Underrated and forgotten gear.......

[Torque]

I've been seeing allot of talk about the Machinedrum and whatnot which is cool cause it's a good piece of gear. Don't forget though before you part with that money for something like a machinedrum that everybody and their momma has one and the sound of them is so distinct that you can hear a machinedrum a mile away. So what about the rest of us that don't have $1000s of dollars to drop on just one drum machine? What about some of us who are more intersted in a more unique sound that only the "forgotten" gear can get you? There are allot of strange sounds to be had out there by machines that are a hell of allot cheaper. There are some questionably built peices of gear from the past that have glitches and weird stuff going on with them that makes them 100% unique.

For example i just picked up a machine for dirt cheap that everybody seems to have forgotten about that sounds like nothing else i've ever used.


Yamaha RX-5

It's a 12 channel 12 bit drum machine from 1985. It's comepletely archaic to use the internal sequencer but if you couple it up with other midi signals running to it you can trick it into making some weird sounds. All the sounds from it are really in your face, probably due to it being a 12 bit machine. All the drum sounds have amp envelopes which is peretty weird for something from '85.

or this:

Korg Poly 800
It doesn't look like much but this board makes some Battlestar Gallactica weird alien outerspace sounds. I've played with some new Korg stuff that has sounds from this peice but none of them seems to nail it dead on. These are still cheap and solid. There are some new mods you can buy or have installed for these that do some sweet sh!t. There's one that gives it some Moog style filters and another one that gives it 2 extra oscillators that are both sick as fck.

What else have you guys run across?

[AK]

I like the Poly 800, those brassy chords are nice on synths of that nature.

I still have bits of cheap gear which I like the sound of.

Boss DR660


Payed £30 for that a few yrs ago. Whilst you wouldn't use if for your kicks ( the 808 and 909 kicks are a bit poorly sampled I think ) plenty of useable percussion. In fact they must have implemented some timestretching algorithm because when you pitch sounds right up, the keep their length. Very expressive too.

Novation Super Bass Station:


A lot of improvements over the original, analog, decent sound and cost me £65

Roland JV1080


Love this thing, it's got huge sounds and makes wicked pads, strings and clangy bell type noises. A sample based synth with some wicked efx to boot. Cost me just over £100.

[steevio]

hey torque,
i used to have an RX 11 way back in 1984 , it was awesome, wish i still had it.

my favourite piece of forgotten kit and one of my most used effects is the

Roland SRV 330 dimensional space reverb.

i've never heard anything quite like it, it has a 3D algorhythm which gives the impression of the sound coming from behind you. if i could find another i would buy it straight away. priceless.

[AVX23]

korg MS-10



Zoom 1204 - I have a broken one which sound perfect to me - it makes a lot of noise and tends to phase things where it shouldn't - as a result it's instant echospace. not used it in a while cos I can't find the damn power pack.



Love the sampling on this - endless looping noise - I use it to make Pole type soundscapes by running a mic into it and scrunching up paper bags and stuff, once you start to get a workable loop you can keep overdubbing until you have a really organic sounding beatscape made up of natural , unsequenced rythym. I always go back to this when I just need to get my kicks as opposed to making serious music - it's endless fun - particularly If then hooked up to other equipment like the zoom for example - gets a bit noisy, but I like noise



I always come back to this badboy - it's very limited in terms of hands on control, but some of the percussion sounds are great (some villalobos style hats and ride cymbols goign on) the sequencing is top notch and feels a little bit looser than say a DAW and it lets you do some neat things with rythyms on the fly - the jog wheel is v good for interrupting patterns and making impromtu break downs or changes.

It was a bit of a mainstay on the german techno scene for a while but I haven't heard of many people using them recently.e

[Ingemar]

actually, thanks for this topic! I was starting to get really depressed when I realised how long it would take for me to save up for a machinedrum (or monomachine)

[AK]

This is a really good thread actually, I might be buying some new gear after xmas and I should think twice about buying from new.

I quite like DCO synths and these seem to be going for very little money these days like the Korg Poly 61.



Also, if you like grooveboxes, the Yamaha RS7000 is very cheap compared to its original retail value. I know a few people who have made entire tracks on that alone.



Some of the Lexicon MPX type efx processors are quite cheap too, esp the older models.

I'm more into synths myself and would love to collect a few older things. Although not cheap, I'd really like one of these:

[twisted-space]

[signal:Noise]

Roland U-110, use it for all my strings, guitars and other such. Yeah it's a PCM based sound module but I paid £45 for it and with some nice post processing of the sounds you can make some really interesting noises quite quickly. It also does huge epic stings just like that