The ranting about vastly overrated machines thread.

Circuitbenders · April 28, 2009, 01:16:45 AM

If you have a piece of kit you especially loathe and you consider vastly overrated then this is the thread for you!

I'll start things off with the Casio VL1 which, and lets be generous here, is a piece of crap. I completely fail to see the magic with the VL1. There is nothing you could do on a VL1 that you couldn't do better on a million other cheap machines. So its got an ADSR and a calculator, WOW! Neither of these things is exactly incredible. My phone has more music making power than a VL1 AND it makes phonecalls! It probably cost less as well. $:-\$

But what about that fantastic cheesy percussion you say. Well isn't this what the sampler was created for is my reply. Its not like the VL1 is analogue or has any kind of magic feel to the percussion you'd want to preserve.

What i don't understand is that people are still are trying incredibly hard to circuitbend these things and cram mods into them when realistically even the best modded VL-1's aren't anything very special and don't produce any sounds you couldn't produce a lot better and with more versatility on other machines more easily and cheaper.

So you can do some exciting things like distorting the sounds and making some feedback noises. Well ok, but for less money you could get a yamaha pss and make a noise like an old woman drowning in a washing machine in a car compactor. Take your pick.

Now the Roland TR606........................ Just don't get me started on the goddamn 606.

deathbender · April 28, 2009, 02:49:39 AM

Quote from: Circuitbenders on April 28, 2009, 01:16:45 AM
but for less money you could get a yamaha pss

EDIT: Hey, where has the text of my post gone? When i looked here today, only the qoute was here and my own text was missing??!?!?!?!?!?!?

What i wanted to say was that i think that crustypaul maybe was inspired to open this thread here by my post in the fleamarket topic. And that i only paid 3 Euro for it. And that i never saw a PSS with a number higher than 50 go for less on eBay. And that aforementioned PSS-50 would be one of my hate-objects concerning music-hardware which is only beaten by the AKAI S3000i i bought brandnew in the mid nineties of the last century for more than 5000 DM and nowadays i won't even get 100 Euro on eBay for it. Which is what i probably hate most when thinking about this machine... besides the microscopic small RAM and lack of HD or CDROM and the abolutely overrated digital filters...

the_zombiest · April 28, 2009, 11:43:19 AM

Quote from: Circuitbenders on April 28, 2009, 01:16:45 AM
So you can do some exciting things like distorting the sounds and making some feedback noises. Well ok, but for less money you could get a yamaha pss and make a noise like an old woman drowning in a washing machine in a car compactor. Take your pick.

I'd take the sound of dying grannies any day.

Circuitbenders · April 28, 2009, 10:38:41 PM

Quote from: deathbender on April 28, 2009, 02:49:39 AM
EDIT: Hey, where has the text of my post gone? When i looked here today, only the qoute was here and my own text was missing??!?!?!?!?!?!?

What i wanted to say was that i think that crustypaul maybe was inspired to open this thread here by my post in the fleamarket topic.

I was wondering why you had just posted a quote there, wierd.

It was indeed triggered by that post in the fleamarket thread but also by people paying anything up to £40 for an unmodded VL1 on ebay and absurd amounts for a VL1 with even the most useless mods on it. I don't understand at all.

I never liked Akai's, apart from the S612 and the S6000 which wierdly were their first ever and last ever rackmount samplers.

deathbender · April 29, 2009, 01:14:40 AM

Quote from: Circuitbenders on April 28, 2009, 10:38:41 PM
people paying anything up to £40 for an unmodded VL1 on ebay and absurd amounts for a VL1 with even the most useless mods on it. I don't understand at all.

Thats really stupid. How much fun it ever is playing with the ADSR (which i really like) and else but paying more than ~10 Euro is just stupid... my humble opinion...

Quote from: Circuitbenders on April 28, 2009, 10:38:41 PM
I never liked Akai's, apart from the S612 and the S6000 which wierdly were their first ever and last ever rackmount samplers.

The S6000 at least had the ability to load .wav files without a conversion-orgy, afaik... the S3000i hadn't. One more point on the 'why i hate that thing' list.

manufactured zero · July 27, 2009, 12:33:19 AM

Damn right about VL. I can only put it's popularity down to there being a band out there who happened to use one for ten seconds in a track so it's suddenly "hey, if i use a VL too then i can be famous" haha. I watched a vid awhile back of a '9 mod monster' and decided to see if i could make my own means to blow people away. I succeeded, and yeah, you've got a bunch of drone mods, some squelchyness and feedback, a pitch mod and some cool atari video game system style noises if you can be arsed to mod it that far. I added an lfo which made it almost worth having for it's commodore 64 like qualities with the rate cranked right up. All this and not much more for whatever you're stupid enough to pay for one. You're much better off picking up a pt1 or pt10. Same crap sounds but a bigger case to stick all the bits in when you mod it. There's no earth shattering ADSR or calculator but they go for as little as £2.99 sometimes. And this to me is about how much i'd pay for the VL tone on a good day.

In joint first place for being crap though. I'd put the Roland mc303 up there in the ranks of absolute shite. I owned one of these years ago which i bought on a whim. Got it home, tried it out, laughed at how piss poor it was, chucked it in the cupboard and then found it again four years later and sold it. In a way i wish i'd kept it as it would have made an interesting core for a circuit bent project.

Circuitbenders · July 27, 2009, 12:54:22 AM

Ahhhh, the MC303. A machine that the original Future Music review said was 'indistinguishable from a TB303'.

I never tire of that quote, i've even got the magazine to prove it somewhere. Just goes to show how deaf you can be when you're getting given synths for free.

manufactured zero · July 27, 2009, 06:57:19 PM

Haha, yes i remember now. This was part of the attraction of an mc303 back then. I remember thinking 'cool, a tb303 with bells on'. I was just gob smacked at how piss poor it was when i got it. I tried to like it. I also tried really hard and spent a fair bit of time trying to discover the similarities to a tb303. As you can imagine i failed miserably.

On the other hand, i don't see them selling for much these days so i guess they are in the crap place they deserve to be now

Gordonjcp · July 27, 2009, 07:33:44 PM

Quote from: manufactured zero on July 27, 2009, 06:57:19 PM
On the other hand, i don't see them selling for much these days so i guess they are in the crap place they deserve to be now

... and in ten years time there will be a whole genre of music based on rediscovering how to (mildly ab)use MC-303s beyond what they were designed to do, prices will shoot up and magazines will be full of quotes like "It's hard to believe now, but back in 2009 people didn't want them and they sold at bargain-basement prices!"

manufactured zero · July 29, 2009, 06:45:12 AM

You're probably right there. Like every TR except the 808 or 909. They were all considered to be shite. I often wish i'd kept more of the crap gear i had from back then. A bent mc303 would probably be really cool assuming it wanted to play nice. It's probably not worth trying but i reckon i'll watch a few on ebay and see if i can get one to put on the slab. If the sequencer and the sound rom are seperately clocked even an ltc1799 mod would turn it into something quite interesting. It'll likely end up in the bin and raped for parts by the end of it but what the hell. If it doesn't i'll post it up on here with some info on where and where not to go...

mr ibrahiem · August 05, 2009, 05:45:14 PM

I sorry but I think casio sks are a bit overated...sure they sound good but there is nothing there that i cant get out of my miracle piano or voltaik detachable synthesizer sytem .I mean they are easy to do and look good but theyve been practacaly used to death they only have a sample time of a half a second and cost where i live five times as much as the tow vss-30s ive got in my house not only that but when i was a kid i saw many of the sk-1-,5,8s but now i ant see any of them ANYWHERE!!!!!! im sorry but people should be a bit more adventerous and try other smpling stuff like the yamaha psr-215 and other stuff liek that.cos if amateurs keep bending them theyll be extinct within 2015 if that!!!

Circuitbenders · August 05, 2009, 07:18:55 PM

erm.... the Yamaha PSR215 doesn't sample. $:-\$

I agree about the SK's sampling though, the VSS30 sounds a whole lot better, which is probably why they are selling for stupid money at the moment.

mr ibrahiem · August 06, 2009, 09:08:43 PM

And so are the casio sk models at the moment ...i went in the ad mags and someone was offering upto a hundred pounds for one aswell as ebay where they have sold unbent for upto one hundred and fourty poundsI mean they werent even woth that when they were new.so..im not getting one and they are FRICKING hard to find now...almost impossible unless you WANT to fork out a hundred pounds for one without a bloody box with three keys missing

mr ibrahiem · August 10, 2009, 12:28:30 PM

TB-303 is shitein my own oppinion but my old teaher had one and he would rant about how in his old punk band it was the best sounding instrument he had ever had and every one liked it they must have had their hearing aids turned off or it was they were trying to be nice

manufactured zero · August 18, 2009, 09:35:58 AM

The Yamaha mr10.

The 606 is as cool as an elektron machinedrum when compared to these piles of shit. They obviously don't fetch as much as tr's but they still change hands for way more than they're worth just because the word analogue gets associated with them.

Absolute bollocks ........