I’ve been meaning to take some photos of the studio for the Through the Keyhole thread, but it’s always a bit of a mess, with bicycles, winter coats and other boring stuff. But the main bits are:
Roland Alpha Juno 2 - I use that the most probably.
Korg M3R rackmount
Yamaha RM1X sequencer - I tend to start on that sequencer and then usually move on to computer.
Korg Poly 800
Yamaha DX7
Yamaha TX81Z
Yamaha DX21
Ensoniq SD1 - great for ambient stuff but I tend to just play on it for hours and never record any of it.
Yamaha CS10 - another one I play with for hours as it has lots of knobs, a great lfo and a hold button but I rarely record it.
Roland D-110 - needs a repair but my local synth repair place charges about the same as the unit costs on ebay, so haven’t sorted out for ages…
Got into the whole modular thing at the beginning of lockdown, wanted to get an O-Coast and a few other bits and bobs but they were never in stock thank god, would have spent all my freelance support cheque given half the chance.
It’s a fine line with modular, right? Easy to get lost in experimenting stuff and at least for me the learning curve was / is a steep one. I now find myself with what could be call a very expensive riff-generating machine, but it never fails to inspire something and although I have nothing against (tweaked) presets on soft / hardware synths, there’s obviously none of that with a modular.
Quite a collection! I had an Alpha Juno 2 - my first ever synth in fact - and loved it. Sadly, at a house party we threw, someone spilled a sticky alcoholic drink over it after which it died a slow, painful (for me) death. I do love hardware for sure and often think about but ultimately reject the idea of investing in a Juno106 or something similar. In the meantime, I’ve discovered the TAL plugins and consider them fairly decent simulations.
I have tried other synths from Tal previously and liked them. I don’t have any recent soft synths as my recording computer is something like 17 or 18 years old, it’s a Power Mac G5, so I can’t install any new software on it. It works perfectly as a midi sequencer and audio recorder so I haven’t upgraded. I certainly wouldn’t spends loads on a new hardware synth. Everything I have was pretty affordable at the time I bought it.
My favourite thing about the Alpha Juno 2 is the dominator patch - I have never recorded with it, but I can sit there and just make dominator noises through a delay and move the pitch slider around and imagine I’m at a massive rave in 89 or something like that… Here’s a demo of it for anyone not familiar, it’s really fun, but I never record the rave noises for any of my tunes:
Yeah it is but I’ve kind of got it where I want it now. Quite a lot of ALM Busy Circuits modules (Squid sampler which is my favourite, Mum M8 & Fizzle Guts filters, Akemie’s Castle which I just got which is nuts) and some Mutable (Plaits for bleeps and Rings for other stuff) and then with the Metropolix and Atlantis doing an SH101 it’s fun times. I swapped a Rene2 for the Metropolix as I just didn’t get on with that at all. Anyway, love it. It’s taken a year or so but I feel like I’m getting to know it.
The latest from yours truly. Was intended for tape release on a label, unfortunately that didn’t get to happen. Glad I’ve gotten to release it finally though. As I say in the description, it’s a release in the spirit of the mid-to-late 1980’s. Informed by Soft Rock, Adult Contemporary, City Pop, Smooth Jazz of the time, etc.
