My New Thing is a new regular MT feature. If you've bought something interesting and cheap, write in with a pic and some sound samples and a story. I'll start... What is it:This REX50 was an eBay impulse buy for £21.01. It's a cut down version of the Yamaha SPX90, the first ever digital multi-effects box, which was utterly ubiquitous in the late '80s, and still fetches up to £180 on eBay.
Good Bits:It's got a fantastic cruddy-sounding pitch-shifter with delay, feedback, and tuning via MIDI, so you can play drum loops like this [600k MP3]. There are two types of gated reverb (it was the '80s) and a reverse one. Plus, I'd never been able to get that high-gloss tacky chorused guitar sound like the second bit of this [200k MP3] before.
Bad Bits:It has absolutely the worst interface. Eight buttons and only one knob (an input gain on the back). It takes 15 seconds to scroll from 0ms to 400ms delay. Should I buy one? You can't go wrong for £21, but some knobs would be nice.
Posted by Tom Whitwell.
Comments:
My first ever piece of "outboard" (hehe) was an SPX50D - the REX50 is simply the rackmount SPX50D in tabletop guise.
And actually the 12-bit reverbs are still usable for a certain sound, and the subtle pitch doubling is surprisingly nice (-8 cents on the left, +8 cents on the right).
The delays are ok, and everything else is awful though, though that can sometimes be nice. :)
These were really neat in their day. SURE they sounded bad - Almost EVERYTHING digital at that era sounded bad (well...almost almost). I loved this box because it was SO damn cheap and was actually a MULTI effects processor...the first I could afford.
The guitarist from the Meat Puppets used these quite a lot in the late 80's. Several of the 4 track recordings I made of them live during that era have THICK layers of phasing and flanging from the REX50.
My New Thing is a new regular MT feature. If you've bought something interesting and cheap, write in with a pic and some sound samples and a story. I'll start...
: 12:55 am