What's your favorite toy/tool/bit of kit?

jkn · Joined: Mar 14, 2004 Posts: 469 Location: La Porte, IN, USA

What's the one thing in your studio/gear that always seems to be fun to toss into the mix? That item you know really well and is always fun to work with?

Not necessarily your workhorse item - something that you use all the time, but is just "there" - more of that item that's always fun to pull out and use.

Anyway - mine is a Korg SDD-1200 dual delay. I bought it when it came out back in '87. It's absolutely amazing at controlled feedback - route one delay into the other - and route the fx send back into a channel on the mixer and push that back into the fx loop... Smile

When I picked up a Lexicon Vortex I was surprised at how many of the effects felt like the feedback type sounds I was getting from the 1200. Not quite the same - they're quite a bit different - but there was a simularity to how I was doing the feedback stuff.

Anyway - that's the thing that appears in a ton of my music - and something I rely on quite a bit. It's a bit on the noisy side - and produces a nice heartbeat pumping noise when left up and nothing is going through it.

There used to be some great shots of one on the internet - but that site went down. Anyway - here's a few shots of mine - nothing thrilling about these shots...

distant: http://www.johei.com/gallery/random2003/DSC02314
right side: http://www.johei.com/gallery/random2003/DSC02317
left side: http://www.johei.com/gallery/random2003/DSC02318

mosc · Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2004 10:58 am Post subject:

The pics of the equipment aren't too exciting, but I got lost in some of the other photographs. Wow, you are a good photographer. I'm a photo buff myself and I must say, you have a great eye. (Lot's of skill too.)

Posted Image

Back OT. This is a great topic.

For the last year, I've avoided anything but the simplist setup. My gear is usually just the NM Classic, but I have found that I'm almost always running my final signal through a network of voltage controlled comb filters. These are NM modules. I set them up differently for the left and right channels and get spectacular stereo effects based on the frequency spectrum of the input signals. Some times I sweep them slowly with a LFO, but mostly the just sit there.

jkn · Joined: Mar 14, 2004 Posts: 469 Location: La Porte, IN, USA

Hey - thanks. I get a kick out of taking photos - especially macros. The "good" photos are scattered around the site - I really should throw together a sort of highlight gallery or something. I'll pop a topic up with a couple of others I'm happy with. I'd love to see your photos if you have any up.

John

mosc · Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 6:41 am Post subject:

I don't have a polished presentation. Most of my pics are not uploaded to the server. There were a lot there but a crash in June 2003 wiped out a lot of my pictures. Anyway, here is a link: http://mosc.com/Slides you can check out. Most are family photos. There are some pics of EM shows. Maybe the best "artsy" pics are in the Flower Show folder. This isn't to good but in the spirit of sharing I post this.

mosc · Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2004 6:54 am Post subject:

OH, forgot. Check out the Sept-2003-trip photos. Most are just vacation snaps, but there are some great pics from Norway, including some of pictures of the elusive Elektro80 himself.

jkn · Joined: Mar 14, 2004 Posts: 469 Location: La Porte, IN, USA

Some very nice flower shots. I loved the "receiving the adoration of the fans" shot here:

http://mosc.com/Slides/Sept-2003-trip/Trondhiem/slides/102_0261.html

Smile

mosc · Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2004 9:48 pm Post subject:

No, no.

I was talking before the performance and describing what modular synths were. I was gesturing how big they were.

elektro80 · Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 4:06 am Post subject:

Favorite gear?
I am mostly using virtual gear these days.. and the analog toys are more a source of frustration rather than a source of inspiration.
If I can tweak the question a bit.. then I could say that the main inspiration these days gearwise is learning to adapt old analog workflows into something workable on the gear I have now. When i set up a patch or a signal routing the way I would have done years ago.. I suddenly find new possibilities etc etc and better ways to handle playable parameters.

jkn · Joined: Mar 14, 2004 Posts: 469 Location: La Porte, IN, USA

Tweaking the question is perfect... I meant to make sure computer related items were in there (how many people don't use a computer at all anymore? It's getting smaller and smaller).

I couldn't touch the plugins I have for effects in hardware units... I haven't pulled a physical drum machine out in a long time once discovering Fruity - infinitely more powerful and set up the way I like to work with drums. (Rebirth sounds great - but I grew up more with Korg/Yamaha and loved the Roland R8 - and none of those really resemble any of the 808/909/303 programming... I still use Rebirth now and then, but Fruity also has midi... Anyway!)

A good friend of mine just sold off all of his hardware for Reaktor... literally everything once he found that he could do all the processing and routing he wanted without ever plugging in anything. A few other friends have pulled Reaktor into their mix of hardware and software.

As I'm still on my 1999 era P3 500 mhz blazing fast computer... Doing much more in the pc beyond what I'm doing now is impossible. Right now I can run Fruity out to my mixer and hardware effects and route it back in and record into a track in Sonic Foundry Vegas. But both of those apps running at once pretty much drains the pc. Due to going all SCSI when I built the pc - I can record in 8 inputs simultaneously to separate tracks without a hiccup. So - it's old - but it holds it's own for raw recording. Great for jamming live situations. But - in a few years I'll have a laptop with Reaktor or something similar.

Smile

seraph · Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 6:39 am Post subject:

elektro80 · Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 7:09 am Post subject:

Well, the new virtual instruments allow me to program synths and whatever in the same way as way back. In that sense this is about a new level of abstraction. I would say it is far easier to do what i want now than like 20 years ago. A modern DAW is just a "better" tape recorder. Composing music is often nonlinear.. and nonlinear editing is a reallly smart feature. Of course... nonlinear is not the way music is percieved.. but I guess you understand what I mean. Very Happy

jkn · Joined: Mar 14, 2004 Posts: 469 Location: La Porte, IN, USA

Yep - completely makes sense. My purpose for getting the computer originally was to replace tape - and I'd always done a tone of changes to individual tracks on mixdown - live on the fly - ha - basically yet another "performance" of a piece. Going to computer allowed me to go in and fine tune all the panning and volume - how much of an effect was going on in different spots. Getting much more precise. It's completely amazing to me even after so many years since I switched (partially in '96, totally in '99)

Yes - writing non-linear/listening linear makes sense to me.

themoors · Joined: Dec 15, 2003 Posts: 148 Location: northern england

there will always be a place in my heart and my mix for this Posted Image

the ohmboyz delay...

paul e. · Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 9:25 am Post subject:

YEAH ,,that delay is amazing

too bad it can;t be automated under VST2.0