TubularCorporation

Yeah, 2016 has been the best year for cheap/free gear I've had since I changed cities about 8 years ago. $50 Korg i30, brand new Porter Case hard case/handtruck from work (fuckers had a $400+ MSRP before they discontinued the model), a few pedals from a guy at work including an early black Russian Big Muff modded with at least dour different diode combinations on a rotary switch (has more than 4 positions but a bunch of them sound the same) and now this, plus a few other things I didn't need and gave to friends. I've got a few 80s cassette decks I found last week waiting to find good homes too (since they aren't good enough to be worth ebaying). I actually jumped out of a slow-moving (like <2 mph) car to get that Wohler though. When you drive by rack gear on the street you do what you've got to do.

Someone down the block left a pretty well maintained, fully working, self contained, 3 way ultranearfield monitor system out with their trash the other day! Got it installed and working, sounds surprisingly good, even with not-optimal placement (if you get it at ear height wih your head 18" or less away it starts sounding a lot closer to full blown studio monitors than it has any right to - which is what it's designed for).Highs roll off noticably when you listen off axis but that's no surprise. Main thing is having a pair of good quality true VU meters that are actually still well calibrated. This is a pretty old version of an older model and I couldn't find it on eBay, but the more recent ones are really cheap these days ($50-$150) and on strength of this one I definitely recommend them if you're looking for another set of monitors to check mixes on, or have a really small or untreated space and want to minimize the impact of room acoustics - if you can manage to work sloe enough to it that you're in the sweet spot - which could be a bit of a challenge, since you need to be right up against it - you pretty much don't hear the room at all. And again, the meters are really nice (although most of the newer models have LED meters instead). Wohler Technologies AMP-2/AM (older and different from the one that has a manual available on their web site - that one looks better actually, has a headphone amp and RCA i/o in addition to the unbalanced XLR the one I found uses)

If you're still looking, a friend of mine had the same problem recently and ended up getting a Symmetrix 420 power amp on eBay for $45. It works great (you'd need an external phono pre and source selector though) and they show up pretty regularly, although that's a lower price than normal.

I'm a big supporterr of the Alesis The Wedge for this kind of reverb. Sort of a Frankensteined together combination of Quadraverb and Midiverb (the DSP of one and the OS of the other with various changes and upgrades; I forget which is which) with a kind of low rent Lexicon remote style interface. The interface is the important bit, those four control faders make it more of an instrument than most reverbs, and they're cheap (I paid around $30 USD + shipping on eBay for a perfect one two years ago). EDIT: the build quality isn't exactly amazing, though. It's not a toy but it's definitely meant to be something you set up in your studio and don't move around a lot so that's something to know if you play live. Mine was fine but it seems like they're notorious for having the plug for the power supply come loose, so that's something to be aware of if you get one untested - which is also the way to get good prices (and if you solder it should be an easy fix even if it's broken). Oh, and it has tap tempo, which is nice.

LUSH

If you get a x0xb0x it's absolutely worth the extra expense to upgrade the CPU and install n0nx0x I used mine vanilla for a bit, then with MarOS (which is much better) for quite a while, but n0nx0x puts it really close to the real thing. EDIT: the new front panels that came out last winter are top shelf, too.

Oh, I got carried away and forgot to ask what Dayton cabs and what drivers you used. I read an article about DIY monitors built with some prefab cab from Parts Express that I think was mostly Dayton stuff but I haven't really had the money or space to give it a shot. My monitoring situation is a joke right now, though. I've got really nice Sennheiser HD-650 headphones I picked up when I was actually making my living editing and mastering audio books for a while (and had a friend at the local Guitar Center who got them for me half off), but for speakers I just have two different pairs of wildly inaccurate acoustic suspension stereo speakers (AR 2AXes for the lows, low mids and generally sounding really good for vinyl listening, and Realistic Minimus 11's for the highs, surprisingly good imaging, and watching movies at night without disturbing the neighbors, since they don't have much low end at all. Between the three I usually do OK and my room's so small and poorly treated I don't worry about it right now, but I'm going to be moving someplace bigger next year and I'll be looking to DIY some proper monitors then so I'd love to hear some details about what you used and what you think of the results!

It's a bit of an undertaking but the x0xb0x with CPU upgrade and n0nx0x was pretty fun, well documented and works fantastically. I haven't actually built a ton of kits. I just picked Ray Wilson's book for Make (Make: Analog Synthesizers) because I'm good at building but terrible at understanding how stuff works well enough to troubleshoot on the mercifully rare occasion that it goes wrong, and so far it's great and I highly recommend it. Oh, the Audiothingies P6 was a really easy build (less than 3 hours from unpacking to successfully powering up and testing) and it sounds pretty good and is a lot of fun. I built a Midisizer Midirex last fall and it was easy and works well, but I still haven't gotten a good enclosure for it so I don't use it that much. Built a Gerhart Gilmore Jr. half watt tube amp about 8 years ago and it's still my go to recording amp but the price of the kit has gone up quite a bit since then. Built some kind of BYOC fuzz pedal from a kit a long time ago and it worked well too, but I traded it for a MidiNES. That's about it, as far as kits I've had good luck with go. Mostly I've just tinkered around with simple distortion pedals and repairing broken switches, plugs and faders in stuff I got cheap or free because it wasn't working. Oh, and for a very simple but very useful way to get back in to it, I made this a couple years back and it's excellent: http://www.recordingmag.com/resources/resourceDetail/314.html You could easily do away with the resistor-only mode (I've never once found it useful, it's supposed to make it behave more like a single coil but really it just makes it sound like the impedence isn't quite right - a bit quieter and kind of dull sounding) and I don't really use the volume pot either, but that would still be useful. A TRS 1/4" jack would be just as good as an XLR jack, too. If you made those changes it should cost well under $30, with at least half of that being the aluminum box and shipping; the transformer was about $8 and everything else was a lot less. I've had mixed experience with the Synthrotek stuff I've tried. The prices are good and they're easy builds but as far as actually being useful or even sounding like the demos I'd say I've had a 50/50 success rate. They do have a passive ring modulator kit that's I think $15 and works really well. You could easily make the same thing for less on perfboard or even point to point but their PCB makes it easy to build it very compact. Took less than 10 minutes to build and it's great to have around. EDIT: don't get me wrong, synthrotek seems to be a good operation, their tech support is helpful and the actual kits are well thought out and well documented, but their overall thing seems to be more lo fi, unpredictable stuff that hasn't really been that useful for me. The last one I tried was the Dirt Filter and it doesn't even pass audio in most settings. From the comments it seems like that's a common issue and has to do with how it interacts with the other stuff in the signal chain. In general their things seem to be hit or miss depending on how you want to use them.

Almost a talkbox.

Go for it, Modey. I've only made a few but it's the most fun thing. A luthier course is a huge help, though, if you can find a good one (try to get one that focuses on hand tools even if you don't plan to focus on hand tools yourself, because if it's one that teaches you to CNC a guitar you'll learn a lot about CNC but not so much about lutherie). More traditional techniques will teach you a lot of stufff that you can translate to a more modern workshop, but it doesn't really work the other way.

Yeah, Ideally but I knew that the glue fumes would cause clouding so I had to go frosted. You can still see some if you look hard which is a shame but It was as I expected. Tested last night and the sub osc is not working as it should. Need to investigate. Something you might try for dealing with glue fumes is masking the areas around the glue joint with softened wax. I do that with wood sometimes and it works really well but you need a solvent to really get the wax out of the grain. With acrylic it would be MUCH easier to clean, and it should keep any fumes or squeeze out from getting where they shouldn't go. It definitely works with CA glue (superglue).

that looks super cool! here's my latest chiptune setup: nanoloop 2.7.8 / PO-12 / OP-1 / patchblock / boss RPS-10 / behringer RV600 Yeah, M-Audio. It's actually in good shape other than no cover for the battery compartment, got it used years ago to have a controller that was actually portable and it works great for what you pay for a used one (I think I got it for $40, maybe less, from a guy a couple blocks over from my apartment), rehousing it would be strictly for looks. How do you like that Boss RPS-10? I've come close to buying one quite a few times. Love the RDD-10 I've got, probably my favorite digital delay. EDIT: is the RPS-10 the one where you can hold the delay buffer ("sample") and then it tracks the pitch of the audio input and tries to pitch shift the delay buffer to match it (bad description, I know)? EDIT AGAIN: I was thinking of the RSD-10, that's the one I've almost bought a bunch of times. Curious to hear how the RPS is.

Makes me want to rehouse my old Oxygen 8 just for fun.

Chesney that synth looks amazing, any recordings of it we could hear?

FYI I made an attempt to implement FDN-reverb in style of Tom Erbe's Erbe-Verb inside Axoloti and i got pretty interesting results: https://clyp.it/vb4bfvw0 https://clyp.it/sh0bo2rl It consumes ~40%CPU and almost whole SRAM so you can't add something else to this — only this reverb patch. So i had to process external source with this (Synth1 VST is sequenced in Renoise being sent to Axoloti and then returns back into Renoise) I'll check that out. My next plan for it is to program some kind of custom interface for a 360 Systems AM-16/B (they cost about $20 right now, although the cabling is a big and pain) so it can be easily programmed in real time over MIDI from a step sequencer (so probably something simple where CC number corresponds to an input and CC value 1-16 corresponds to an output) and play around with quick signal routing changes as a compositional tool. EDIT: that's a nice sounding reverb!

Oh, and the current live (or soon to be at least) rig:

Axoloti Core is available right now. I can't say I've used the one I got from the funding campaign as much as I'd hoped but that's more because of the way I'm working these days than because of anything wrong with it, it's definitely a capable thing. Obviously different than a Nord modular but could fill a similar niche. http://www.axoloti.com/product/axoloti-core/

You might be able to run the software in a virtual machine running an old OS, not sure if there would still be driver issues for USB communication (or is it all done via sysex? Never used one) though.

Yeah, I'd love an ER-1 and an ES-1 but can't really justify or afford more gear. A guy I know has a Nord Micro Modular and it seems really useful.

The more obscure stuff is fun (and usually pretty cheap). The nostalgia cycle is getting pretty close to hitting the turn of the millennium, I think a lot of the less popular late 90s/early 2000s groovebox and phrase sampler type stuff is going to be harder to come by pretty soon. My gut say that kind of low-rent, fake Crystal Method sounding stuff that was all over bad action movies and police procedural shows near the beginning of the Bush era is going to see a bit of an ironic revival in the next couple years, which I will most definitely not be participating in.

Every crowd shot in this is a work of art. I've probably watched it half a dozen times today and it gets funnier every time.

It was a hassle to get the OS upgraded (the guy who developed it still sells it but he doesn't have an EEPROM burner anymore so you have to pay him for the hex file and burn an EEPROM yourself) and the output is really quiet unless you have the last version of the OS, I think it's something like 6db hotter with that version. I actually really like it but it's still very buggy even with the latest OS (sometimes the encoders will jitter a lot when you adjust them, or change the values in 2s or 3s instead of smoothly, so it can get to be a hassle to adjust things sometimes - almost always it's stuff in the setup menus - the actual controls for the synth engine are pretty reliable) but the interface is really easy and fun to work with so that kind of offsets the occasional glitches. I've had it freeze up a few times but no more often than the Bass Station does. It's not the greatest thing I've ever done, but this track from a few years ago is maybe 3/4 Elevata, and the whole thing was recorded straight to stereo through a line mixer with no EQ (although the whole mix went through a modded DBX117 onto VHS tape, so it's not exactly uncolored). The lead that comes in around 3:55 is a guitar through a low end pitch to midi box driving an Anushri, with the guitar signal also patched into the Anushri's audio input, and I think the sort of high pitched FM string pad that comes in sometimes near the beginning and end was from the TX802 but other than that I'm pretty sure all of the synths came out of the Elevata's main outs in one pass. I usually use it for kind of squeaks and chirps but it can actually get really thick and does a pretty god job at deep basses, too. It's not really analog sounding and definitely not warm but it has a quality I like, and it's really fun to use when it's behaving. If you have a chance to get one cheap (they're pretty rare but they're also pretty cheap, I paid I think $215 a few years ago and that seemed a little high at the time) I'd say go for it. If nothing else, the "formant" waveform can get you some very Casio MT-xx like sounds but with a 2 oscillator analog-style topology. https://www.dropbox.com/s/uq5afq4wnu9tkds/20140617%20To%20the%20Crystal%20Core%20CDDA%20VHS%20MASTER.mp3?dl=0

Not the full studio setup, but here's a couple things: Rack of mostly unpopular 80s and 90s synths. Yanked the card reader from my MPC2000xl MCD and replace it with a cheap, non-hotswappable one so I could put the original in the VP9000 (as far as I know it's the only card reader anyone has ever had success putting in one of those - works perfectly). Weird, modded Otari MX5050 (it's one of the big, desktop MK IV's from the 90s that someone chopped and converted into a B III - they were essentially the same machine in a different case). Needs a lot of adjustment still but everything works and it already sounds good and the heads are almost new. Bought it for $20 years ago from a guy who got it free from Berklee when they were throwing out a bunch of their analog gear, but only had the time, money, tools and skill to start restoring it this spring.