the watmm GAS thread

[YangYing]

Pretty much made up my mind on this synth

fuck me that's insane, never knew it could do all that

 

the gas is real

[modey]

yeah the blofeld sounds fkn lush.. the interface doesn't look very inspiring though imo.

 

 

In other news, I got a piano!! Someone was giving one away on gumtree for free, all I had to do was pay someone to move it. I've never had a real piano before, it's such a novelty. I looked up the brand/serial number as well, made in Australia in 1951. Really lovely sound! It's only slightly out of tune, still very playable though. I'll get someone in to tune it when I get back from Europe.

 

[sheatheman]

lol yeah, fair. I did play with it a bit at his house as well and it still had THAT sound. But I definitely could have given it more of a chance. There's just something repulsive about it to me. I know I'm being completely unfair and unreasonable.

 

I think it's that reverb... built-in reverb is always dicey. Novation has made some gorgeous VA's in the past though.

Lol. I used to hate it too, but it’s become pretty compelling, much more so than it was at release.

 

Of course, I’m going to scent mine with amber oil.

[thawkins]

The Blofeld sounds really really really nice in that video, but my reality check is saying that buying a synth after a jexus demo is like getting Nike Airs after seeing the Michael Jordan ad. Also wasn't it supposed to be a bit buggy on the software side?

 

And I know that I will never be able to menu dive that long to get those motions going on in these sounds...

[kausto]

Yeah menu diving is PITA in blofeld. Always misleads you from sounds you actually want (oh one more Env page etc). That's why i sold it pretty long time ago (i tried to tweak it with my zero sl also before doing it). Though sonic range you can sqeeze from it is ridiculously wide and interesting.

[eczem]

My cousin has a blofeld, and iirc he's used one or two software editors, to mixed results, but still better than menu diving in the interface.

[modey]

Does it have decent MIDI implementation? Could it be controlled from say, a BCR2000?

[sweepstakes]

Blofeld looks really nice. I had a MicroQ for a bit, which I think has a similar engine, and it had a very lush and diverse sound. It also had a pretty interesting arpeggiator, very unlike the Elektrons. There were some bugs with the MIDI CC implementation in multitimbral mode which really got on my nerves, though.

 

I do remember it being someone menu divey, but there was such a long time between when I sold it and when I got my first Elektron (and got spoiled forever) that I can't remember just how bad it was. As a reference point, I used to think the TX81Z was "not that bad" but the A5000 was intolerable, on account of editing everything with clicky encoders.

 

lol yeah, fair. I did play with it a bit at his house as well and it still had THAT sound. But I definitely could have given it more of a chance. There's just something repulsive about it to me. I know I'm being completely unfair and unreasonable.

I think it's that reverb... built-in reverb is always dicey. Novation has made some gorgeous VA's in the past though.

Lol. I used to hate it too, but it’s become pretty compelling, much more so than it was at release.

Of course, I’m going to scent mine with amber oil.

lol good idea. Good to know it grows on you rather than the other way around.

[kausto]

Sure. As for me i borrowed cc numbers etc from renoise guru lua tool some guy made a template for it. So i made my own 3-page template for zero sl. There is one nuance — blofeld doesn't show currently tweaked param on it's gui automaticaly as tx81z do for example.

Edit: it's for Modey

Edited September 19, 2018 by telefunken

[YEK]

blofeld is a pain to program? makes sense. shit, back to the drawing board

[auxien]

^i don't have a Blofeld so take this with that in mind, but the same basic matrix-style programming works pretty well for me: I have the Pulse 2 and a DSI Evolver, obviously the Waldorf is more similar to what I've seen of the Blofeld, but my point is that that general type of 'menu-diving' isn't necessarily bad... it's not ideal either, but I've found it good for me. That said the Blofeld goes deeper into menus than the Pulse 2 does, so even I might suggest against the Blofeld if I'd used one...just saying I guess. I dunno. Don't listen to me :)

[YEK]

^i don't have a Blofeld so take this with that in mind, but the same basic matrix-style programming works pretty well for me: I have the Pulse 2 and a DSI Evolver, obviously the Waldorf is more similar to what I've seen of the Blofeld, but my point is that that general type of 'menu-diving' isn't necessarily bad... it's not ideal either, but I've found it good for me. That said the Blofeld goes deeper into menus than the Pulse 2 does, so even I might suggest against the Blofeld if I'd used one...just saying I guess. I dunno. Don't listen to me :)

haha, it's all good

[Bubba69]

The blofeld is pretty damn easy to program if you understand the signal flow. Even the filter routing is graphically shown to you on the panel. You take wavetables/oscillators, modulate them with lfos or envelopes or whatever ring modulation you want, then choose your filters, then modulate those or whatever, then you mess with fx. It's really easy to understand IMO. Basic wavetable/subtractive architecture, with different routing options. And uh, you can do karplus strong with the comb filter and cool stuff like that. Good sounding synth.

[Guest]

The Blofeld is great. A friend of mine has one and seems straightforward enough to edit patches.

I lapsed slightly with the GAS and bought an Akai s3000xl for $150 from the above friend who's purging a ton of gear he never uses. Now to load it with breaks and start making some stripped down jungle! 

Edited September 29, 2018 by Guest

[TubularCorporation]

LApsed slightly by snagging a Behringer Composer MDX2100 for $20.  They seem to have a reputation for being good at dirty, late 90s DnB and jungle type drum sounds (but not much else)and for $20 it's hard to go wrong with a compressor as long as you're expecting it to be a distortion/"color"/lo-fi-izer effect rather than some kind of high end mastering tool or something.

 

Also it's pre-lawsuit Behringer so there's a good chance it's just a straight up clone of whichever Drawmer it's based on* (until Mackie caught them they were allegedly literally buying gear, stripping all the components off the boards, making exact duplicates, and then manufacturing them using cheaper parts) so it's probably a good candidate for modding. I mean hell, the pots and jacks alone would cost at least $10-$15 plus shipping and there are apparently a couple THAT VCA chips in it, so even if it's worthless as a compressor it's still a bargain for the parts. I'm fairly sure they didn't switch to SMD components until the MDX2200 (the 2000 is through-hole for sure). 

 

 

 

 

 

*"One of the tech guys at the Drawmer factory told me the MDX 2000 is a DIRECT copy of a DL241."

-Carl Taylor

 

Internet wisdom is the 2100 is the same design as the 2000 but with the layout changed so it uses a single PCB instead of two, and cheaper components.  People seem to disagree over which one is actually more useful, though, and for my purposes "cheap parts and lower headroom" could be a good thing.

 

EDIT: after digging around a little more, it seems like the difference between the 2000 and the 2100 is more about fixing a design flaw or two in the 2000, and both versions went through a bunch of revisions and have been spotted with at least 3 or 4 different VCAs installed, most of which are pretty good and all of which can be swapped out. The 2100 seems to be the swet spot between when they sorted out the design but right before they switched to SMD and started cheaping out.

Edited September 30, 2018 by RSP

[auxien]

^nice. would love to grab like 10 $20 hardware compressors and chain/parallel them all at once :)

[TubularCorporation]

^nice. would love to grab like 10 $20 hardware compressors and chain/parallel them all at once :)

 

I did that with fuzz and distortion pedals at a show where I was playing guitar with a band once, back around 2012.  I forget what pedals they were but it was 5 or 6 cheap-ish distortions and fuzzes (including a couple DIY things and a reissue Fender Blender, so there was some octave in there too) and an 80s DOD compressor. It worked VERY well in the context of a big 3 guitars and 2 drummers space rock wankfest, at least.

Edited September 29, 2018 by RSP

[sheatheman]

man now i want that composer. how do you think it compares to a dbx 266xs?

[TubularCorporation]

man now i want that composer. how do you think it compares to a dbx 266xs?

 

 

No idea, I've only ever used a 166A.  FWIW people on the usual assortment of gear forums seem to compare the Behringer favorably to the 166 and the same forums tend to favor the 166 over the 266.

 

If you're interested, this thread has a lot of details about them.  From what people are saying there, it sounds like everything after the 2100 in that series was surface mount and everything before the 2100 had a design flaw (in linked stereo mode, instead of the compressor reacting to the sum of both channels, it just reacted to the left channel, which kind of breaks it as a stereo compressor), so the 2100 is probably the one to go for (OTOH the manual for the 2000 and reports on forums both say that the 2000 can be upgraded with output transformers and has pads on the board for installing them, no idea if the 2100 has space for them on its version of the board or if it would make much difference).  $20 was on the low side for eBay but it looks like they're usually around or under $50 which is still pretty good if it's even halfway decent.

 

 

I should have more free time again after this coming week, and it'll be arriving around the same time, so I'll do some kind of simple demo on a crappy Amen break or something when I get it, since that's the kind of thing people seem to like it best on.

Edited September 30, 2018 by RSP

[TubularCorporation]

Did a little more poking around.  It looks like the MDX2100 can almost definitely be upgraded with transformer-balanced output, since the 2000 and the 2200 both explicitly mention that option in their manuals (the manual for the 2100 I found is only 7 pages and is missing most of the info that's in the 2000 and 2200 manuals that are online, but it would be really weird if they left it out of that model only).

 

Anyhow, the actual Behringer branded transformers actually seem to be halfway decent judging from the minimum of info out there about them (one dealer claims they're actually identical to the transformers used in the DBX 160XT but who knows), but they're kind of expensive ($30-$40 each) so not really worth the expense, at least for me. Behringer doesn't publish the specs so getting a different brand of transformer would be tricky and probably even more expensive for a decent one.

 

BUT the Behringer DI100 active DI has one and is only $40 new itself, so it should actually be pretty feasible to pick up a couple of those cheap on eBay (especially if they're broken!) and scavenge transformers from them. 

 

Another thing to keep in mind fr anyone else who's interested in this piece.  Not sure if I'll do it myself, but if the thing sounds interesting stock I'll probably give it a try at some point.  At the very least I'll be beefing up the filtering on the power supply, since that's just a couple of capacitors.

[YangYing]

I mean, I think that's about what it can do actually. Music making was once just allow us connections and funds to procure anime tiddies, now we can bypass the middle man and just design our own.

so many tiddies

 

[TubularCorporation]

I really want a full set of replacement heads as backup for my Space Echo.  Echofix is going to have a new batch in stock in the next few months, hopefully the timing will be right so that I have the money when they're available.   Those are the last hard to source part left now that the process of changing the bearings in the motor is well established, so a pair of those should give it at least another 30 or 40 years of usable life, not counting the life left in the original heads.  At that point I'd say t's more likely that tape would completely disappear before the Space Echo was at risk of permanently dying.

[TubularCorporation]

So the Behringer showed up and it sounds really good, but the seller apparently drowned it in control cleaner or something. The entire chassis and all of the knobs were completely covered with oil, so much so that I had to take the knobs off to clean them for it to even be usable, but two of them were so tight that the potentiometers actually cracked while  was getting them off (I've been fixing my own stuff for over a decade and I've never seen that happen, much less twice).  Turns out even though they're just bog standard Alpha pots, finding a 16mm PC mount 20k pot with a 30mm flatted shaft AND 41 detents is really hard (or any 20k 41 detent pot, 10k is no problem but 20k just doesn't seem to exist), so unless one of the wholesalers I contacted gets back to me I'll have to either panel mount some non-detented ones and run leads to the board (probably what I'll do), find another broken MDX2000 or MDX2100 to scavenge parts from (but who's going to sell a broken Behringer Composer Pro at a price that makes sense? It would have to be like $10 including shipping, unlikely) or order them direct from Alpha (minimum is 1000 so not happening).  Behringer won't even take a parts inquiry for current production stuff if you aren't an approved tech, so I doubt they'd sell me $5 worth of parts from something they discontinued 20 years ago.

 

But even with only one channel available I can tell it's a lot nicer sounding than my old DBX166A was, and I'm pretty annoyed that I can't start using it right away.

[YangYing]

just to note that the opz looks insanenely powerful, craze stuff

[Bubba69]

I wish I had a bigger mixing console. I want like 8 aux sends.