racketboy.com

THANKS SO MUCH ALL FOR POSTING!

I'm gonna have to make time to deep dive into all your gear and recommendations. I'll definitely look into Reaper for DAW purposes. I'd heard of it but never investigated my options too much. I guess to start, GUI and ease of use is a big factor.

So I've got a like new Wavestate and Opsix that I'm stoked to give my older kids for Christmas. I woke up the other night, snuck down to the basement, and spent 2.5 hours messing with both in the middle of the night while everyone else was sleeping. HA! Couldn't resist. Amazing tech!

When I was a youth (back in the early 80s) my parents got me and my sister a cheap Casio. I mean a real POS by todays standards. In fact - I just googled 1980s Casio Keyboard and everything that came up looked better and had more options than the one we got. I think it had 8 preset instruments. No memory. On board speaker that crackled. Maybe some kind of a demo button? It was terrible but I still spent hours and hours on that thing.

Having goofed around with these new synths is total mind blowing. I feel like I could quit life and spend 100 hours just messing around with them. So complicated. And that's even before I get into any music composition. This sounds like a mid-life crisis. I kinda want to quit work and just make music forever. Weird.

Hey! Great thread idea - it's cool seeing people getting into synth stuff. I'd dabbled a bit in electronic music making back in the early 2000s with some early sequencing and loop software, but didn't pick it up again until I started messing around with iPad synth emulation software about 8-9 years ago -- I recommend the official Moog stuff in particular.

After a few years of playing with those, and increasingly feeling I wanted to try the real thing I took the leap into hardware and quickly amassed a collection of Korg gear (a minilogue, a monologue, a volca beats, and a volca modular) along with a Behringer Model D (a smaller but comparable reproduction of Moog's famous synth). I link all that and still interface in emulated synth stuff on iPads from time to time, and it can be fun to work in other instruments like electronic piano and guitar, but generally it is hard to go back to touching screens once you get the feel for twiddling knobs. It can be an expensive and consuming hobby! It is also a blast to jam with other folks who have their own gear as well...

If you are curious and want to check out any of my stuff, you can find it linked here.

Here's a pic of my gear from a while back

There is some previous discussion around this here on the forums as well, which may be of interest: viewtopic.php?f=53&t=51850

I'm always looking for recommendations for good hardware additions to my setup, especially since it is so hard for me to find places to test synths "in the wild" before buying them. Lately I have wanted something of a better drum machine that would offer more range and complexity than the volca beats. Any thoughts?

Haven't really played with my keyboard, but I follow Dr. Mix on Youtube. One of his latest videos is a deconstruction. I have some familiarity with FM, and additive synth, but watching him recreate such a complex, layered waveform just by tweaking a single 3xosc plugin was amazing:
https://youtu.be/W9LxLYkgVM8?t=1232
Just, such familiarity with the basic synth engine that most synthesizers have, and explaining what and why he adjusted them to that specific level. This explained a lot of what I didn't understand on the additive synth stack.
I hate that song, but I love seeing how it was made.
Nothing like those deep-dives into which motown jazz and blues songs were sampled for Daft Punk's hits. Those deconstruction videos didn't educate me, they just blew my mind.
ex.: Discovery: The Samples another ... What?! How?!? Music was made like this? That isn't fair! I can't just play that. My keyboard can't arbitrarily sample!.
Oh, those exist. Scary!

Learning how Daft Punk made their music solidified them as my favorite artists of all time. So unique - no one else has been able to capture their sound.