ivorytoothpaste

Honestly I love the sound of this little keyboard. I personally own two and would gladly get a third if I found one cheep. Most folks on youtube miss that this thing has quite a few sounds, I dont blame them though they are hard to access. To get to these other sounds you have to hit the "Synthesizer" button and then you can use the buttons on the far left to move up (top button) or down (bottom button) a sound, the ones to the right of them will move up 10 (top) and down 10 (bottom) quite a few of these sounds are in my opinion usable, if kinda cheesy ROMpler sounds. The keyboard responds to volatility but both of the units I own have odd action. Some sounds are also in stereo, although this effects the drum sounds in weird ways. There are also what are basically preset banks of sounds that you can access by hitting the "Synthesizer" and then using the volume buttons to move up and down the banks, these are useful because in those banks the "Synthesizer" button lets you layer two sounds from them. Other then that all the sounds in them are also accessible with the method described before. This thing is plastic-y as hell and creeks and groans when playing, I'm not sure if this is because both of my models were used heavily before. also unfortunately the outputs are either a stereo headphone jack (3.5mm) or 2 RCA jacks both of these are not super useful for my workflow so often I'll add a 1/4th inch output to it.

I found my copy of this game laying on the ground while I was out on a walk. I LOVE this thing! It is vary limiting admittedly only two mono synths and 4 drum sounds and only a 16 step sequencer. Personally I like the limitations, it forces you to get creative, you can make chords by tuning the two oscillators that make up one of the mono synths to different notes (for example, Synth one to root and fifth and Synth 2 to a third and seventh). If you need another synth voice you can load a synth setting into the drum rack, admittedly it wont act the same in there but it will be the same tuning usually just less release. The effects sections it has are nice, you have Stereo Delay, Chorus and Flanger. In the mixing section you can apply these too a few combinations of synth 1, 2 and the drums. Where I think it gets interesting is in the drum editor you can also bake in these effects before the mixer section. the don't work exactly the same, like the delay won't ring out forever but it makes for some interesting effects. The pattern editor and song mode both are pretty easy to use and quite intuitive, however for the type of music I make (ambient/Drone) the BPM is kinda a hindrance it only goes down to about 40 but is usable. This thing is amazing to bring on small trips and just make short little sketches to flesh out later. You could probably do some amazing things multi-tracking a bunch of sessions of these. There are also a few videos on YouTube showing live sets using two or three of these that actually work out quite well!

This is a toy keyboard put out by Radio shack back in the day, I'm not sure if it is a clone or not. Most sounds on this are trashy and the keys are garbage on my unit, vary vary stiff. It has one or two real nice sounds, the String ensemble sound and a few of the vibraphone / E-Piano sounds. Kinda reminiscent of something you would hear in an old SNES game. The drum pads are honestly kinda fun if you get used to unseeing them, the response is nothing to write home about but you can play some decently complex things if you work with the pads limitations. You can change the sounds assigned to each pad by going to percussion mode on the keyboard hitting down the sound you want then holding down one of the drum pads. I was going to use this live with my band for drums once when we couldn't bring a live kit and i did not have anything else, they are trashy but definitely usable. They wouldn't be my first choice if i did not have to but they definitely add something nice to a mix, I still use it frequently. Iv looked online for others and even just finding a picture of it was hard. If you mange to find one i wouldn't pay more then five dollars for one. Personally I got mine for three bucks.

Honestly I love the cheesy sound of this thing, Its got surprisingly nice drums and the chords sound nice. Its not for every style of music, I mostly use the drums as samples so you don't need the unit it self for that. A useful tip is in the tuning mode you can trigger the drum sounds and make a sine-ish drone with the keyboard. Not realistically not useful for much but I love using it for ambient jams. the chords that it makes are cheesy but useful. I also do enjoy running external gear through this, it does not do much but the stereo knob seems to add just a little spread to the signal. The external input and the addition of a headphone AND line output does allow you do some feedback with this that's rather interesting. Obviously not something that it was intended for and is risky to do. The main use for this is as an accompaniment tool. I hardly use it for this, most patterns are too cheesy and I cant figure out how to use the song mode. If you want it for that I'd temper your expectations, It cant sync with anything easily and most patterns are not good. Not something I'd recommend unless you can get it for super cheep, I got mine for 50 second hand and use it enough that I think that was worth it.

Lovely keyboard made relatively famous by Mild High Club with their song Window Pane. It's a Standard Casio Keyboard affair a few preset sounds and drum rhythms, auto chord bass and arpeggio. Its quite a hefty keyboard featuring full sized keys, the action feels quite nice for a "toy" keyboard. The sounds are nothing special, pretty standard for a Casio, but for some reason they just sound extremely good coming out of the speaker or DI, better then most Casios I've tried out. You get 8 note polyphony and 4 note when you are using the auto chord function so thankfully you are not too limited. I quite like the included vibrato and "reverb" which is just a longer sustain with a much different envelope, and usually always have them on. The drums are nice, the kick drum is surprisingly punchy and worthy of being sampled. I'm always a big sucker for the high hat and cymbal sounds on old Casio and Yamaha keyboards, something about the metallic tinged white noise just speaks to me. The only thing I could wish for was a better snare, it is not that snappy and just feels a little loose. The preprogrammed beats are nothing to write home about, but if you had to use them they are not that bad. I really would recommend sampling the drums to use on your own, they are quite nice.

The keys on this thing have a pretty decent feel for a toy keyboard. I love that it has midi in and out, vary useful. The sounds are nice, there are a few "Hidden" sounds you can only access via midi. It claims to have a 210 sound tone bank but honestly that is kinda a lie, its referring to the fact that you can layer sounds. The built in drum beats are nice and usable. Drum sounds are your basic PCM samples I'm pretty sure. Nice and compact and runs off of AA batteries rather then C cells, which is a plus. Just wish it had RCA or 1/4 jack output instead of the headphone port, but that wouldn't be too hard to add.

This is basically a toy piano made by Roland if we are judging it solely on features. 4 sound separate sound selections, an arpeggiator and a simple decay knob. Like with many other analog keyboards you can make it do a few things it was not quite intended to do, you can mix sounds by pushing two of the buttons at the same time. You can also force the arpeggiator to hold down chords by messing with the direction and turning up the speed all the way. I love going to this for idea creation and drones. overall a vary simple but great sounding keyboard.

What can I say? its a Wurlitzer piano, it plays great and sounds great. I got mine for free from my partners grandma, thankfully the thing is surprisingly vary portable and we managed to drive it two hours in a tiny car. The Wurlitzer 145B has a tube preamp inside so supposedly it sounds better, honestly I think it sounds good even when the amp is not even on! I'm unsure if its just the one that I have or all Wurlitzers but the keyboard just feels amazing to play, mines just the smallest amount on the clacky side. The only thing with these is if you get one that has not been worked on you are going to be dealing with nearly sixty years of dust inside. Its not too hard to clean out one of these things but it sure takes a long while. Make sure to have a good mask handy because you never know whats mixed into all that dust!

I own 2 of these and over the years I've bought four of them and I would buy more if I was not broke. Lets start off with the good, two slots for saving samples, eight effects and you can power it off usb. the bad however is that the touch pads for the samples and the drums seem to be prone to failing with high use with no easy way to fix them, 3.5 mm ins and outs and the price is going up on these things. I use these things a ton, I use them in two main ways and effect pedal and a sample mangler. When running signals through them they get a nice low bit mp3 kind of quality with a minor amount low end and highs rolled off, the echo on them is Karaoke like but its super nice, Iv used it on live dubbing a horror movie and it fits right into that genre. The stepped flanger is an interesting sound that i haven't seen anywhere else and the regular flanger can get you into Vaporwave territory quick. The filter is nice for sweeps but there are much better things that you could use for that. The rest of the effects other then the two ill be talking about in the next section are nice but nothing to write home about. For sample mangling you can save up to two long loops in its memory. they sound a little bit better then if you were just running something through it as an effect but its not a huge difference. With the samples you can change the pitch/speed (not independent) and it can get nice and crunchy. The two effects that are the most useful for sample mangling is the stutter and "pitch shift" which is more of a pitch shifting stuttering looper. The pitch shifter is amazing it takes a short bit of what ever is playing into it (external input or the sample or *both* ). and you can pitch it down to diggital mush or reverse it. A thing i love to do is hit the effect on/off button a few times to load the pitch shifters memory with different parts of the sample, making a glitchy wonderful loop. It is just a toy so admittedly a lot of it is limited but for what it is, its amazing. If you see one for cheep and you think it could fit in your work flow buy it.

This was one of my first "real" guitar pedals ever, I got one super cheep off eBay because the paint was beat too hell. I love that its stereo, and it sounds really nice in almost every setting. Its kinda hard to go crazy with this pedal, no over the top swooshy sounds. I used to use it set to a vary slow amount with almost no depth as an always on thing for clean guitar. Its amazing for all sorts of keyboard stuff, I tend to use it with drones, or on an organ to spice things up. Overall I love the sound of this thing, its not really a super stand out effect in a mix but it really adds a little extra something. The downside however is I wish it was also stereo in, and the power jack is really odd. its one of those 3.5 mm jacks and I'm not quite sure what it needs so I mostly use the 9v battery.

This is a lovely effects unit, stereo in and out with great effects. The controls are simple and easy to use, if leaving a little bit of complexity to be desired. The Ineko is a sort of combo of all the ModFX line by Alesis, and honestly I would say that this has its own place. Its definitely simplified but the effects still sound great. I mostly use the reverb and delays along with some of the more unique effects like the bit crusher and band pass filter. All the modulations on here are all great as well. Personally I love using this with a looping pedal to make tape loops changing the effect each time. Overall its a simple but vary useful and nice sounding piece of gear.

Super Lo-Fi and limiting sampler, but it has a lot of charm that just makes you fall in love with it. I originally started searching for one of these when I listened to cLOUDDEAD as a teen, and feel in love with the bit crushed pads they had going on. You admittedly can't do much on these things, the most you can do when editing a sample is using a "mark" button to mark the start and stop points. No individual control of pitch, volume or anything like that, what you record in is mostly what your stuck with. However where this thing shines is the actual sampling part of it, it is already a tinge Lo-Fi on its standard setting but you can go down 3 more lower quality sample rates. Lo-Fi 1 is probly the best middle ground if you want that bit crush sound, I find Lo-FI 2 to have a bit to much volume drop and artifacts. The effects are not that robust but each of them sounds great, the pitch is extremely nice sounding, super fluid and just works. It's not like the SP-404's pitch where it re-pitches how a guitar pedal would, and I'm glad it is not like that. The filters are quite nice, and when using them on a live input add a slight crackle that is really nice if you like that texture. I'm not quite sure how they implemented the delay on this unit but it sounds kinda odd, and it doesn't seem to ring out after the sound plays unless you are holding the pad down. You can mess with the knob as you are playing a sample to get all sorts of beautiful digital glitches, and for that reason it's probably the effect I use the most other then pitch. The time stretch and ring mod are okay, and I personally don't use them that much, but when I need them I'm glad to have them. The major downside to this is that you can only store 8 sounds with out the smart media card, which at this point are about as hard to find and expensive as the sampler it self. And with those 8 sounds you don't get much overall sample time. I think it's this reason why you will see a lot of people say you cant make a full track on one of these, and personally i disagree. You can get a long way by just playing a sample loop and a drum break with this thing, and if you started multi-tracking or other stuff you could get extremely far, but because its an SP, people expect it to have that work flow. However there is nothing wrong if you just want to use this thing as something to color your samples and then work with them on a more capable sampler, it really has a lot of character in it. Don't buy this thing thinking it's going to be an SP-404. But I can't imagine a time where I would want to get rid of this thing, it does what it does in a way I love. These things are going up in price however, and honestly if it goes above 200$ I would stay away, its just to simple of a device to pay that much money for. I will warn that if you are not careful with your gain staging you will get a nasty high pitch whine of sorts, you need to record into this thing a bit hot. I've heard that this can also be helped if you use batteries but I've had a lot of success just recording a bit louder into it so I've never tried that.

Now I'll say right off the bat I'm not super duper into guitar so take every thing I say with a grain of salt, or perhaps one of those salt lamps. I found mine in a good will for 10 dollars, it was quite dirty, missing the whammy bar and half off, and I needed a guitar so I got it. When I got home I washed the thing like it was a lost puppy, replaced the whammy bar and gave it some new knobs, and it was in good condition. When I found it the guitar only had the first 4 strings, and I haven't replaced them yet in the 3 or so years I've had it. Personally I've always wanted a 4 string guitar, and just have never had enough money for an electric Tenor guitar, so I enjoy keeping this as it is. I'm not sure why, but the action and playing feel on this guitar is just perfect for me. It just feel so good to play, and I feel like I could play it for hours. Honestly it could just be because i have played it for so many years now. Some times it is not about how good your gear is, just how familiar you are with it. I don't think this guitar is amazing on an objective level, but on the same hand i think its probably perfect for me. I doubt any one else would have the same experience I do when i play this thing, but man do I love it. The sound is okay, the pickup is not anything special I don't think, it doesn't impart much character I can say that. I feel like I could keep this guitar for the rest of my life and be happy, I originally gave this thing either a 2 or 3 star rating when i first got it, but obviously that's changed. I won't give this thing a 5 though because I honestly think, that what ever I like about this guitar is not "objective" I'm sure you can find much better guitars even in the beginner category.

I got this as a gift from some one for Christmas, probably because i like my other First Act guitar so much. When I got it the poor thing needed a lot of work, it was scratched up quite a bit and disgustingly dirty, I didn't mind however because half the fun of getting new gear is cleaning it. I usually keep it strung up in Nashville tuning, and I think that anything to like about the sound comes from that. I might need to bring mine to a luthier because the high E is really close to the edge of the neck and if you play a little to loose you can accidentally slide it off the side and make a horrible sound. I'm not sure if I will ever love this guitar as much as my other First Act guitar, but honestly it is not horrible. I quite love the body shape but if you have thicker thighs like me the pointy horn can dig in a little bit.

I have two of these, an old one a friend gave to me that I later modified and one I bought after my friend lent me the first. Honestly it's a strange mini amp, the tone knob doesn't work how you would think. If you turn it clockwise it rolls of the lows and anti clockwise it rolls off the highs. The distortion is an amazing plasticy sounding one, it's hard to dial in any thing other than full crunchy. I got this originally because I was obsessed with gross plasticy sounding amps, and for that purpose it's perfect. Additionally it's so small that it's nice to take out in the field for experiments. With the distortion off it doesn't color the sound all that much so it's nice for contact mic stuff. On both of the units iv had the headphone jack has never worked properly unfortunately because I'd love to use this as a pedal. Overall amazing for what I got it for even if that reason was extremely nieche. You probably won't be buying one of these for nice sounds.

Look I love FL Studio, this isn't a negative review, I've used FL for years now and can do everything I need to do and I can do it quick. But on the same hand, the learning curve is brutal, and I feel like the way the FL studio works just isn't intuitive, and doesn't translate to other DAWs. I feel like I am almost stockholmed into useing FL studio at this point, but I don't know if I would want it any other way. I love FL and can do every thing I want to do. The piano roll is probably the best you can get and I love it, time line works great, once you know how to do everything to feels like butter to use. The inbuilt effects and synths are great but maybe not on the level of Ableton. I even ended up putting together radio shows and what not in here in addition to music, and it works great, even if its a bit of an overkill for that application. The demo version is great and you can get pretty damn far with just that. At first glance not being able to save a project can be a down side, but as a kid before I could afford the full version I would just leave my laptop on with FL running. It probably wasn't great for the laptop and if it crashed or turned off it was devastating, but it really made me make decisions and stick to things to get stuff done, there wasn't much room to waffle around on an idea. I'm glad I stuck with it, and I don't think I would want it any other way, but I'm not sure if I would ever recommend it.

Okay I wasn't expecting when I found this program. When I dug into it, I was surprised to find out that it was a live coding investment from 2012ish. Now I'm not the greatest programmer in the world, the most I did was make admittedly involved TI-BASIC programs when I was a teen, so I was worried I was going to be unable to do much in this. However a big selling point for this programing language is that the programs are compact, and by that I mean very compact. The most simple program is an empty program, and some of the other are "qs" , "+/" or "**" you can go really far with very little here. Thing is, if you know how to use this programing language you can get some hard core stuff done, "vArs1ldv*vv*0!1-1!0dFX4X1)Lv*vv*-vv2**0@+x1@+4X1)Lv*vv*+4x->?Lpp0:ppRpRE.5*;" This program zooms in to the mandelbrot set. Do I know how this works? No not at all, I haven't got a clue how it works honestly. But at the same time having a little bit of knowledge I am able to get some very interesting visuals and audio, and I'm happy with that. What I'm saying is, I think even with no programing skills you can still get interesting samples for musical use. You honestly could probably nearly key-smash a program, and still get something usable for music. Or you could record the visuals, for your music videos or other stuff. Its a super flexible thing, and gives at least 10 fold of what you put in. If you are into noisey or droney music, this thing is a god send, you just need to massage the samples some times. And if you want to get into live coding this is going to get you into that much faster then, say TidalCycles or Sonic Pi. BUT the problem is, those things make songs and so far I have not seen, anyone make a "song" with IBNIZ, if that makes sense. Great for visuals, great for making samples, horrible for structure from what I see.

I'm surprised that this thing has mechanically controlled faders I didn't know that that was a thing in 1987. I can't attest to the quality of this as a mixer, in fact there is quite a bit of noise on my unit. I think however the inbuilt effects are quite nice, so if you have an extremely large amount of space it makes a good multi effects unit.

My first mixer I ever got, and originally I used it for doing stuff with my band in high school, however I don't use it for that much anymore. Its nice and portable, super easy to use and doesn't color the sound too much so it is nice to use for your regular old mixing. Nothing to write home about, simple EQ section, 2 AUX sends, Pan, your regular stuff. I mostly use it for no input mixing, its pretty easy to get some nice chaotic tones, some wild bursts of noise and the standard fair. But I quite like it for these low, beating sounds, its quite minimal but I just love something about it. I feel like its great for that kinda stuff, it just seems like there is so much more tweakable then a lot of the other sounds you can get out of it. There is quite a world of sound in this thing when you are really careful when messing around in that area.

I found one of these at a thrift store and bought it for like three dollars and had to do minor repairs on it. Honestly I dislike that its a departure from the usual form factor of Dictaphones but it more than makes up for that in quality. It has three different speed controls and the mic on it sounds really nice (i guess that's why its so big) with three different gain settings. There is a way to mess with it and have the Mic come out the headphone output, nice for some flavor or just to have a tiny mic. The tape player is not too fussy and i can get it to play mini-cassette tape loops with ease! lovely unit for slowing down tapes or recording loops, or even recording stuff out in the field. I was able to get surprisingly hi fidelity recordings of birds with this thing. Can't recommend this one enough!! buy it if you see it.

I use this all the time, easy to use and simple. Its a fairly bog standard Piezo pickup I use a little bit of poster tack to keep it on stuff, I love putting it on stuff out in the field for interesting sounds. It also works great on instruments too.