TubularCorporation

A lot of the best stuff (like that Triadex Muse) was Boston and Cambridge but at least half of it was in smaller towns around New England. I didn't even get in to the stereo equipment. Finding 60s and 70s hi-fi components around Cambridge was like finding vintage computers in Austin. I've spent about a day and a half in Austin in my entire life, but apparently you used to be able to find vintage computing stuff in the Austin area all over the place. Aroudn 2012 my roommate and I could have gotten the entire analog editing B suite from a TV studio for free but we'd have had to drive all the way to Baltimore and it was a huge rack. Same reason I didn't take the free 80s SGI I had a line on in 2009 or so - it was the size of a small deep freeze and you had to have a special high voltage mains source wired in to your house to even use it.

Yeah, it's hard to find good stuff free or cheap anywhere these days. Still possible but rare. All of the memes about finding some rare, valuable piece of gear in the trash use to be legit. Here are some things I or people I know have found in good condition in the trash or bought for a few dollars at yardsales/thrift shops/shady strangers between 2000 and 2010 (mostly): An 808 Multiple Juno 60s 70s Ampeg B-15n 60s Wurlitzer electric piano Triadex Muse Otari MX5050 MKIV about half a dozen portastudios Alesis HR-16 Nakamitchi cassette deck 5 or 6 other cassette decks fully serviced 1960s Akai tube reel to reel with all original tubes 4 or 5 vintage combo organs 2 hammond organs Uncountable number of Casio SK-1s Tons of vintage guitar pedals Commodores, Ataris, Amigas, etc. Akai s612 E-Mu Drumulator Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of rare records I'd say the total amount paid for all of that stuff was between $200 and $250. The 808 cost a coworker $80, I got the Ampeg for $30 and the Otari for $20; I don't know the cost of the Drumulator or some of the Junos, but the drumulator + the Juno a friend of mine has right now was about $100 for the pair - everything else on that list was free. About 3/4 is stuff I found, although at least half of that was been traded or given away years ago. Almost all of that kind of stuff dried up in the last 7 years or so. It's a whole different world now when it comes to scavenging. All of those use the same cheap transport, though. Probably the same heads, too. You're just playing for signal path and brand name with the expensive stuff now.

Kolchak is so good.

If you're not streaming on Electrophone for true analog warmth you might as well just quit.

It's something that was co-developed by I think Roli and Linn and has been rolled into the official MIDI spec. It's basically a formal standard to handle spreading MIDI across multiple channels from a single controller to a single instrument to allow things like separate pitch bend for every note, the way guitar synths have done since the 80s. It's really, really fun and the controllers are getting more affordable and common. https://www.midi.org/midi-articles/midi-polyphonic-expression-mpe

Back in my thrift store days I got a really top of the line late 90s Pioneer laserdisc player and about 40 laserdiscs for something like $30, but it was so high end it had an auto-flip feature and that thing jammed in less than two years. But we had a few good underground karaoke parties first, at least.

The only cassette deck I have that still works completely is an Onkyo that also came with that lot of free gear, and it is indeed really nice. Replaced an entry level early 90s Nakamitchi I found in the trash and used for 10 years until the transport control got intermittent. The free gear haul also included an original Tascam 122 and it's ridiculously nice but one of the wires on the playback head came loose not long after I got it and replacing it without taking the head out (and then not being able to realign it because who actually has a Tascam calibration cassette?) and the Onkyo is nice enough that I haven't bothered to fix either of the other two yet. I don't listen to cassettes though, I've just got a bunch of old stuff from when I was a kid that I'm slowly digitizing (we couldn't afford a video camera but we had a boombox so my version of home old movies was cassettes) and I like to record stuff to cassette and then sample it. If you go looking for a deck avoid anything with auto-reverse, the mechanism that flips the heads around will probably break sooner or later and the actual heads are tiny and crap. On the other hand, if quality isn't an issue there are tons of playback-only cassette decks, mostly with USB output built in, for $20 USD or less brand new on AliExpress

You can get a speaker-to-line converter, I've never tried one though. I actually have one that came with all that free gear I got a couple years ago but I have no use for it. It's really light, so I assume it's just a couple resistors inside and I have no idea how safe it actually is for your amp.

If you have one that already works just use that, buying one now is probably not worth it between the condition of what's out there and the inflated prices from the cassette revival plus Covid making pretty much all used music gear prices at least double since last spring.

Not exactly free, but free to use with Patreon support encouraged: https://www.patreon.com/analogobsession/ Haven't had a chance to really explore them yet but they seem really good so far.

You don't just make $6m without already being rich.

I've been trying all week to rationalize to myself the fact that I might actually try to get on this before the bubble bursts. The most so far is "it's unethical to NOT grift crypto-bros."

No true hipster would self identify.

Yeah, the only thing worse than hipsters is people who unironically use the term "hipster."

I've never messed with a Monologue but I used to know a guy who had an original Minilogue and it sounded great.

The FM one that's coming out in a few months looks and soundsreally good too, and having a 4 track sequencer is definitely a big plus for it, but this one has a sound I really can't get out of any gear I have (including LSDJ/Nanoloop), and it seems like the perfect sequenced synth for the kind of fully improvised stuff I've been doing for the last year. Goodbye SQ-1 I never use anymore.

$200usd is hard to argue with for what it does. I've already figured out $100-$125 worth of stuff to put up tomorrow.

Been a while since I saw a new piece of gear that caught my attention but this has me eyeing a couple underused things I could unload on ebay.

It's crypto, it's definitionally not cool.

Yeah, Nagras are amazing. Forget sending full mixes through it, use it for delay! Also trak mono instruments through it. Split your signal so you are recording direct in your DAW on one track while also recording the same signal to the Nagra, set the Nagra to monitor from the playback head, and record that on a second track in your DAW but don't monitor it. Then use the direct recording to line up the Nagra recording manually afterward and use either/both in the final mix. EDIT: that's assuming you are recording hardware. If you work ITB you can obviously just bounce individual tracks out through it at any point. Stereo would be nice to have, but most mixes benefit from more mono sources than they usually have these days anyway. And maybe it willbe stable enough that you can get away with doing stereo in two passes, Especially if you do M/S rather than L/R like you suggested, since imaging variations that affected width would probably be a lot more musically acceptable than variations that affected balance.

New answer to OP: https://www.futur3soundz.com/xva1-synthesizer

Makes me feel better about dropping $700 on a Juno 6 back in 2015 (at that point by far the most I'd ever spent on a synth and still near the top).

I've been going through all of the stuff I got for like $40-$80 a few years ago and it's all gone crazy since the pandemic hit especially. The Electrix Warp Factory is like $500 now, I don't even know anymore.

My first proper, budget synth was a Korg Poly61-M. Paid $200 (overpriced) at a shop and only got $80 when I sold it a few years later before a move. I'd definitely like to have THAT back again. EDIT: Not as much as my old bandmate who sold his Juno 60 for something like $500 (also overpriced) to cover part of the cost of a secondhand Korg CX3 probably does, though. This all went down about 12 years ago, but it was like another universe in terms of synth prices.