the watmm GAS thread

[TubularCorporation]

9 hours ago, user said:

Wavestations seem to be cheap but I personally don’t have enough space left for a huge keyboard. Reverb prices for ensoniq modules seem to be around 500,- for the m and 600,- for the 80. Over here ensoniq stuff is also a lot rarer to find than a matrix. Over the last 4 years or so I’ve seen maybe 3 bass station racks listed, almost bought one at some point but someone had already snatched it. I think it was about 250,-. 
600,- for a matrix1000 in good condition really doesn’t seem like such a bad deal to me, though I have to add that I’ve never operated one, only heard demos. 

Yeah, $600 seems like a good price these days for sure (I jumped into the conversation late and missed the price you could get), but the voice chips are really hard to source if you can at all (last I saw them it was around $80 for one used one from a reputable seller) so make absolutely sure you can return it if there's a problem (it has a diagnostic mode so you can easily test all the voices when you get it).

 

But yeah, I was going by the current US prices I was seeing, which were way too much IMO. $600 is what they were going for here 5 or 6 years ago (and people were complaining that it was too expensive back then, too).

Wavestation A/D is a 2u rack unit and it's the one to get because it has audio inputs, so you can use external audio in your wave sequences, use its effects indepenently of its synth engine, and get real access to the vocoder (all of the versions have a vocoder but it's sort of useless in the varieties that don't have external inputs). I wish I had one.

[chim]

50 minutes ago, TubularCorporation said:

Yeah, $600 seems like a good price these days for sure (I jumped into the conversation late and missed the price you could get), but the voice chips are really hard to source if you can at all (last I saw them it was around $80 for one used one from a reputable seller) so make absolutely sure you can return it if there's a problem (it has a diagnostic mode so you can easily test all the voices when you get it).

 

Keep in mind we were talking euros which would correspond to $650. The fully updated one I found is just shy of $800. There's a Cheetah MS6 wizard on maad.net who sells narrow-body 3396's for 24usd/16eur a pop, plus group discounts and whatnot. I haven't been checking eBay but worldwide Reverb price histories seem to mostly correlate with local listings. Aside from some audacious profit maximization, good conditions fetch higher prices and the matrix does indeed go for around €1000 sometimes which is pretty insane. Then again, it's definitely worth a premium to know a device is fully tested beforehand and half the keybed isn't smashed to bits... The gold-rush can't go on forever and I expect lots of synths will start to lose their appeal over the next 10-20 years as the pool of working-order units shrinks.

Thanks for the Wavestation tip by the way, it does indeed seem to go for cheap. People really underestimate these modules! 

Edited April 20, 2020 by chim

[TubularCorporation]

$650USD is still a good price right now from what I was seeing. It definitely has its own sound, and if you like it I can't think of anything that sounds very similar (I mentioned polychaining Bass Station Racks half as a joke and half because there's a little bit of similarity in the sound, although the filters are very different), and the voice-per-channel mode for using it with a MIDI guitar is interesting although I haven't used it (the programmer I built isn't compatible with that mode, and all of the MIDI to/from the Matrix is routed through it, so I can't use guitar mode without completely repatching the MIDI cables).

In theory, a Matrix 6/1000 should be MPE compatible with a little bit of MIDI processing (it's basically the same except MPE uses a dedicated main channel for all of the global controls, but the M1k uses the same channel for voice 1 and the global controls, so you'd need to merge the main channel with the lowest voice channel to get an MPE controller to work right with the Matrix).  I have a feeling you'd need to limit your per-channel CCs to bend and velocity because the Matrix CPU is pretty slow and I get the feeling it would be easy to crash it if you sent too much CC data on 6 channels at once, but since I haven't tried it I can't really say for sure. At any rate, I can't think of another vintage analog synth that's even theoretically MPE compatible (the other analog guitar synth modules I'm aware of were more proprietary).  I assume a Wavestation A/D would be good for this too, since it was designed for MIDI guitars - you were supposed to plug your MIDI guitar's main pckups into the audio inputs so you could use it as a multi-effect unit for the guitar AND a guitar-controlled Wavestation AND integrate your guitar sounds into your Wavestation patches.

Thanks for the tip on the 3396's!  That's a good price, I might grab a couple as insurance.  It's too bad they aren't popular with the boutique world, because they're pretty cool chips with a lot of potential for complex modulation and I'd love to see them reissued like some of the more famous synth-on-a-chip type ICs have been over the last few years. If nothing else, the vintage synth boom has led to a real golden age of replacement parts - even the old Juno faders are in limited production again for the first time in ages, and the whole IC reissue thing is amazing.

 

Working vintage synths are definitely going to start going away (like what's happened with tape - heads and other parts for really high end machines are very expensive but still in production, but the prosumer machines like portastudios and 1/4" 8 track machines are doomed - heads for 8 track 1/4" haven't been available at any price for over a decade, and it's unlikely they'll ever come back because they'd cost as much as the entire machine, so the usable life of the working machines still out there is probably in the hundreds of hours at this point) but what I'm hoping is that FPAA technology will get to the point that replacing any proprietary analog IC that has specs available will be comparable to flashing custom firmware to an EEPROM - not something every user would want to do, but something any experienced DIYer would have no problem with and that could be easily done to order at a reasonable price for everyone else.

[kakapo]

Back in 2006, I had the opportunity to buy 2 mint 1000s for £100 each.  I turned it down because I thought there might be too much overlap with my Cheetah MS6...

[TubularCorporation]

In 2007 I sold a Korg Poly61m for $80, which was a $120 loss compared to what I paid for it in a shop around '99. Around that same time I could have gotten a fully working Minikorg 700 for $200 but that was pretty expensive.

 

I also distinctly remember around 2000 one of my professors heard I was in to synths and introduced me to a different professor who wanted to show off the synth he'd jsut bought.  It was an absolutely showroom-mint Memorymoog, but he'd paid a LOT for it - $1100. Even more than the working Polymoog with footpedals that was for sale that spring at one of the local guitar shops (that was $1000 even but it sat around for a long time because nobody wanted to pay $1000 for an analog synth that wasn't even modular).

 

But the worst of all was when I was working at a record shop in 2007 and on my day off one of the local trash pickers tried to sell the owner a Triadex Muse that he'd found out with someone's trash (very likely Edward Friedkin's own trash, or one of his friends or colleagues from back when he was making them) but he wanted $80 for it and the owner wouldn't go higher than $40 so he took it across town and sold it to one of our competitors.  If I'd worked a day earlier that week I'd have it right now. That same year we got a pair of really well preserved, fully working AR1 speakers and I could have had those for $70 but they weighed 50 pounds each and I didn't want to carry them home on the subway.  There's a pair with no grille cloths and white paint all over them on eBay for $6000 right now.

 

All the stuff I could have got for next to nothing in the late 90s and early 2000s and didn't because I was so broke even that stuff was mostly out of reach just kills me.

 

EDIT: I also passed up a Transcriptors Skeleton turntable because it was $75.

 

 

Edited April 21, 2020 by TubularCorporation

[TubularCorporation]

On the bright side, the Tayada Thonk clones are already back in stock, so that's all set.

[chim]

If you think not being able to buy the gear back then sucked, imagine the people who sold stuff like Jupiter 8's for a few hundred... 

In brighter news, just noticed Klark pulled this off.

 

https://www.klarkteknik.com/Categories/Klarkteknik/Signal-Processors/Effects/3RD-DIMENSION-BBD-320/p/P0DTH#googtrans(en|en)

No idea how many BBD chips are in there but it's supposed to be a faithful recreation of the Dimension D so there should be two. Not a super versatile effect but the stereo connections are there and at €160 it's almost a no-brainer. This makes me hopeful for a revival of the more extreme effects of yesteryear. 

Edited April 21, 2020 by chim

[TubularCorporation]

I'd love to hear a comparison between that and the Jurgen Haible Subtle Chorus.  I've got an old PCB set for the Subtle Chorus sitting around, but when you factor in the cost of a case it would be more expensive to build it than to get one of those.

 

I bet it sounds good, Behringer's clone of the Dimension C pedal was pretty close and I still use it a lot.

[chim]

Still undecided on the Matrix. I'm in a bid shootout over a JV2080 that's still super cheap but I suspect it'll rise into the expected going rate over the next couple days, if not the final minutes. Modules aren't as popular but there's always somebody super aware of market value and it's hard to score those stealthy deals. I'm very impressed with its capabilities (Legowelt sure knows how to rock 'em) and can easily see myself grabbing one and a Boog or Bro-1, and there's still dough for a second DCO module, sampler or even a TD3. This is a lot of competition for a single Matrix, even with its infatuating signature. But I've listened to too many demos over the days and need some time off to make an objective decision. Funnily enough, a super cheap JV1080 listing just materialized, but the bid system for the 2080 is compulsory when you're in the lead, so we'll see how it goes. With my luck, someone will grab the 1080 before I'm outbid on the 2080 

Edited April 23, 2020 by chim

[TubularCorporation]

I forgot in my sob story about missed synths, at the tail end of the 90s the Zappa family was selling off a lot of gear left over from the last touring band he had, and I went on their website to check it out.  Most of it was expensive pro equipment, but there were also two Casio FZ-1 keyboards.  I really wanted one of them but $100 was really expensive for a teenager working weekends at a video store, and anyway I didn't know back then that Casio made any pro gear so I thought it was just some kind of Casiotone that would be cool to have because Zappa used to own it.

 

I've never used a 2080 but the JV1080 sounds really nice and is fun to program.

 

 

Edited April 24, 2020 by TubularCorporation

[user]

Bought a second hand Disting mk3 for a really good price. Decided last year that I definitely didn’t need a Disting but started reconsidering a couple weeks ago and was saving up for a new mk4 but then this one showed up. Didn’t really feel like gas but more something that made sense to try out. I need a MicroSD adapter to upgrade it to the latest fw though so guess now I’m gassing for a microsd adapter. Hard. 
Have only spent about an hour with it and am still struggling with the somewhat cryptic interface, will give it a couple of months before deciding I definitely need a mk4 or even the brand new alpha ex whatever edition. 
 

All the 90s rompler talk around here has gotten my gas started on one of those though. I’ve got some korg arranger thing somewhere that hits the spot for some of those sounds but it’s kinda bulky and needs to be put into the right mode every time it powers up. Ugggghhh. 

[modey]

Ha, I had a disting mk3 for a few months, but ultimately the interface frustrated me, especially since putting any wav files on the sd card corrupts the "display" and makes it super hard to even figure out where you are in the menus, let alone which mode is selected. 
 

Would the QY70 be considered a rompler? Sounds aren't very editable, but it can get very lush. 

[acid1]

The new disting has a full on display 

My old disting is permanantly in stereo ping pong delay mode.

[chim]

I had a quiet time leading the 2080 auction for a few days but it sure snowballed in the last minutes! The auction was for an untested unit from a charity thrift shop so the uncertainty collided head-on with the value of a good cause. It sold for the same price as a serviced & warranted unit on reverb, ridiculous! I'm not that partial to the 2080 and have seen at least a handful JV1080 ads in the past week so they look easy to come by. I'm just not ecstatic over a €100 premium for Pop/Hip-hop expansion cards so I'll bide my time for the next deal. I was utterly unsurprised to hear Frank Klepacki used the JV's to hell and back on the Command & Conquer soundtracks. Such great tone. Anyway, the good news? The Matrix 1000 is on its way  

[user]

8 hours ago, modey said:

Ha, I had a disting mk3 for a few months, but ultimately the interface frustrated me, especially since putting any wav files on the sd card corrupts the "display" and makes it super hard to even figure out where you are in the menus, let alone which mode is selected. 
 

Would the QY70 be considered a rompler? Sounds aren't very editable, but it can get very lush. 

Wasn't aware of the sd card bug, usually I do more research before buying anything and in this case it would have probably been wise as sample playback was one of the main reasons for adding the disting. I'm sure I'll get use out of some of the other modes but not looking forward to a further encrypted interface.

Will look into the QY70, cheers!

 

6 hours ago, acid1 said:

The new disting has a full on display 

My old disting is permanantly in stereo ping pong delay mode.

Watched the announcement/interview Os did with sonicstate right before going to sleep and then the next morning the first thing I saw on my phone was the ad for the 2nd hand mk3, took it as a sign. Looks great but unless I end up really gelling with some of the modes on the mk3 I'll probably get a 4ms sampler or even the squid salmpler, when/if I have that kind of money to drop on a module anyway.

Stereo pingpong was the first mode I went to because it seemed the easiest to identify that I was actually getting the modeswitching right, ended up messing around with it for about an hour.        

[user]

1 hour ago, chim said:

I had a quiet time leading the 2080 auction for a few days but it sure snowballed in the last minutes! The auction was for an untested unit from a charity thrift shop so the uncertainty collided head-on with the value of a good cause. It sold for the same price as a serviced & warranted unit on reverb, ridiculous! I'm not that partial to the 2080 and have seen at least a handful JV1080 ads in the past week so they look easy to come by. I'm just not ecstatic over a €100 premium for Pop/Hip-hop expansion cards so I'll bide my time for the next deal. I was utterly unsurprised to hear Frank Klepacki used the JV's to hell and back on the Command & Conquer soundtracks. Such great tone. Anyway, the good news? The Matrix 1000 is on its way  

Daaaamn, seems ridiculous. Untested thriftshop jv2080 vs matrix1000? Seems the dice fell in your favour. Curious to hear how you get on with it.

[TubularCorporation]

Yeah, 1080/2080 are one of the most common synths ever made, if you decide you want one you'll be able to find one.

 

Edit @chim:

 

Before I made the Alpes hardware editor for the Matrix 1000 I settled on OB-6000 on the PC for editing and it worked well.  I can't remember what the problem was now, but I never got the CTRLR panel to work right, plus I work on a pretty small monitor and it took up way too much space. I don't think I ever tried SynLib for the Matrix 6 but it should work too, the only significant difference between the Matrix 1000 and the Matrix 6 is that the Matrix 6 (at least the keyboard version) allows some voice splitting while the Matrix 1000 is strictly monotimbral (but I don't remember if the 6 has the channel-per-voice guitar mode for polyphonic pitch bends that the Matrix 1000 has).

 

There are some MacOS and iOS editors that are supposed to be good but I haven't used them.

 

Which version did you get?

 

 

 

Edited April 28, 2020 by TubularCorporation

[psn]

 

[chim]

It's a blackface one, might have been manufactured in -92 but the seller wasn't 100% sure. The condition is pristine, it's got the latest firmware and a battery holder mod. I just couldn't let that slide, the other stuff I'm into is much easier to find. Should arrive tomorrow.

In a kind of reverse GAS, I finally sold my old Alesis AI-3. It's an ADAT interface that has had nearly zero use since I bought it. My first gear purchase in 2004 involved me taking an inheritance of €2500 to the music store and asking the clerk what I could get. He pushed me a Mackie mixer, the alesis ADAT, an RME soundcard, a microkorg, sontronics mic  and a pair of Tannoy monitors. The monitors were good but the whole setup was way too ambitious, I should've just upgraded my PC and get synths. Audio interfaces weren't that capable back then, but I guess I got screwed. Also it sucked to be pushed Mackie and Alesis, the two brands that never appreciated in value. I hope the new owner gets some use out of it. 

[TubularCorporation]

7 hours ago, psn said:

 

You'd still need a software editor to access the mod matrix but that looks nice for tweaking the main stuff along side a software editor for getting deeper in to it. The Stereooping stuff is REALLY expensive, though.

 

There's a Matrix 1000 preset for the Novation Remote 25 SL Compact here: https://resource.novationmusic.com/community/libraries/midi-templates

 

 

Chim, it looks like you got a really solid deal, especially having the new firmware and battery installed already. I bet you'll like it a lot!

Edited April 29, 2020 by TubularCorporation

[psn]

Ah, alright. Wasn't too pricy when I got my TX81z programmer a few years back. 

[TubularCorporation]

9 hours ago, psn said:

Ah, alright. Wasn't too pricy when I got my TX81z programmer a few years back. 

Yeah, I remember them being a lot less expensive when I was looking for a TX802 programmer a few years back, although they were still a bit out of my range.  But I checked the price on their Tubbutec Juno66 version last night and it was around $500!

[chim]

It's finally here, and the power works, but unluckily the necessary MIDI cables and USB hub are delayed. The delivery was just sitting around for two days and is moving from Norway today... And it's supposed to be a great franchise.  Hopefully here by Friday. Seeing the "120" firmware version light up was ecstatic! It's not exactly a Kijimi but a very old itch was scratched today...

 

Edited September 10, 2020 by chim

[TubularCorporation]

It's not as far from a Kijimi as you might think, once you get in to editing it. It has its quirks but it's a really capable synth.

[Taupe Beats]

A friendly tip:  There's a great iOS app called Patch Base where you can get editors for a lot of the synths mentioned in the last couple pages and many others. Developer is a nice guy. Not too expensive.

https://coffeeshopped.com/patch-base