Hardware Setup

tone-def · Post by **tone-def** » Wed Nov 11, 2009 4:24 pm

Robot Criminal wrote:
tone-def wrote: in 5 years time i want to start building an analog modular.
+1 god damnit.
allready built me one simple piece of gear though

what is it?

i like the home made look of it.

Robot Criminal · Post by **Robot Criminal** » Wed Nov 11, 2009 4:59 pm

it is "home made"

and it is WSG <- link

sound example

miniKAT · Post by **miniKAT** » Wed Nov 11, 2009 5:51 pm

What about the jp8000, its digital I believe. A guy I know is selling it and I was wondering if maybe its worth the 400 he wants for it. It sounds cool i guess and has a lot of knobs and sliders, but I'm def not an expert on synths and dont have much to compare it to.

coldfuture · Post by **coldfuture** » Wed Nov 11, 2009 6:15 pm

steevio wrote: its easy to talk bollox about gear, if you fancy a piece of kit just go for it and see what you can do

Best advice ever. Getting kit and learning it inside and out is the best approach.

Brankis · Post by **Brankis** » Wed Nov 11, 2009 6:26 pm

MagpieIndustries wrote:
the korg electribes are super hands-on and really really quick and loads of fun to use, but the sound quality is less than desirable

i think the emx-1 sounds awesome, im curious to which electribes you are talking about? in fact compared to the machinedrum uw i think the korg is much warmer/fatter sounding

some of the onboard sounds unprocessed do sound cheesy, but that is not to be confused with bad sound quality

Android · Post by **Android** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 6:52 pm

I have an Electribe ESX

its great fun to mangle samples

but I agree on the sound quality issue

so I usually turn it off and go to my MPC

then write a song

steevio · Post by **steevio** » Fri Nov 13, 2009 12:18 pm

a word of caution for anyone thinking of the 101, remember its not velocity sensitive. this might come as a shock if you buy one and didnt know.

its not so much of a problem for bass, because generally bass needs to maintain a fairly constant velocity to cut through, and not a problem for one-shot sounds, but its harder to make more complex percussive patterns.
there's various tricks to get round it, like using a slower attack, shifting the notes forward by varying degrees, and using the length of the note to determine its loudness.
i use this method all the time for shaker patterns, but if you want fast attack sounds, you cant do it.

MagpieIndustries · Post by **MagpieIndustries** » Fri Nov 13, 2009 2:10 pm

Brankis wrote:
MagpieIndustries wrote:
the korg electribes are super hands-on and really really quick and loads of fun to use, but the sound quality is less than desirable
i think the emx-1 sounds awesome, im curious to which electribes you are talking about? in fact compared to the machinedrum uw i think the korg is much warmer/fatter sounding

some of the onboard sounds unprocessed do sound cheesy, but that is not to be confused with bad sound quality

I have both an emx and an esx. The emx does sound lots warmer and fatter than the machinedrum kicks, but I think a lot of the emx sounds are kinda dated. Also I don't think the synth parts are so good; despite the number of different osc types and parameters it all just sounds like the same fizzy mush to me (this may be just my opinion on what a 'good' sound is). But, the oscs are free running and do not have any kind of anti-click envelope, resulting in unpredictable and loud clicks on some notes that are especially noticeable on lpf bass. This is not to be confused with cheesy. Finally, its pretty hard to get a really earth-shatteringly low bass out of it, the sound just sort of disappears, although with the right combinations of modulators and filters it can get really rumbling subby sounds. Just not under any kind of control.

I don't know much about the synth parts on the esx, as I mostly use it just to play back some samples. It is easily the most noisey piece of gear in my studio, its just basically a lot of hiss. Samples played on it sound sort of flat and dead when compared to the same sample played through my macbook internal soundcard (into mixer and monitors, same as the esx). I suspect it is the DACs causing this. I've had both good and bad results by changing the tubes, can't say at the moment what kinds are currently installed in my machines but the above issues are more or less present regardless of the tubes used. The esx also ignores incoming velocity messages (on the drum parts, synth parts are velocity sensitive) and this makes it utterly useless as a sampler for my electronic midi drums. Basically I am finding the esx to be totally worthless for anything other than generating a hiss. It's good at that.