-=[THE SYNTH ZONE]=-

Cool! I keep thinking of doing something like that, but then Ableton is so flexible and powerful. Once I have a space to do it, I may try something like that with my Circuit (albeit with way less tracks).

Thanks haitch, I'm just wrapping up an album project so now is the time to try something new.

There's one track on the record that is primarily Volca FM & Keys and I'm really happy with the sound. Still love the FM although I keep coming back to like two patches ('Plucky' and one of the bass patches), lol. Keys I usually have to combine with a digital synth to add some attack and sheen, but the blend is soooo much better than either could do on their own.

I still don't do any real hardware workflows, just program midi with purposefully lame/neutral softsynth sounds and then do a couple 'live' takes sending it out and twisting knobs.

i impulsively bought an electribe sampler from a sketchy guy on craigslist (his price was $100+ cheaper than on reverb, he showed me a photo of his storage space filled with boxed music gear, and tried to sell me a moog out of his car when he dropped it off). i don't know what i'm doing yet but it seems pretty intuitive. i don't really know what i want to make with it yet either. i don't have a spare SD card so i can't save my samples/patterns yet, but that's probably a good thing at this point. i spent my lunch break today sampling orchestral strings and then pitching them up and down and layering them to sound gross and seasick. pretty fun.

I finally have a place at to play in my house! Here’s a little jam with my Circuit controlling some external synths:


https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=dX8W7jADLwE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX8W7jADLwE

awesome!

want 2 put in a good word for the moog subsequent 37. recently got one and it was instantly the most fun synth i've ever touched

today ordered the new hotness from a new synth company called ASM, v excited to learn to program it: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/asm-hydrasynth

How are you getting on with the Hydrasynth, Davey?

Happy 909 Day!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU-UsvYbIV0

The Wizard!

shoot, xps, sorry i missed this earlier sharivari. i didn’t end up ordering the hydrasynth after all. actually i thought i had, but didn’t quite complete the transaction on ebay. then i took a look at my credit card statements, and while i’m not in debt, i couldn’t justify the purchase :/

i DID finally restore my DSI Prophet ‘08, though. it took a few operations. on the second to last, i tried to fix the two dead keys it had and, after much painstaking effort, when i pieced it all together found that something like half the keys were dead! i had to laugh. no idea where i went wrong. anyway, i got a new keybed for it and it everything works, finally. it’s a beautiful machine

I made a little jungle-ish jam using a Circuit, Streichfett, Minilogue, Bass Station 2 synths and MD500, RE20 and BigSky pedals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKZUHgidf1E

Arturia Polybrute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on1gP5J0_NA

I've been making some dreadful noises with a Lyra-8. great stuff.

Is it easy to get started? It seems like it would be

The Lyra-8 is the best

Tom I think so - I just tuned all the voices around the same pitch and started from there, good way to see how changing something effected everything else. once you grasp that you can just tune some intervals up by ear and make your own scales or whatever.

my sister's not quite 2-year-old was obsessed with it when they came to visit last week, and was delighted by endless delay feedback when I let her have a play! (her older brother was not impressed, what a normie)

I'm tempted by the Lyra-FX Eurorack module for when i expand my case.

i think i've said i really regret selling my lyra-8. the pulsar drum thing looks bananas, i like that guy's russian business hippie vibes

https://808303.studio/

Very sad news:

https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2020/10/25/british-synth-designer-chris-huggett-has-died/

My bass station 2 is still my favorite synth - Huggett was a legend.

Hello thread, I bought a DFAM and a Subharmonicon last month with my redundancy money and have been annoying the tits off everyone here ever since they arrived. Absolute instruments of joy and madness! The DFAM especially is a unit of raging destruction. Have been eyeing up quantizer modules so I can patch in more melodic sequences and somewhat tame its chaos, but I think it would be a bad idea to start buying eurorack while I don't have a job. I do have a thing for pursuing bad ideas though

a used 4ms pod full of cheap and versatile doepfer utility modules would be one way to pursue that bad idea.

i just been making trash ambient with an op-1 and some guitar pedals and--secret weapon--an alesis wedge desktop reverb, love that 90s digital sound

Keep telling myself that buying any sort of case is basically investing in a coffin for my bank account. I'll look into that though, just for research purposes of course!

Other gear I have at the moment, clogging up my desk and generally hijacking all my evenings: minilogue, volca fm, behringer model d, drumbrute impact, and indeed a bunch of guitar pedals. Still don't know what I'm doing at all tbh, just merrily whiling away the hours making a terrible racket

A pod case plus a Disting already does a lot but yes, you won’t stop there lol.

Yeah a disting would do very nicely indeed

I'm selling my Arturia Microfreak, it just didn't get used and I don't love the overall sound. It took way too much work to make it sit in a track, whereas my Volcas (FM & Keys) just work even with minimal processing. The keyboard is cool, I thought about keeping it around as a controller, but I do almost everything with midi anyway.

Also selling an old Korg Microsampler than I inherited from a friend. If I can sell these I've got my eye on the Yamaha Reface CP, the electric pianos sound really good from everything I've heard and I like the idea of doing crazy midi-controlled arps with them, in addition to having something pleasant to actually practice piano with.

Would love else something as small, affordable, and usable as the Volcas, haven't found the right thing but suggestions would be welcome.

bit bigger than a volca by about 50% and twice the price but i have a model:samples and that's pretty fun to use once you figure out the sample library. or there's the cycles now which is the fm synth counterpart

how much u selling yr microfreak for

Mmmm want to dm me? I'll give you the ilx discount if you're interested. :)

I've got an Electribe 2 Sampler, and I kind of think of it as a Supervolca. The workflow and sequencing is largely similar. It gets a lot of hate from gear nerds, and to be fair there are some annoying limitations, but limitations are good IMO. You can probably find one for relatively cheap used (how I picked up mine).

Notation usually have big Black Friday sales if any of their grooveboxes/ synths look interesting.

Argh I better not

Xpost to Jordan

Goddamn. I have a Peak, and it is currently my favorite synth. RIP Chris, you went out on top

The Peak/Summits are so rad-looking. I've spent enough on gear this year, but maybe in a couple years.

Has anyone messed with the Behringer Pro-1?

Just got one a "B-stock" Pro-1 a few days ago (Alto Music and Pro Audio Star sell Behringers as B-Stock to get lower prices but they're usually unopened IME). It's really good - different kind of bold, easier to make work with other instruments than the Model D. The small knobs on the Behringers might bother me in the dark on a stage, but in normal use they're fine.

New Korg "Altered FM" synth looks pretty sweet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6X4QSP0NpY

would be nice if in future it could have looping envelopes, and the modulation processors off the wavestate - that stuff seemed really cool to me!

I stumbled into a (gold) Korg Monologue, after someone offered it in trade for my microfreak. Haven't tried it yet but I think it might be just the sort of thing I was after!

Not a lot of great synth deals this year but i picked up a 4MS Ensemble Oscillator anyway as it looks really fun.

https://plogue.com/store.html

Plogue's various retro VSTs are 50% off; I'm probably going to pull the trigger on the chipsynth MD

I used to use that one a lot around 2012, it sounds great. I should fire it up again.

Oops I used to use Chipsounds, not Chipsynth my bad

Also 2gether Audio is doing a 'pay what you want' (minimum $10) for everything

Yeah, Chipsynth MD is an emulation of the Sega Megadrive/Genesis FM chip. So far I'm loving it. It sounds great, the UI is very clean, and there's tons of nice presets to start with.

Grabbed cherry audios realistic radio shack moog plugin for free. It’s great.

Nice, I grabbed that too, haven't tried it yet.

Gotta say I'm loving the Monologue so far, more than I ever liked the Microbrute. It seems deep but also very intuitive -- haven't even cracked some of the features yet, but I was able to create some very nice patches in pretty short order. Loooove that there's a noise generator, that makes any sound 1000% better to my ears and I'm sure I will abuse it.

Also I'm very curious what my Reface CP will sound like if I put it through the Monologue's analog filter *devil emoji*