the watmm GAS thread

[Guest Chesney]

Never tried those personally, had a few alright units but the ones I kept hold of are the ensoniq DP4 and the lexicon PCM80. These are getting pricey now unfortunately.

[Hautlle]

 

Been longing for some hardware FX. Delay/reverb etc. Pretty sure I'm gonna grab a multi-FX unit such as the Zoom MS50G or the likes, they're super reasonably priced on eBay.

 

I'm a big supporter of unloved 90s rack effects, you should totally do it.

 

Boss SE-50 prices seem to be back down again, they were really overpriced last time I looked ($200-$300) but I see a bunch in the $80-$90 range now and at that price they're absolutely worth it. SE-70 is supposed to be great, too, but they are both useful. I've only owned a 50 and it can be a little noisy (but really not bad at all, nothing I've ever noticed in a mix even if I was looking for it, and it's just hiss not hum or anything) but they have a great, raw sound and a very ugly digital distortion. The SE-70 is a bit more hi-fi and has a different selection of effects (and a much upgraded vocoder compared to the one in the 50), and the distortion is analog so it sounds more like a run of the mill Boss distortion pedal than the weird attempt at digital modelling that the 50 had. I don't think you could go wrong with either at the prices I'm seeing right now.

 

It could be Internet legend but I've heard that Liam Howlett from The Prodigy toured with a rack full of at least 4 SE-70s for a long time, for what that's worth.

 

EDIT: also the battery is really easy to change, so try to find one that turns on but has a bunch of garbled characters on the screen and try to get a low price on it.

Hey, thanks! I did think to myself, "There's got to be some out of fashion old gear that's a steal right now." But had no idea where to start searching. The only thing with rack gear is that my desk is pretty full with my current setup, but I could build/buy a 19" rack to go under my desk to fill up with cool stuff. Will definitely look into it.

[TubularCorporation]

A sort of sleeper used t be the Boss RE-70 but I checked eBay before I recommended it and now everyone's asking about 4x what I paid for mine two years ago.

 

For $70 or so it was a really good buy, for $300 not so much.

 

If you can find one cheap, though, it's definitely useful.  200 user preset locations with a simple interface (just four knobs for editing the basic parameters), with basic algorithms for reverb, delay+reverb, and nonlinear/gated reverb.  There isn't an editor available for it now (someday I want to sit down and make one for Sound Diver) but there are actually dozens of SYSEX-only parameters under the hood (about 2 full pages in the manual), with stuff like multiband parametric EQ and multi-point envelopes for the nonlinear reverb decay, so if you put in some work you could get really deep with it and make some pretty sophisticated custom presets, plus it's apparently easy to mod it for Eurorack CV control of the four front-panel knob values.

 

The actual algorithms are a subset of a much more popular and expensive Roland box from around the same time (mid 90s) that I forget the name of, with all of the most unusual, flagship new stuff taken out and just the bread and butter stuff left in, almost all of the front panel editing capability stripped out, and marketed for guitarists.  It has a really solid "glassy, 90s digital" sound, and I use mine quite a bit but I'd never recommend spending 3 figures on one, there are better options.  Much more hi-fi sounding than the SE-50 is.  I actually got it because it was fairly cheap and I thought it would be good for getting really unnatural, metallic reverbs and it can do that but mostly it actually sounds almost to good for what I was originally after. Really solid build quality, too

 

It would be a good one to set an eBay alert for and wait until you see a good deal.

 

EDIT: I'm sure I already posted it at some point since this is one of the (at least formerly) underappreciated pieces of gear I like to recommend, but this is the only demo I know of that shows a CV-modded RV-70. No technical details about how it's done that I've ever seen, but I suspect it's one of those things like the k1m (IIRC, I haven't done any of these mods myself and only vaguely looked in to them a couple years ago, since I don't really have much i the way of modular gear anyhow) where it's just sending a 0v-5v control voltage through a pot configured as an attenuator, so you can literally just add switching jacks that bypass the internal CV and pot and inject 0-5v CV from an external source in their place.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InCGxrC0k_I

 

Obviously you could do the same thing with MIDI CC control, too.

Edited July 4, 2018 by RSP

[TubularCorporation]

Never tried those personally, had a few alright units but the ones I kept hold of are the ensoniq DP4 and the lexicon PCM80. These are getting pricey now unfortunately.

 

Thos eare definitely more classy than the stuff we're talking about, but the lesser gear usually has its own personality.  Now that most of it is a fraction of what it cost new things that would be shortcomings if it was your only effects unit have turned into CHARACTER.

 

 

This thread is making me want an SE-70.  I forgot it replaced the +/- buttons with an actual data knob, that alone is a big advantage over the 50.

 

Anyway, I've made no secret here about being as obsessed with digital reverbs as East Coast analog synth nerds are with filter topologies, so take whatever I say about this with a grain of salt - if I had the time and money and space I'd just hoard shitty reverbs until it ruined my life, so there's probably not a reverb in the world  that I can't find something good to say about.

Edited July 4, 2018 by RSP

[Guest Chesney]

Yeah, agree.

I guess I just tried the wrong ones and kept the ones I liked.

I always wanted to find a zoom rack that had the same reverbs as my MRS1608 multitracker, but never did find one that matched, not that I looked that hard. That thing had some great sounding verbs, pissed over the DAW verbs I heard, definitely Logic ones which are a bit shite on the whole.

[auxien]

Better buy the zoom ms-70 cdr. I have one and itz great

 

heard lots of praise for that, and seen/heard a lot of good demos of it. not magic but seems to do very well for what it is, I love Zoom stuff. :)

[TubularCorporation]

I haven't really used much in the way of digital Zoom stuff but I got a Zoom Power Driver distortion pedal cheap years ago and it's one of the best general-purpose distortions I've ever used, sounds good on anything (plus it has a hidden clean-boost mode that guitar people swear by now, but I don't have much need for that so I haven't really used it).

 

At any rate, the one Zoom thing I've owned is really solidly built and sounds fantastic, for what that's worth.

Edited July 4, 2018 by RSP

[modey]

I will always recommend the Behringer Virtualizer Pro whenever multifx/reverb units come up. I'm surprised they don't come up here more often tbh, as the reverb is probably the best hardware reverb I've used (maybe not as good as some of my midiverb III's modes though). Great vocoder as well, and pretty decent filters / distortions. Haven't really tried the other effects much because the verb is so lush. 

[TubularCorporation]

Yeah, I passed up a Behringer Virtualizer Pro for $50 at a local guitar shop years ago and I regret it, they're actually getting a bit expensive now, at least on the Internet.

 

EDIT: maybe not.  I just checked and there are plenty of them for well under $100 again.  I was looking last fall but they seemed to always be pushing $200 back then, which is crazy.  Must have been some hype about them on one of the big message boards or Reddit or something.

 

 

Fuck it, I just picked one up with a missing knob cap for $61 shipped, I can probably sell my ailing 80s Digitech rack delay for that much (and even if I can't I never use it anymore since the input started distorting easily on sounds with loud transients, so I can swap it out for the Virtualizer in the rack regardless of whether I sell it; it was $15 so whatever).

 

 

I really need to stop opening this thread.

Edited July 4, 2018 by RSP

[thawkins]

It is difficult but I will not open Yahoo Auctions after reading this discussion about rack effect units.

 

At least not until the evening when I need to deal with hopefully winning the Roland A33 auction.

[modey]

Fuck it, I just picked one up with a missing knob cap for $61 shipped, I can probably sell my ailing 80s Digitech rack delay for that much (and even if I can't I never use it anymore since the input started distorting easily on sounds with loud transients, so I can swap it out for the Virtualizer in the rack regardless of whether I sell it; it was $15 so whatever).

 

 

I really need to stop opening this thread.

lol nice one. Mine had a missing cap as well, it ended up being about $100AU, but this was 11 years ago. 

 

I just bit the bullet on a new macbook pro, non-touchbar model, so no more gear purchases for me until at least my Europe holiday later in the year (which I've quite considerably over-budgeted for, just in case :P). I was keeping some money aside for the OP-Z but my interest in it has waned; new laptop is probably a better decision..

[thawkins]

Weird, I thought all the new models are touchbar - are you getting a refurbished machine? Mine is a refurb too, had to send it to the warranty once for some keyboard issues but now works like a charm. :)

[TubularCorporation]

 

Fuck it, I just picked one up with a missing knob cap for $61 shipped, I can probably sell my ailing 80s Digitech rack delay for that much (and even if I can't I never use it anymore since the input started distorting easily on sounds with loud transients, so I can swap it out for the Virtualizer in the rack regardless of whether I sell it; it was $15 so whatever).

 

 

I really need to stop opening this thread.

lol nice one. Mine had a missing cap as well, it ended up being about $100AU, but this was 11 years ago. 

 

I just bit the bullet on a new macbook pro, non-touchbar model, so no more gear purchases for me until at least my Europe holiday later in the year (which I've quite considerably over-budgeted for, just in case :P). I was keeping some money aside for the OP-Z but my interest in it has waned; new laptop is probably a better decision..

 

 

 

I'm telling you, last year they were starting at $150 USD and some of them were over $200, it was stupid.

[modey]

Weird, I thought all the new models are touchbar - are you getting a refurbished machine? Mine is a refurb too, had to send it to the warranty once for some keyboard issues but now works like a charm. :)

No, there's a base level 13" without touchbar. I don't need it. I just want something super portable and powerful enough to run the things I need on the go—Renoise, pd, REAPER, Adobe CC suite, the apps I'm using to learn programming like Processing, JUCE etc. I realise these would all run on a PC, but for some reason I can't stand Windows anymore for either music or graphics work.

 

I was considering a used/refurb macbook air, but I got sucked in to the shiny :P plus, they're all less powerful than my current macbook so I'd end up getting frustrated.

[thawkins]

 

Someone outbid me on the A33 by $1 in the last 10 minutes of the auction. I had been waiting for 5 days for it to end.

 

Live & learn not to eat dinner while the auction is ending. Noob mistake.

[Guest Chesney]

Always bid with 6's!

 

i.e. £156.66. that way you'll always beat the people who bid round numbers. Obviously you still have to read and expect what something is worth and going to go for.

[thawkins]

It's not even that I needed to do this. The auction system e-mailed me that someone had outbid me and all I had to do was just keep my eye on the thing because it's the type that automatically extends if there's bidders. At least that's my understanding.

 

At least the dinner was tasty...

Edited July 5, 2018 by thawkins

[Guest Chesney]

Oh I see, you missed it! ha, yeah, that's annoying, done it many a time.

[worms]

i always bid what i think the thing is worth at the last 40 seconds on ebay, won a pearl fightman and a roland csq 600 that way

[Guest Chesney]

Yeah, i rarely lose out on ebay unless there is someone desperate. The price shown at 1m left is not far off what it will go for so stick 56.66 on top of that (only if you're willing to spend that if it comes to it) and 95% of the time you'll only pay 10 above what it was on at 1m left.

[worms]

haha my vx 600 is back from the repairman

sounds brilliant, can do bass drums

havent worked out the multitimbral settings yet

[TubularCorporation]

Oh, I was misremembering, it's the V-Verb that got hyped up and too expensive (at least for a while).  The Virtualizer is the one I want, but the V-Verb is the one with all the "I sld my Lexicons and got more V-Verbs!" type posts all over the place.

[Leon Sumbitches]

I lost out on a pair of Adam A3X monitors for under £200 on eBay, the last 10 seconds were a frenzy. Still a bit gutted about that one

[Guest Chesney]

They are a bit weak anyway man, The 5x are real nice but still weak on low end, but that depends on your room. 

So don't feel too bad ;)

[thawkins]

On one hand I'm gutted because it was a full-size 76-key board with a nice size, everything else seems to be relatively gigantic if you want that many keys. On the other hand now I don't have to rebuild my desk and start selling the MicroKey which it was supposed to replace.

 

Still want better keys though. Or that Akai S3000XL... GAS never dies.