I’ve been meaning to get a bass guitar for ages, just to get that wonderful *twannnnnng* sound. Let’s see where this ends up.
And what is it with these guitar / bass naming conventions? I get it that if you have loads of similar products there has to be something that distinguishes them from each other, but how am I supposed to ever remember exactly what kind of bass or guitar I have?
Got this because I wanted to make a cover of Ultravox’ Mr X, so a violin was needed. Not an easy instrument; I ended up playing the violin parts one to three notes at a time, and then doing some cutting and pasting and creative editing. End result is quite nice though. Did Vienna later as well using the same proven technique.
Would be nice to be a real musician and know how to play this bloody thing.
A decent steel string electro-acoustic guitar. Just don’t ever ask me what guitar I have, as there’s no way I can remember.
A machine drum, I guess you could call it. A responsive drum skin, and the plastic body also acts as user interface. The drum brain inside it generates the sounds depending on how you interact with its surface, and it’s actually quite impressive. I thought I would sit in the sofa drumming away and getting better beats because of it, but no. Out the door it went.
Come to think of it, maybe I should have been the one getting out the door, as it definitely isn’t this one’s fault I suck at making beats.
This thing is something quite extraordinary. Looks like an electric guitar, but contains a bunch of modeled guitars that you can select with a switch. When you play the string, the quitar samples the sound in real time and runs it through the converter, as it were, and the sound that actually comes out of it is that of the selected guitar model. That is quite phenomenal, when you think about it. With the accompanying software you can tweak the sound and the tunings to your liking. You can select from a bunch of classic electric guitars, or say, a banjo or a 12-string guitar. That is so incredibly convenient!
I can’t play this thing, though.
Yeah! Drumming again! This is just what the Octapad should have been. The mechanical noise is about the same as the DTXPress pads, so this is quite drummable even late in the evening, and it’s really compact. 9 pads, plus two trigger inputs. It turned out I could patch my modular synth in such a way that an ordinary switch pedal can function as a (non-dynamic) kick drum pedal. I can also send triggers to it using an analog sequencer, or just about any method to generate analog gate signals, to trigger the drum module. And every time it triggers, it also sends a MIDI note, so I have a nice gate-to-midi converter 🙂
Obie was my only keyboard since I sold the Emax. I had planned to trade the K2600R for a 88-key version, but no-one seemed interested. So I got this one second-hand and pretty cheap. It has rather nice controller abilities, and I have configured the sliders to send the most relevant cc’s to my both my Virus and Pulse for added convenience. I planned to do this for all my synths, but the K2600, which really needs a more immediate interface, is a slight problem, as it does not have a standard set of cc’s for specific parameters, meaning I would have to go through my programs and do a lot of assigning, but I just can’t be bothered. Likewise, I was thinking of standardizing my Modular patches, but that also takes a lot of time. When the NM G2 comes out, it will most likely have a standard way of using cc’s on its factory patches, so I’ll just wait for that one and see what I can and will do. Meanwhile, this is a great keyboard with a good piano touch, and I see no reason to not keep it forever. It weighs a lot, but I don’t gig, so it’s of no concern. It even inspired me to take piano lessons. 30 years too late, but hey…I’ve attended regularly, twice now, one year apart. I’m a bit late from my third lesson…
Of course, selling the Octapad gave rise to a need for something else to kick the hit out of. In early 2002, I scraped together a bunch of old stuff I I didn’t need (CD’s, DVD’s, a PC, and the Akai S2000), sold them, and got the money to buy the DTXpress drum set. I had barely touched a drum set before, so the incentive was more learning than anything else. For that purpose, the set is quite adequate. The rubber pads are a bit noisy (I’ve moved to a house since, so it’s not a real problem this time), and so is the sound module itself. I didn’t really use the sounds, but just the pads to trigger my other synths, mainly the K2600 and the Machinedrum.
Although I think hardware interfaces in general are keepers, I got rid of the set mostly due to the space it occupied in relation to the time spent playing with it. I will most likely get a smaller pad thing to replace it at a later point.
My hands and feet are constantly drumming. My ex-next-desk neighbour at the office constantly used to tell my leg to shut up, as his monitor kept jumping up and down. The logical thing for me to do was to get something that, when drummed, actually would result in something useful. The Octapad is a nice concept, but I didn’t keep this for the simple fact that it was very noisy; drumming it sounded like drumming a plastic bucket, and considering I lived in a block of flats at the time I got this, I just didn’t feel comfortable using it.