redvoid

1997 "Standard Jazz Bass" aka the MIM, Alder body with Rosewood fretboard. Upgraded with copper shielded body cavity, Fender Custom Shop 60's pickups with new pads, CTS pots, heavy gauge wiring, professional setup by a Luthier, Fender American TRS jack, Fender American pick guard in black, with the sunburst body shown. Currently strung with DR Fat Beams Marcus Miller MM-45 45-65-85-105 stainless steel round wounds for that low grand piano key rumble. Upgrades I still want to do are a HipShot Drop-D tuner or . whole set with the Drop-D, replace the synthetic bone nut with a true bone nut, and ideally a Badass II bridge or a Hipshot high mass. Overall it plays great and the Custom Shop 60's pickups and electronics upgrades made it come alive and feel like a real instrument. With pedals, preamps and amps, it's a tonebeast that I can make morph into almost any bass guitar sound. It sounds great just through a good DI box like my Radial Pro DI2 straight into any mixing console or audio interface. The only thing lacking in a Jazz Bass is just the low end power of a P Bass, for which you just need to go get a Precision Bass for. I've been meaning to toy with some LaBella flat wounds, but haven't gotten around to it yet, since I can go from Marcus Miller style funk, to Jaco fusion, to Justin Chancellor clang, to Timmy C overdrive, to Royal Blood bi-amped madness, by just turning pedals on and off.

This thing goes from rubbery 303, 202 and 101 like acid, to lush fuzzy Juno-106 like pads. Fortunately I do have a PG-300 programmer or I would have never been able to intuitively create so many amazing sounds. Don't listen to any of the presets other than the Dominator hoover sound, but init every patch that doesn't knock your socks off (most of the factory patches are horrid) and do some real analogue synthesis yourself and you will not be disappointed

If you have one of the above instruments and do not have this programmer, you are missing out. It has a MIDI out that acts like a merge of the in and the thru port, so you can place it between your DAW or sequencer and have both notes and programming at the same time which should be the default way it stays hooked up always.

I played in tons of bands in tons of styles with this thing for many years. Though the sounds are a bit dated, they are also all classics. In the end the factory set, no matter how much you normally hate factory patches are on every record you own from the 80s and 90s, every TV or Movie soundtrack, and every ad for 30+ years. The keyboard still feels better than most dedicated MIDI controllers. I am more of a synthesis first guy these days, so it doesn't get much use, but it still has solid resale value, so anytime I want out, some gigging musician will gladly buy it from me. Only the Roland D50 has this level of desirability in the rompler space.

The M1 and D50 got more heat, but this has a better VCF than both of them, and it's chock ful of Curtis chips: 8x CEM3379 VC Signal Processor Filter/Mix/VCA, 1x CEM3360 Dual VCA, 4x SSM2300 You'll need a MIDI Editor/Librarian application, or a dedicated hardware controller to get the most out of it but with 3 Oscillators, and complex routing, with a pan modulation available on the VCAs one of it;s signature sounds, you can get fuzzy warm pads all day, while still able to produce some buzzsaw bass with a satisfying thwappy attack.

I have the Dance (909 and CR-78 sounds) and Electronic (808 sounds) PCM cards, and without them this thing would have been sold a long time ago. With them, I have little need for a TR-8 or most drum machines, and the CR-78 in tuned pad mode is the secret weapon of Miami Bass artists and breakbeat artists. It's not analog, and it has menu diving, which is the reason for the 3 stars.

8-bit sampler with only 8 seconds of sampling time, and 8 note polyphony doesn't sound too appealing, and it's a heavy beast too, so it is totally not for most people. However, if you find yourself dissatisfied with lo-fi plugins, and wish you had an SP-12/1200 but can't afford them, or you dig Skinny Puppy or Rhythm Nation era Jam & Lewis productions, and wondered how they got such great gritty sounds, this was part of that equation. You absolutely need to go get the aftermarket MASOS OS, since it adds SMDI support, so you can send samples from your computer over MIDI. Best for short drum sounds you want to filter with the Curtis filter VCF chip: 8x CEM3328 VCF I got mine for $80. It's a pain to use with a boot disk on floppy, with long loading times, with tiny led menu diving, the UI will be culture shock for many. However as an affordable 8-bit lo-fi drum machine that takes up too much space, it sounds fantastic.

lame pickups, strings unfit for a young student, noisy electronics, and worst of all the tuners cannot stay in tune no matter what. It looks pretty, and it's a half decent slab of wood with real potential. Unfrotunately to unlock the potential you need to at a bare minimum buy a loaded pickguard with all new electronics and pickups and new tuners, at which point you should really just have gotten a more expensive guitar in the first place. With all the upgrades it REQUIRES you can get a Standard MIM Strat and have something useable on day one, and worth upgrading later if you want.

If you are dying to have the UA Apollo plugin suite, then go get the Apollo. If you are more oriented toward recording real instruments or external synths, and have rack effects, and don't rely on hardly any plugins, this is a great box. plugin bundle is very small and underwhelming. The inputs and outputs and their quality is surprising for the price point. It's easy to go headless when you have 8-line, 8-XLR Mic, and 8 ADAT inputs, with 10 TRS and 8 ADAT outputs because it's like having a 24 channel, 8 buss 24x8x2 mixing desk in 2U of rack space. Slap an Octopre or other ADAT input/output device on it to maximize the i/o. The virtual mixer is both good and bad. It's how you mess with the Liquid inputs. The emulations are OK but not great. They're still useful especially the Neve and Avalon emulations. Don't expect them to replace real Class-A analog preamps with discreet circuits, but to get some air, or sparkle they definitely achieve that.

No matter what kind of synthesis, or effects processing, or sequencing or drum machines you like, you can probably do it better with a Eurorack modular. You will also pay a hefty premium to do so. You are also going to have to sink some time to get good results. If you want instant results, or preset sounds, this is not for you. If you want the most flexible, open ended, infinitely upgradeable system imaginable, are tired of being stuck in a computer screen with your only UI as a mouse, if you have option-itis from thousands of plugins that usually suck, and wish there was a tactile, hands-on, 1 to 1 physical control, with routing that you design every step of the way, that sounds frigging amazing, then this might be for you. Are you ok with never being able to reproduce the sound you made last month? last week? yesterday? 10 seconds ago? You cannot be attached or it might drive you mad. If you want to experiment, and roam free with no limits and care more about the journey than any final product, and the rest of the profile is true, then you might have an obsession awaiting you. My current rig configuration is always documented here: https://www.modulargrid.net/e/racks/view/179898

I've been on gigs with this device where a flaky device stopped being flaky as soon as it was plugged into the PL-8 It's also gigged out with e countless times and is on almost perpetually in my studio for decades and still does it's thing. built like a tank. This is a pro device. Don't buy some crap that's oversold to home theater consumers in a big box store. This is a tool, not a toy.

When you see top flight studios, often the least expensive piece of rack gear in the entire room are dbx compressors. I have 2 of these, and when it comes to bass guitar, individual drum hits, or a stereo drum buss (the reason I have 2) you have to pay double or more the price to get better compression.

In conjunction with my Akai MPK-49 this becomes my MPC-2000. Mine has maxed RAM, the 8 output board with S/PDIF, SCSI and an external hard drive. The MESA software is no longer available and was buggy when it used to be supported. The LED is tiny, but fails less often than it's big brother the S3000XL. You can get one for $100 and upgrade it from any of the MPC parts dealers. It's debatable whether or not hardware sampling is still worthwhile in a world where it is honestly much easier and more powerful to do it with software. You sort of need a super special edge case to want to do things this way, but it will load Akai S900, S1000 earlier sampler samples which abound, and the envelopes are very fast and snappy, so unlike many other sluggish samplers, it is well suited to drum hits. It functioned as a breakbeat and sample triggering box for me for many years and these days is mostly not used. I often debate whether I should upgrade it to a SD drive, with chopped and screwed mods, or just sell it, but the once in a blue moon use is still worth the $100 of value it would provide if I sold it, so it sits there awaiting it's next lark.

I use it on guitar amps, bass amps, my Djembe, my Yamaha Trombone, shakers, percussion, claves, and yes even vocals. Fact is, you can find it in lots of old music videos and certainly tons of live applications with major artists like Metallica, Tom Petty or Trent Reznor singing through one. Gearslutz like to get all bent out of shape over oh no it should be a MD-421 on Trombone, an EV RE-20 on bass amps, a Royer R-121 on guitar amps, a stereo matched pair of Neumann KM-184s on percussion overheads with a Telefunken 251 on vocals, which is great if you have that super pro microphone locker, but if not, a great singer on an SM-57 will blow away a mediocre singer on a vintage U67. It takes massive SPLs, which is why you can put it inches from a metal drummer hitting a snare, or hats, or inches from a cranked Marshall full stack all while delivering neutral accuracy every time. This is all for $100, less when used and since they're all built to last for the long haul, it's a no brainer. Everyone should have one or several of them. I don't typically record vocals, so for me, it's my all arounder with no apologies.

The highs are a little too pronounced, and it's not as full and lush as a truly great mic, but for just over $200, it is tough to beat. It picks up everything for fairly long distances, so you want to treat your room heavily, and put up baffles and shielding or an isolation booth or something to stop everything you don't want in your recording from ending up in the track. On it's own, it sounds a little thin, but with a good preamp it shows its full potential. A Tube preamp can help warm up the inherent coldness. If you have the right room or sound treatment, a good vocalist or MC, a half decent pre, good levels and a good recording engineer, this is a workhorse that can do more than you might think. It's pretty much exclusively a vocal mic, though it could do drum overheads if you had 2 of them, or a distant drum room mic for fill. It's a cheap knock off on a U87 but if you are comparing it to that, there's little comparison other than the shape. If you are used to a cheap mic though, this one will feel like a nice upgrade.

Not made anymore, were all handbuilt by one guy in the Netherlands. Sounds amazing, every knob sends MIDI CC data, so every parameter is automatable from a DAW or hardware sequencer. The midi to cv/gate conversion is a godsend, since it is like having a Kenton Pro-4 and a 303 in one modern box with a full MIDI implementation. The 303 synth is on 1 MIDI channel, and the 4 channels of cv/gate occupy 4 more channels. The button on the front will send the current position of all knobs to any midi recording device or editor/librarian software, so it can store and recall patches from any midi recorder. In a track, I will hit the button at the start of the track to get my starting point, then record my live tweaks, then go into the DAW and smooth out my automation lines and curves to get perfect acid tweaking every time. The accent and slide are not as authentic as I would prefer, but it still sounds great. People with newer 303 clones like a BassBot have been stunned at how good it sounds. I'm keeping mine forever! I've already had it for a looooonnnnggg time and it's on a bunch of my 12" vinyl releases sometimes next to tracks with a real vintage Roland TB-303 and most people can't tell the difference. I can, but I'm a freak about these details, and a synthesist, artist and producer of many years.

Were a big upgrade from my Alesis Monitor Ones that I had forever prior. I still want the powered sub to go with, but the 8" woofers satisfy me enough without bothering the neighbors and function as solid nearfields that I haven't felt the urge as strongly as I thought I might. I blew tweeters once every couple of years with my Monitor Ones, but after like a decade I haven't had a single issue with these, and I do tend to spend some serious time in the cranked up zone. I prefer to monitor loud, and these handle it fine without ear fatigue. My only issues are being in a room that could still use a lot more tuning that I have acoustic treatments to cover. In addition to recording studio use, they double as multimedia speakers for everything online, and for impromptu DJ sets in the studio and sound great on all tasks. They are fairly flat in response which is what you want in a nearfield reference monitor. They are very cost effective for the rather stunning level of performance at this price point. There are aftermarket mods for the few flaws that hardcore audiophiles might notice.

DANGER: Do not go crazy and try to win the loudness wars with this or your mix will suffer. If you already have a nice blend of plugins handling other types of compression at the track and busses, then this can be the last bit of push to get you to a decent mix. People with tons of high end gear and/or plugins will use it for reference mix dailies and never on the final mix, so if you're that perfectionist, skip it or relegate it to this position. If you are a musician or producer on a budget, then this can stand in for much more expensive bits of kit, and as long as you don't push it too hard, you will like the results better. My suggestion is to never try to go for more than 6db of boost unless your material somehow magically doesn't get messed up when you push it further. If you plan to send your final mix to a real mastering house, then either skip it or use it in very subtle ways with the Dithering option turned OFF! If you dither prior to sending it to a mastering engineer, you've sabotaged their efforts before they even get a chance. If however mastering is not in the equation and you need to make do, this will get you over the hump of what's required to get decent sound into an online streaming format. It is a useful and affordable tool, if you don't abuse it.

So if you think all DAWs are too linear, and feel like a slave to the timeline, preferring pattern based external hardware drum machines, samplers and modular synths, then Ableton Live is likely going to be your favorite DAW like it is mine. If you run sound, lighting and video from custom control surfaces, Ableton Live probably has the most flexible custom routing possibilities for control surfaces of every kind, and they do not try to pull vendor lock-in moves on you like Avid/Digidesign is known for. I've used many DAWs from Performer, Vision, Cakewalk, Acid, Sonar, Pro Tools, Reason, Cubase and Logic, but Ableton Live for me is the best of the bunch overall. I think Pro Tools has better audio headroom, Sonar had a more robust MIDI implementation, Reason has better default virtual instruments, but for realtime control and production workflow perspective nothing beats Live for me. I work primarily with my Eurorack modular synth these days, so I send MIDI clock from Live to my Malekko Sync to run my Transistor Sounds Labs - Stepper Acid Eurorack modular hardware sequencer module, from an instrument track that sends MIDI while receiving audio with my Akai MPK-49 acting as input device and control surface for effects plugins, and my workflow keeps my head and hands outside of the computer on my synths where I can get more done creatively. There is a slight time penalty to working this way as it introduces more steps, but ultimately I am much more creative and productive, ot to mention happier working hands on, with 1:1 controls:parameters on my modular synthesizer, so my creative output has increased with an overall more arcane process. I love it.