pkennethk's forum posts 2051

To give you an update, we're probably 3-4 days away at this point from rolling out your new Equipboard profiles. One of the biggest changes will be that you are free to make whatever sections or lists you want (don't worry we'll carry over what everyone has currently so you have a base to start from).

We'll call this upcoming revamp version 1, but be aware that this will not yet include an overhaul of the gear photos. Redoing gear photos requires some special attention, so we'll call that version 2 and it'll be released a little bit after.

Looking forward to hearing what you all think once it's out!

The update is much appreciated, thank you! We're all looking forward to seeing the next round of changes. Godspeed to all Engineers and Designers involved.

Logged in to suggest option for user to make gear/studio photos more prominent*. Happy to see @Gchiaren already suggested. Big +1 to that. Maybe I'd actually add some if you could get more mileage out of 'em ;)

*However, if the photos were prominently titled with the word "Porn", IDK... I probably wouldn't want that to be first thing ppl see. Maybe this is just me.

I don't think the 4ops share the dx7 keybed

That's a bummer. I was always interested in the DX11 because I was a big TX81z guy and, the DX11 was the closest thing to a TX81z with keys... plus u-ziq's Lunatic Harness album was the record that got me to finally take MIDI seriously, and I think Mike P. used a DX11, D50 and EMU ESI sampler on most every track on that album... fun stuff.

I was assuming paint job but maybe he shoud buy a crazy colored keybed....

I've never played a DX11, but I know the Mk1 keybed on DX7 has a unique clicky feel... it would be a shame to mess up something like that.

How extensive of a redesign are we talking about here? Is this a new paint job and exterior graphics, or did you change the functionality of the device? Maybe you re-wrote the firmware and shortened the DX-11's key-bed to 37 keys?

Fixed! Thank you!

Proposal: move all pro attributions for various versions and editions of Live to a single "Ableton Live" entry.

I've attributed Ableton Live to dozens of artists, and not one has ever specified what version they are on.

Given Ableton has only changed incrementally over 20 years (at least visually), and doesn't have the same I'm-committed-to-this-10-year-old-version-so-obviously-I'm-a-wizard thing that ProTools and Logic have... would it make more sense to just have a single product entry for "Ableton Live" for attributing to artists and leave it at that?

Update: ok. lol... maybe I'll poke this one again in a few years. :)

I haven't been able to read my notifications on the site itself at all in 2020. I get the red indicator that I have a new notification, but My Profile > Notifications always leads to a 500 error page.

Is this everyone, or just me?

I'm glad to hear it was a relatively quick fix. Thanks!

Issue: occasionally, an item in an artist's equipboard will link to the wrong artist when "Learn More" is clicked.

Examples:

Aphrodite's Akai S3000 now links to Moby's S3000

Ron Boots' Clavia Nord Lead 2 links to John Friscante's Nord Lead 2

Peggy Gou's Jupiter 6 now links to Deadmau5's

Is anyone else seeing this?

So this little box of sliders was driving me nuts... saw it in a few different setups of people putting out great records right now (Cinthie, Patricia)... but I couldn't ID it... Finally, a link here on EB to a Nils Frahm article gave me a photo clear enough to lead me to it:

The Pearl SY-1 Syncussion

Anyone have experience with these old things? Are they really worth the gear-shelf space these artists are giving them? I'm a bit incredulous, but the evidence gathering here on EB is intriguing.

Update 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__7HyZkuKHg

OK, it sounds cool... but the only one on Reverb right now is going for $2k... seriously?!?

Update 2:

...and there's a clone that looks nearly identical... the plot thickens!

https://www.psycox.co.uk/product-page/syncussion-sy-1m-kit

Update 3:

..orrrrr the SY-1 clone kit from Human Comparator:

https://reverb.com/item/10525464-the-human-comparator-syncussion-sy-1

No sweat and no rush. thanks for confirming!

The submission page for Raymond Scott's Electronium is erroring out. When I click on Mr. Scott's picture in the link below, I get the (very cool looking) 500 Error page.

https://equipboard.com/items/electronium

I'm not getting this anywhere else on the site, just this one entry with this one artist. Note: I got the same error when I hit "submit" to create this entry a little while ago.

that's unapologetically digital alright... but thick & fizzy, instead of whispy and fizzy (as if that means anything, sorry for the lame adjectives).

The Vangelis-y pitch envelope starting at 1:13 is a nice touch.

Glad you're digging it! Post up a demo of some of the sounds you're loving if you get a chance (no pressure).

Was planning to tonight! Been jamming on it all day

looking forward to it.

lowballed, buyer accepted, paid for it... I at lasr own a juno!

Congrats at long last!

I know the finest DCOs Roland ever shipped will treat you well.

:party: :synth: :party:

no itnernal memory in a 60, no patch storage ;-) but I also got offered another one today, same money, also near mint cosmetics but well maintained other than a recently broken pitch wheell/stick thingie, just tried to bring him down because of the effort of isntalling a new one... so $100 for my effort and 25 less for the part.... we'll see. I feel more confident about this one.

Ha! forgot you're looking at 6 not 60. This latest one sounds much more promising.

anyway, remember I wasn't enthused about the modal argon8? take it back.... I get it now, read the manual over and over between experiments and I own it. Its a monster and makes anything from bread and butter analogish and later 80s digital sounds to huge otehrworldly soundscapes thata re the stuff of plugins but so much ebtter sounding, so much better.... weird fitlers and things and the bass.... I have a gentle high pass on the output in the glonal menu and out into a hardware limiter to avoid blowing my woofers on fucking 200 watt rms 3 ways right now.... the strange thigns this can do. oh man

buy an argon8.... whooooaWOW!

Glad you're digging it! Post up a demo of some of the sounds you're loving if you get a chance (no pressure).

man, this one closet classic juno, dude came down to $1500, so torn on it because its mint in appearance but not well tested.... and its full of dust apparently and the seller isn't making any effort to clean it up internally. Externally its cherry though.... tested and guaranteed to be basically functioning with no bad keys,but no other promises and it'll be a bitch to return the thing... decisions decisions.

I'm guessing the sliders have developed the internal corrosion/gum-up of death like the neglected 60 I got, plus you can pretty much assume the memory chip and the internal battery need to be replaced. Once you budget in $200-$225 for parts + hundreds in tech labor, plus a recalibration back to factory tolerances (which mine still needs).... $2000-$2200 for a pro-serviced and guaranteed example doesn't seem so bad.

I am a guitarist as well as a synthesist and yeah, I resemble that remark. I'm the reenactor with the actual 19th century springfield musket.

I started with electric guitar in the early 90s, i've been there. Give me a nice thin nitro finish over glossy new poly anyday.

s... but what's next? When are they going to do something really innovative and make it a real isntrument I can hold in my hand?

Is innovation what a majority of the synth market in 2020 wants? These companies are still businesses, making something brand new is a much bigger risk than repackaging familiar concepts into the latest/trendiest form factors. Look at the guitar market; how many guitarists in 2020 are essentially the musical equivalent of a Civil War reenactment enthusiasts?✗✗ ... The synth market isn't quite THAT obsessed with the past, yet, but it's ultimately going to end up as obsessed with products of the 70s and 80s as the guitar world is with products of the 50s and 60s.

I'm all for innovation, but we don't have to wait for manufacturers to take a huge risk and serve that up for us. There are still endless ways to use what's already out there in new ways.

✗✗*A friend of a friend came up with that Civil War Reenactment analogy, not me... but I love it.

they haven't improved on music a whole lot since the heady days of techno and EBM and stuff. And only SOME gear has been improved,

Re: only some gear improving: I'd have killed for something like Ableton Live 10, FL Studio, any of the affordable Roland ARIA gear, Korg, Arturia, or Dave Smith analog gear, etc back when I started trying to make electronic music as a broke teen in the 90s. The gear market for making electronic music with software or hardware in the the 2020s had never been better. I'd agree that most offerings don't sound any better than what was available in the 80s (Serum and other forward-looking offerings notwithstanding), but it's all a hell of a lot more accessible/affordable, and that's important.

Re: the music itself. as we all know, most gear of the 70s, 80s, and 90s wasn't designed for creating genre-specific electronic music... and things like the 808, 909, and 303 weren't designed for making what we'd call electronic music at all, but for musicians to record rock and pop demos to 4-track without a drummer or bass player. Making dance music in the 80s and 90s meant taking a bunch of secondhand gear with extreme technical limitations and subverting thier limitations and intended usage to some degree to make something new and oftentimes transgressive.

Lifting those limitations, and flooding the market with gear and VSTs designed to make genre-specific music didn't necessarily result in an amazing new world of shocking, mind-blowing tracks... but it didn't totally ruin things eitehr... music is still marching forward... great music and awful music seems to get produced at about the same clip regardless what changes happen in the world at large.

The greatest time to be alive and making the greatest music ever is always right now.

HA! the Tannoys are from the same era, those are 90s k1 PBMs, not the 00's mk2s MA8s can't be improved, the better edirol version sounds too good, the 90s ones are whats (up), if you make it sound good on them they sound good on ANYTHING

Passive studio monitors not improving much since the 90s makes a lot of sense, and that's been my (limited) experience too, be it old Tannoys or even something like old Alesis Monitor Ones... shocked at how good those still sounded recently powered by one of those old Samson amps... but you couldn't get a sweet pair of 5 or 6" self-powered JBLs or Yamahas for $400 shipped in the 90s... the self-powered market is where all the growth has come, and I love it.

Re: MA-8s being the NS-10s of 90s self-powered computer monitors... that is awesome. I'm impressed they still work, and that you're still using them.

https://postimg.cc/fSD2JTYK

1st wave

Some long time gear

drool!

Those Roland MA-8s take me back. The late 90s/early 00s... you were there Jim... making it happen... this is proof.

I'm cool with 6.5 to 7 inch, ns10 and pbm 6.5 man but I also have a 4 sytem setup with 3 way yamahas, 10" woofers, 4 inch mids, no porting on a good amp :-) I dislike subs

Nice! I'm for any solution that lets you get down low enough without a sub, but only for simplicity's sake, that's not job-earned wisdom.

I'm using a sub in my current setup, because I just wasn't hearing or feeling the last 20-30Hz of my 808's kick decay after I switched to my latest set of 6.5" monitors, and that freaked me out... but for the most part, I keep the sub bypassed via footswitch because I'm in an untreated apartment and a sub likely just adds to the chaoss and deception.

Dang.

Your (very good) taste and priorities remind me of a friend/colleague who was a guitarist in bands in the 90s/00s, before moving into MI industry... in other words, these are the priorities of someone that has (unlike me) spent real time being productive in real studios. Seems you've distributed funds evenly across all parts of your chain, commendable... what a feast for the ears this is gonna be. :)

Is all this (minus the octapre) already up and running/integrated?

Also, do you feel like you'll eventually need a sub for the new 6" JBLs (yay, I always really like Harman's JBL offerings), or are they covering enough of the sub bass range as-is?

Glad to hear you're staying financially buoyant in these rough waters.

And, suprisingly, there are a ton of wood & graphite pencils on Reverb right now. :D

https://reverb.com/marketplace?query=pencil

I generally tend to agree, but every now and then I find an exception.

For example, I almost deleted this when I saw someone added a pencil. But then, I saw this really interesting video of how Tom Morello uses it and thought it is absolutely in the spirit of Equipboard. https://equipboard.com/pros/tom-morello/pencil

Turns out it's kinda difficult to come up with a hard rule or guideline for what's appropriate on Equipboard.

I find that the pre-2002 Dixon Ticonderogas, the ones from the old Ohio factory, have a warmer tone. The newer No. 2s tend to have more presence, but they're a little sterile.

(but in all seriousness, that pencil is a cool example of a leftfield addition that adds fun & value. Oftentimes, the most valuable thing I get from an artist's Equipboard entry are all the obscure source articles and videos that this site helps aggregate)

Docterine of Applicability:

If it's not sold on Reverb, ever, think twice before adding it here.

Its a tough one and as I redo my home studio this month bit by bit space will also play an issue. I'm in a terrible space crunch as my museum grows nonstop.

I remember you mentioning elsewhere that you've put some new $$ into your home studio lately. When/where are we gonna get a rundown of the changes you're making?

As much as I love the proph2k it might go out, it needs a USB drive, floppies are awful.... load time is ridonculous.... with stock waveforms its like a stiff proph600 and I have one.... Its more of a wave memory synth that you customize the waveforms at a whopping 16 bits LOL! I might sell it. I'm seriously debating the prophet X for ahrdware sampling. Go modern. Although I fear I won't be able tog et those amazing timestretch sounds from low sample rates on longer samples. Filter probably sounds the same though.

My ultimate keep/evict decision comes down to how much joy I get from using that instrument and whether or not I look forward to playing with it in the future. For example, TAL Bassline sounds 99% as good as my real 101s, but everytime I pull one of them out of a drawer to mess with, I have a good time, and I fall in love with a dumb hunk of plastic all over again... so it stays. My PCM-70, on the other hand... I keep forgetting I have one... the most joy it's brought me has really just been in having it there as a reference point to compare other algo reverbs to... so I'm kinda just procrastinating on putting it on Reverb.

Jim, does the prophet2k bring joy and strength to this relationship, or is it one more dependent to tend to?

you may be right, my experience with them is nil, I just know someone who has one that's seldom if ever turned on LOL

Yes it's a lovely rack-gap filler for me at this point... and sadly not much more till I find that mouse and reclaim my borrowed RCA to USB adaptor. I plan to use it for adding some late-80s smear to a few samples here and there, then decide if it's enough fun to keep for any longer.

I could be mistaken, but I thought the S-550 light pen accessory only worked on a digitizer tablet, and not directly on the monitor itself like the Fairlight... and as such, there wouldn't be anything you could do with the pen and tablet that you couldn't also also be able to do with a with a compatible mouse.

I've yet to source a mouse for my S-550... it's sadly been gathering dust for too long.

I don't think submitting gear to Equipboard brings any points, just like editing/revising submissions.

I thought the approval of it was what brought the points. There was a breakdown between the keyboard and the user in how the system worked. That was entirely this side.

You get +5 for each artist gear spotting imediately, but getting an additional +1 points after you've recieved your first 1 or 2 "correct" comments for each submission would be cool... it would also incentivize ppl to post with care and detail.

I'd definitely review more submisssions if I knew it was helping other users get points... even if it meant no extra points for me.

thanks for your sympathy, its been so long now...

I'm relived to hear this isn't a fresh wound on your soul, Jim. Congrats on being the much more together one that was clearly going to win the custody suit.

I just got distracted, modal is sending me and argon8m to keep! sound design time! HAHAHAHA but maybe its a good time to scoop this when I'm rolling in loot from spending on nothing but bills

Nothing beats free new synth. That's awesome! Maybe it's a sign to just hunker down and learn the Argon8m for awhile? Maybe this Juno 6 is cursed? (probalby not).. but free synth... damn. Enjoy that!

Did you beta test for Modal? You have dirt on them? What happened there?

austin guy? do you happen to know Donal Mohr, Get Off My Lawn Record, ex of austin?

I'm an eastern los angeles guy. I've only spent time in Austin once in my life, sadly. Great city. I was referring to Equipboard HQ, listed as Autsin, TX.

its weird, I submit veryninfrequently lately but my gear IQ creeps a few points every week.

Must be a parental point subsidy. ;) The folks in Austin feel your struggle.

I'm widowed, I have a son but fear keeps the local children in line... just gotta love up my gearz.

I'm so sorry to hear that, Jim.

got a bead on a minty closet time capsule juno6 right now. $1700 USD on ebay. Negotiating. Seems like it just eneds the sliders cleaned well.

That's awesome! My earlier opinions re: sliders still stands: budget for replacing sliders, and be pleasantly surprised/grateful if cleaning fully revives smooth/consitent performance for any of them... but if sliders are the only issue, it'll likely give another 40 years of service no sweat.

Godspeed!

I don't think submitting gear to Equipboard brings any points, just like editing/revising submissions.

Nope, nor does adding an artist. Butt adding gear/artists, for me at least, is a means to an end in getting more points... you go to update an artist or gear, find out it's not logged on the site yet, so you add it... but reviewing others isn't in the critical path to anything.