy got his wish.

As an American I can vouch for the accuracy of this:

A few nice, free utility plugins from BOZ: http://www.bozdigitallabs.com/product/panipulator/ http://www.bozdigitallabs.com/product/bark-of-dog/ http://www.bozdigitallabs.com/product/width-knob/ (that last one is completely redundant if you use Reaper)

By candlelight, wearing a loincloth made of cheetah hide, while rubbing my body with assorted aromatic oils and musks,

Interesting, thanks! The way I'm working right now I'm more likely to pick up one of the Valhalla plugins than to buy hardware but hardware does always seem to have a certain something.

Baywatch Nights Season 2, and it's amazing. Hasselhoff is a lifeguard who deals with supernatural, X Files style monster of the week scenarios and is obviously drunk.

i have both the polara and obscura and they are amazing. the polara is super lush and the obscura can do some interesting things (i got it because i was interested in the degrade options, but it does clean stuff really well too obviously). I need to check both of those out some time. A bit out of my price range these days but I bet they'd be really nice to have around.

As much as it's an old, unloved piece fkit the Alesis The Wedge I mentioned before actually is pretty great for the money (they're really cheap) and is quite knobby, four long faders for real tie tweaking, stereo ins and outs, reverb time up some something like 80 seconds. Not modern sounding but useful. It was either dual Quadraverb engines with a modified MIDIverb OS or vice versa, I forget which. If you can solder you can get them really cheap sometimes, because the power supply jack apparently tends to get loose. Mine was around $35 on eBay untested, and worked perfectly but even tested they should be around $80 more or less. Dated sounding but not in a bad way in my book, and mine has always sat well in a mix. Pretty good MIDI implementation too, although no sync for the delays, but you get tap tempo so that mostly makes up for it. Don't buy one without the power supply though, because it's proprietary.

The only upload of Rawhead Rex I can find on Youtube is 360p and I don't feel like finding a place to download it in better quality. Life is hard.

If you don't need stereo and want analog, I've had an Ibanez AD20 delay for about 4 years and I love it. I checked eBay recently just to see if they were going up in price (I paid I think $225 locally for a recently serviced one) and they aren't, if anything you can often find them for less than that. Probably not really what you're after but it's a really nice sounding BBD delay with the old 15v Panasonic chips (two of them working at about half their capacity for even more headroom, too!), a tone control, modulation, separate wet and dry outputs and some solid chorus and flange modes too. I'm not really a good person to ask about stuff that's actually good though, not my area of expertise!

Pedals not so much, but my favorite cheap reverb thus far is the old Alesis The Wedge, the Midiverb/Quadraverb's unpopular, inbred cousin. I've also got a completely indefensible love for the original old Digitech RP-1 multieffects pedalboard thing and those used to be practically free (or literally free in my case) but they seem to have crept up a bit. I'd be careful buying them because the power supply runs really hot and causes all kinds of problems. Mine works sometimes. Only mono input, but stereo out. For really lo fi analog delay (Radio Shack Electronic Reverb caliber here, but different), I picked up one of those $35 Donner delay pedals last summer. It's definitely not a good pedal (I know some of these cheap Chinese clones are actually good for the money but this isn't one of them) but there are some things about it I actually really like. The main thing is that because there's so little headroom, it has a really squashed, gritty sound when you turn the feedback up into self oscillation. Most BBD delays I've used get really loud when they self oscillate, like a Moog filter, and it can make them hard to manage but this one doesn't, it just gets ompletely saturated but not much louder at all and sometimes that's a really nice quality in a delay. The down side is that it's pretty mid-heavy and the dry signal sounds really bad when it's turned on, so it's not like you can switch it on and it jsut adds a cheap sounding delay to your input signal, it makes the whole thing sound cheap. Also nice sometimes. I haven't messed around with moddin it at all since it's mostly surface mount but it would be nice to put a dry signal defeat switch in it so you could use it in an aux send (I did that with my BYOC reverb pedal and it's great, does a convincing enough spring reverb sound to fill that role in place of a proper spring reverb 9 times out of 10. EDIT: I have a feeling you probably meant cheap in price, not in sound. Oh well. Thanks, chesney! Honestly part of the reason I don't post much music here is that it's not really IDM (or at least let's just say it's closer to The Manor Boys than to Selected Ambient Works) but a big part of it is that a lot of the time I'll just get sidetracked in the sound design/making it sound weird side of things and end up with tracks that sound weird but don't necessarily go anywhere. I've been working on a sort of an album for a couple months though, and when I've got enough material together and have things far enough along I'll probably share some stuff to get advice. This video from a few months ago does a great job of explaining what the different bias and formulation and noise reduction settings are for and how to get cassettes sounding their best. Once you've got a handle on how you're supposed to use them itt's pretty easy to extrapolate how to make them sound "bad." If your machine has a setting for metal tapes it's probably pretty nice, so you might want to look for a shittier one to go with it, maybe a walkman or something.

That's a good idea. Little jam desk, sequencing the blofeld with sq-1 is limited but still pretty fun. How's the Behringer Multieffects pedal? Ever since I picked up that Space-C pedal last month I've been a lot more interested in their stuff, that think is REALLY nice sounding even though it does tend to distort easily with signals that have a lot of high end. I have to make an effort to not record everything through it sometimes. I can only imagine how great it would be to have an actual Dimension D! I saw a show a few months ago and one of the people who played did everything in the box on his laptop except for one Behringer octave pedal that he was using as a send effect in Ableton.

DBX is great if you're trying to get a clean sound on a cassette, it really does get rid of most of the hiss without affecting the highs too much, so you can run everything a little quieter, which means you won't get as much distortion i the mixer. Pretty much the opposite of hat you'd want out of cassettes today. You might try turning it on for playback only, though, just to see what it sounds like. Another thing I've been meaning to do but neer got around to is recording on a tape and then rewinding and recording on the same track again but with a piece of paper or masking tape or something covering the erase head so it doesn't completely erase what was already on there. Either recording since the second time to partially erase the first take or recording something else over the first take so they get blended together. When I was working at a record store a while back we had a long time regular who was developmentally disabled and one time he made us a mix tape, but he had changed his mind a lot and rerecorded different songs on it. Thing is, his cassette player wasn't working right so it wasn't actually fully erasing what was on the tape already when he recorded over it, and what we got was three our four different mixes of 60s soul playing at the same time, but the way they all kind of smeared together because of his erase head not working right sounded amazing. Got a lot of in-store play for a while and I'd love to try to recreate that sound some time. Cutting the hot lead to the erase head and wiring in a pot to control the level would probably work really well (I've seen people ad switches for bypassing the erase head completely before but never seen a variable erase level setup) but I like my portastudio too much to mess with it like that and whenever I find cassette decks that are unremarkable enough to be sacrificed but still work well I end up giving them to friends instead.