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Hello from New Zealand!
Hi Everyone
I've just created my Equipboard profile, and enjoying browsing around different artist profiles, and the forums.
I mostly use soft synths with Propellerhead Reason, but also use Roland JX-8P, DSI Mopho X4, and the Roland Boutique JP-08 & JU-06 synths.
A couple of example tracks if anyone is interested in retro synthwave/synthpop :) Solo: https://soundcloud.com/raymondhayter/vicious-cycle Pacific Deep (my collab with an Artist from San Fran): https://soundcloud.com/raymondhayter/tell-it-like-it-is-by-pacific-deep
cheers! Raymond
Thanks Jim!
Yes the Mopho is pricey. When I bought it in NZ it was $2400. You have a lot of choices on gear for that sort of outlay. Is it worth it? It's a tough call. I think yes, but you have to spend a lot of time with it. It has a very, very nice keyboard action and it has a lot of modulation options. It is a very deep synth. And the sound is very fat, forward, present and aggressive. I find it difficult to emulate some of the old Prophet sounds I had hoped it could reproduce but the more I program the synth the more I'm realising it just takes effort. 4 voices is definitely a limitation and for this money there are plenty of 8 voice instruments available, but each of the 4 voices are massive! In fact, the funny thing is that it is so impressive, it makes mixing very difficult because you have to be fairly brutal with EQ to make it fit into a mix (in my experience so far).
The Roland Boutique Units - they are absolute GEMs. I was excited when they were announced, and I am thrilled to have them. The main weakness: 4 voice polyphony limit - and polychaining multiple units is far from perfect as there are limitations with that. Also the controls are small - so it is more difficult for fine tuning than I expect the full sized units would be. And the main advantage -- they sound absolutely amazing. At high registers you can hear a bit of digital aliasing but other than that they are fantastic emulations of the original instruments. The JU-06 in particular is a great Juno 106 emulation. For the JP-08, I struggle to get anything musical out of cross-modulation and I read somewhere that the JP-08 cross modulation doesn't behave exactly like the original Jupiter 8, but otherwise very happy with the synth. My old JX-8P still has a lushness that all the other synths don't have (including the Mopho), but I think that based on the gear I've got, the debate around whether a digital unit can sound "analog" is increasingly difficult to argue.
Hi Jim
If you're interested in the Mopho sound, all the synths on this song are the Mopho X4, except the drums. The FX (chorus, reverb, delays, EQ etc) are done using Propellerhead Reason. Vocals are my friend Carl Grace.
https://soundcloud.com/raymondhayter/rebellion-suits-you-by-pacific-deep
I'd be keen to hear you remix one of my tracks! I had a listen to your SoundCloud and you have a really wide variety of music there. Do any of these solo tracks appeal to you for a remix?:
https://soundcloud.com/raymondhayter/vicious-cycle
https://soundcloud.com/raymondhayter/the-silver-fern
https://soundcloud.com/raymondhayter/peel-the-layers
https://soundcloud.com/raymondhayter/surfing-the-solar-wind
If you like any one of these, I'll get the stems ready :)
cheers, Raymond
Sounds good!
The synthesized vocals were extremely tedious! 50% of producing the whole arrangement was just in the vocals. They were originally created word by word in FL Studio, then chopped, edited and put into the Propellerhead Reason project. The synths are AudioRealism's ReDominator - a software clone of the Roland Alpha Juno.
I'll PM you on Soundcloud once I have the stems organised. May be a few days as busy with work at the moment.
Sorry to hear that Jim - my condolences.
Nice one Jim! Sounds like you are taking a very creative approach! I am glad you're having fun with it and look forward to hearing what you come up with!
I used to use FL studio but find the Reason workflow suits me better. Every now and then I fire up FL Studio again, but it has advanced a lot from version to version and now I don't remember how to drive it! BTW I created the robot vocals in this song with FL Studio (then exported them to Reason.
Sounds great Jim - a true re-imagination of my original song!
Oh well hopefully you'll get another chance sometime! We're still here :)