While I was at wandering around AES in New York last week I made a startling discovery. I'm pretty sure that I have now seen enough super expensive vintage-ey boutique rackmount audio gear to last me a lifetime. The first twenty boxes looked shiny and exciting, the next thousand didn't, really. Anyway, here is something expensive and boutique, but a bit different. Zerotronics make passive spring reverbs - line level goes in, mic level signal (+ reverb) comes out. They have no controls and no mains cable - just a monolithic black rack box with four XLR sockets on the back. Their new thing is the Mini-LE, which is the same principle but in a hardback book-sized box. Inside are two old-stock reverb springs for Baldwin electronic organs. Zerotronics found the springs on eBay, then tracked down an organ technician with a small stash. $795, limited run of ten units. More rock'n'roll but less chic are valve-powered stand-alone spring reverb units like the Guyatone FR-3 and Valvetrain Spring Thing. (More springy goodness) (Thanks Ian)
I just bought a very cheap, old, dutch-made D&R stereo spring reverb from the 'bay. It's a bit noisy, but sounds cool. This evening I took the top off, started twanging the springs and made this small, clangy sample pack for the Freesound Project, who are now getting close to 10,000 sounds and 1 million downloads.
On the left: Electro Harmonix' new Holiest Grail reverb pedal. I can't work out if it's all analog or partly digital, but it looks utterly analog and rock'n'roll, and it might even have a real spring reverb in it, so you can kick it for that cool boingy noise. On the right, Waves' new IR-L cut-down convolution reverb plug-in. It's pure geek power, the opposite of rock'n'roll, but convolution is black magic. The hardware: $225, the sofware is $400. (From Harmony Central)
It's all in the headline: here are the instructions. There's also a $115 plate reverb which looks like rather more hard work...
One of the consequences of writing Music Thing is that I seem to acquire a great deal of stuff, which fills up the room a bit. Time for a clear out. Here’s what I’m selling:
IT'S ALL GONE!
Waldorf Pulse 3 osc analog rack monosynth. Loud, bassy and tweakable. Has cool 'random patch' function. Like new. It's the bassline on this remix. £140
D&R Spring Reverb Gnarly stereo rackmount reverb. Noisy but effective, with a parametric mid boost/cut on each channel. Hear it here and here. £70.
Crumar Bit One: Huge Italian 'analog' 6-voice poly synth from 1984. Two grimy DCOs per voice. The same SSM filters found in a Fairlight II. Velocity-sensitive keyboard. MIDI. Lots of buttons. Fully working, with factory presets. Lots of pics here. £160 (Pickup Only)
Roland TR-505 The least sexy of all the Roland XOX boxes. Good through a bunch of effects. Easy to program. Comes with the original box. A couple of elements of the LCD don't work, and it's in 5/10 cosmetic state. £40.
Yamaha Rex-50 Lofi digital effects box. Hear it and read more here. Volume pot is very crackly. £21
Akai S2000 Sampler I've had this a whole week, and if you can deal with loading the OS from a floppy every time you turn it on, and pressing a lot of buttons, then it really does sound great. £25 donation to the charity of your choice (Pickup only)
Make me an offer. Pickup only items are very heavy and must be collected from SE London. I'll post anything else at cost. Paypal only. If you're interested or have questions, please email me. Finally, if you're selling an Akai MPC1000, I might be interested in buying it. (I found one on Gumtree, the nearest equivalent London has to Craigslist)
A pleasant evening at Music Thing towers, spent fixing up and sampling this ancient Fisher Price record player from my parent's attic. The Swiss-made music box mechanism was rusted solid and the tiny clockwork motor doesn't really give enough juice to push the records round at the right speed, but a generous application of 3-in-1 got the music box part working well enough to sample a few notes. This Fisher Price Sample Pack at Freesound is just random notes, motor noise and winding sounds, but it works well enough mapped out across the MPC... Previously on Freesound: Spring Reverb and Cracklebox samples.
What is it? It's a hardware controller for Arturia's Analog Factory plugin, which emulates 7 classic vintage synths (Arp 2600, Mini Moog, Moog Modular, Prophet 5, Prophet VS, Jupiter 8, CS 80). £229 / $349. LINK
What's good? I love the idea - a piece of software made real.It's a great looking, great feeling little keyboard made in China by CME. The design ticks all the Music Thing boxes - it's (off) white, it has real wood end cheeks, a nice semi-weighted keyboard, really solid, heavy, all-metal chassis, 11 continuous knobs, 4 ADSR sliders (NICE TOUCH!) and a snapshot system pinched from the Nord G2. I like the idea of a tweakable preset machine, like a modern day Matrix 1000, but with 3,500 patches. On each preset, you can change the volume envelope (slightly frustrating if the filter envelope is fixed), the filter cutoff & resonance, LFO rate & amount, and four other pre-selected parameters. Arturia's emulations sound fantastic, though I'm not qualified enough to judge how accurate they are. The Arp sounds raw and clunky with a boingy spring reverb. The Prophet VS sounds gritty and digital. The Moog Modular sounds huge, etc. If you want to know about the software, Create Digital Music and Sound on Sound can help.
What's bad? Aaaaagh! It's software. Installing it had me typing a 32 digit number four or five times until it took. I installed it on my laptop, and it's now impossible to move to another PC, without (at least) contacting customer support and buying a Syncrosoft key for €14. Yes, if I'd paid £229 for it, rather than borrowing one to review, I'd have thought harder about where I installed it. But why should I have to? It's lame. For £250 you can buy a new XioSynth, MicroKorg, or Alesis Micron or a used Juno 6 or JP8000.
If you're a professional musician, or you're trying to get great sounds in a hurry, or you enjoy tidiness and efficiency, then Analog Factory is perfect. It's quick to use, far better sounding than those cheap hardware synths, and all your settings are saved automatically. If, like me, you're a no-talent tinkerer, who enjoys fiddling with gear and recording bits of music, then the Analog Factory Experience might be a disappointment. But that's just me. If you enjoy software synths, then there are a few relatively minor niggles. The keyboard will output midi, but the controller numbers are all fixed, so you'll have to teach other synths to understand it, rather than vice versa. And there's very audible stepping when you're tweaking some knobs, i.e when tweaking the cutoff frequency on a resonant filter.
So... If you get on with software synths, and you want a fantastically sexy little controller for a huge collection of great synth sounds, buy this now. If you want a sexy little synth, don't.
I love the look of these vintage Fender amps modelled in Boss pedals. No idea how they sound (it would be a miracle if they get the spring reverb right) but they look ace...
So, my friend Peter lent me his beloved TR-909 drum machine. After a bit of messing about, including tracking down an IEC C9 mains lead (from here), it's working, and is wonderful, particularly when messed about with. I already posted this G2 resonator patch, which is a copy of the effect in Ableton Live. Last night I made this patch (+ audio sample), in which the G2 tries to recreate the sounds it's getting at the inputs, using just a simple oscillator+filter. It sounds really wiggy, but somehow still a bit like a 909. Finally, and least interestingly, here [mp3] is the 909 coming through the spring reverb and VRS-23. Thanks, Peter!
Loscha writes: "While not as cool as the Kraftwerk Vocoder, a jackfield from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is still very neat..." Quite right: eBay item #120003732436 is a jackfield/patchbay which was apparently used in the legendary workshop before being shipped to Australia in the luggage of a former BBC engineer. As the vendor rightly says: "I can say, unashamedly, This is the best jackfield in the entire world. Period. You will never see anything like this again in your entire life." Unfortunately, you've just missed the chance to have something to plug it into. eBay item #250001734656 was a AKG BX20 spring reverb unit, "As used in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop", although it's not totally clear if that was this actual unit, or just the model. Either way, it went for a not unreasonable £470.
On the subject of that Kraftwerk vocoder: The auction page has had 47,000 hits with a $7,600 high bid, and still two days to go. The Music Thing effect strikes again...
This is the prototype for Scottish analogue synth makers Macbeth's new toy. The Macbeth M5 is (very roughly) a modern version of the ARP 2600, best known for being a: very cool, and b: covered in sliders. The M5 will cost £1995 and come in a huge steel box, with a built-in spring reverb and dozens of full-length sliders. It is pre-patched, which means that it works without a jumble of patch leads, but if you want to override them, small spaghetti is possible. (Thanks Ignatius)
It's all in the headline: here are the instructions. There's also a $115 plate reverb which looks like rather more hard work...
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 8 comments Post a Comment 
A pleasant evening at Music Thing towers, spent fixing up and sampling this ancient Fisher Price record player from my parent's attic. The Swiss-made music box mechanism was rusted solid and the tiny clockwork motor doesn't really give enough juice to push the records round at the right speed, but a generous application of 3-in-1 got the music box part working well enough to sample a few notes. This Fisher Price Sample Pack at Freesound is just random notes, motor noise and winding sounds, but it works well enough mapped out across the MPC... Previously on Freesound: Spring Reverb and Cracklebox samples.
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 7 comments Post a Comment 
What is it? It's a hardware controller for Arturia's Analog Factory plugin, which emulates 7 classic vintage synths (Arp 2600, Mini Moog, Moog Modular, Prophet 5, Prophet VS, Jupiter 8, CS 80). £229 / $349. LINK
I love the look of these vintage Fender amps modelled in Boss pedals. No idea how they sound (it would be a miracle if they get the spring reverb right) but they look ace...
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 6 comments Post a Comment 
So, my friend Peter lent me his beloved TR-909 drum machine. After a bit of messing about, including tracking down an IEC C9 mains lead (from here), it's working, and is wonderful, particularly when messed about with. I already posted this G2 resonator patch, which is a copy of the effect in Ableton Live. Last night I made this patch (+ audio sample), in which the G2 tries to recreate the sounds it's getting at the inputs, using just a simple oscillator+filter. It sounds really wiggy, but somehow still a bit like a 909. Finally, and least interestingly, here [mp3] is the 909 coming through the spring reverb and VRS-23. Thanks, Peter!
Posted by Tom Whitwell. Story permalink. 4 comments Post a Comment 
Loscha writes: "While not as cool as the Kraftwerk Vocoder, a jackfield from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is still very neat..." Quite right: eBay item #120003732436 is a jackfield/patchbay which was apparently used in the legendary workshop before being shipped to Australia in the luggage of a former BBC engineer. As the vendor rightly says: "I can say, unashamedly, This is the best jackfield in the entire world. Period. You will never see anything like this again in your entire life." Unfortunately, you've just missed the chance to have something to plug it into. eBay item #250001734656 was a AKG BX20 spring reverb unit, "As used in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop", although it's not totally clear if that was this actual unit, or just the model. Either way, it went for a not unreasonable £470.