Category Retired Gear

In category Retired Gear on  February 6, 2011  No comments

In category Retired Gear on  September 9, 2010  No comments

The other day I was thinking about this old stomper I had years ago. The Roland Phase II. I sold it because it made a bit of noise but man, what a sound. Deep sweeping phases.

One thing I remembered about it was the power up phase. On particular settings, when you kicked it in gear, it made a super deep “FFFFsssswwwewwewer” sound. Pretty cool.

It was built like a tank. It was from the 70’s (if I recall) but looked like the 40’s.

In category Retired Gear on  July 19, 2010  No comments

What a wacky box this was. It was intended to track the audio from a guitar, guess the note, and play the same note from its internal tone generator. Yeah, right. Most of the time it just tracked up and down the scale looking for the note. This unit did have some cool filters but not cool enough to bother keeping it around the studio. Interesting thing about stuff like this. You buy it for $35-40 dollars at a second-hand store, sit on it for years, sell it for hundreds on Ebay. Had I known back then, I would have bought a boxload of them. But, you know what they say about hindsight? You only see the seat of your underpants (or something like that).

In category Retired Gear on  July 19, 2010  No comments

Cute toy for a few days of fun. After the romance was over it collected dust for a few months. I think I gave mine away. I honestly don’t remember what happened to it.

In category Retired Gear on  July 19, 2010  3 comments

Coupled with Edit Tracs Gold, this was a sweet machine for sequencing. Of course this got pushed out for newer, faster computers. For those of you STILL working on the Atari (I know you’re out there), time to upgrade. It WAS cool, now it’s just sad.

In category Retired Gear on  July 19, 2010  No comments

I always wanted one of these. I ended up with a S-330, then a S-550. By the time I found and bought a S-50 I wasn’t really using the other S-series very much (The only reason I think I bought it was because I had wanted one for so long). I was tired of the boot and load times and the inability to edit sounds on the computer and transfer to the sampler. Playing samples and setting up patches was fairly easy using the attached monitor, but recording and editing samples was crappy at best. That said, it was a damn cool machine in the day.

In category Retired Gear on  July 19, 2010  No comments

I really liked the sound of this little synth. It had the organ sounds of the Saturn 9 and the same string sounds as a Jupiter.

Neat little guy but it gathered dust due to MIDIfication.

In category Retired Gear on  July 19, 2010  No comments

I was thrilled to find this synth in good shape. I had always wanted one. I bought it, played with it, and thought it was the bee’s knees. Then it sat and I never touched it. Yeah, it is a classic beast but honestly I think the sounds are only average. The fidelity was sort of eeeeghh. It didn’t sparkle.

At the end of the day I’m happy with the software version of the Jupiter 8. It doesn’t have the same hardware filters but it programs the same and no one can tell in a mix. So, I sold the Jupiter 6 (well over the price I got it for) and reinvested the money back into the studio.

In category Retired Gear on  July 19, 2010  No comments

Chuckles. Funny little thing that. I honestly don’t remember what happened to this machine. Perhaps I still have it in a box some place?

In category Retired Gear on  July 19, 2010  One comment

I had this for about a year and used it on the Tic Tok Men Remote Control album. I didn’t like this synth much. I think I was more about analogue synths at the time.