korg "electribe" mark 2 boxes

I had an ER mk1 back when they were first released. They are awesome fun - really easy to bang out quick and interesting patterns with. The drum-synths are basically really simple 2-op FM, so its mainly good for strange percussive loops rather than standard x0x type drums. The poor thing falls down flat if you try and coax a decent kick or snare out of it.

All in all, probably the best drum-machine fun you can have for under £100 (short of picking up a cheap 606 and modding it).

the electribe series all include the motion sequence feature allowing you to record knob tweaks as part of a sequence = they are more bang for your buck than much more expensive and ridiculous gear and Korg is still head and shoulders above the competition in terms of interface design.

anybody with a little bit of outboard, even cheapo Alesis stuff, should have no trouble coaxing excellent sound out of these things. The only reason the ER1 fails at "decent snare or kick" is because it has no dynamic fx in the signal chain. You really need to put some kind of exp/comp/od on the output to maximize your investment, but that's easy enough to do.

Gotta disagree there. Outboard doesn't get you very far without individual outs.

Both of these videos have audio tracks done entirely on the Electribe MX, which I believe is some kind of bastardisation of the ER and EA:

http://iff-transponder.co.uk/city_seventeen/video/blip1.mov
http://iff-transponder.co.uk/city_seventeen/video/blip2.mov

but you have TWO individual outs, right and left! what exactly did you want for $200? I've had great fun running these through overdrive and compression. You can spend all day with typical equipment trying to find a unique phrase to sample or you can spend about 30 minutes with these.

I can't be bothered to argue the outboard point. Two outputs doesn't work for me, but YMMV. Agreed on the rest though.