Yeah, EMS VCS3 MkII, with the DK2 keyboard barely visible. It is legendarily cantankerous, but that is part of its charm. After 35 years of playing synthesizers, few instruments offer me any surprises, but this one always does. A brilliant instrument beloved by Eno, Hawkwind, Roxy music, Klaus Schulze, Pink Floyd, White Noise, Sonic Boom to name a few. Patched through the tape delay next to it, it’s instant outer space.
At this moment my RYTM… but there is some modular on the way
Please tell us more
Lifeforms coming next week and the 0-coast in about 3 weeks. Allright some of you dont think its real modular but its modular enough for me… I think i’m gonna have loads of fun with it.
Machinedrum ️:pray:
The next thing I buy - more seriously: recently I’ve been having a ton of fun with noodling on a Reface CP run through Strymon Big Sky and Analog Heat. I’m a sucker for those sweet Rhodes chords and while I dismissed the Refaces initially, I think at least on the CP and YC they’ve done a great job. I’m a very mediocre keyboard player, still with a few basic 7th chords and a simple melody, this thing makes me smile. I wish it had an octave more, though.
PreenFM2 takes the cake for me at the moment. I always loved Abletons Operator, but having it in a little box with lots more algorithms and non-european scales is just blissful.
at the moment this 70s Ibanez Eagle Bass i bought second hand, took the damaged original black paint off
and repainted it with Shellac. I like it a lot more with the natural look and the resonance is significantely better than with acryl painting on.
Was fortunate enough to spend some time with Robin Wood (who still runs EMS and builds VCS3’s) at his studio/workshop in Cornwall in the late 80’s. Amazing to discover not only that the company was still going strong but that it was also based 20 miles from where I lived!
Robin was very generous and hospitable to my request to discover more about the company and have a nose around his studio. The opportunity to experiment with many legendary EMS machines has stayed with me since.
He provided me with loads of EMS advertising and merchandise which I still have. Shame I’ve never had the available funds to pick up one of these cantankerous synths…
Thank sounds awesome, man!
currently the dreadbox Hades. it’s such a small semi modular analogue bass synth, but with many capabilities for sound design. especially Bass of course. i got a used one for 240 Euros last week and i’m still surprised by this powerful little bastard^^
ATM my fave as in “funnest” is the KArp Odyssey desktop. There is something to be said about having the luxury of 1-knob/fader-per-function that makes operating a synth fun. Too bad such a luxury comes with unmanageable form factor constraints for most devices… a 1-knob-per-function elektron box - How big would one be lol
per black box, roughly 24U x 104 HP of eurorack, I’d guess, and no less than $28k
Funnest would have to be my Ibanez bass running into a Dark glass B7K into my Octatrack. I can jam on one pattern for hours!
I guess that’s not just one piece of gear, but this combo rules!
Give this combo a name, and it will count as one object.
(I need to return to studying programming)
Bass OCTASTACK
Beautiful
Casio fz1 a sampler with a great filter
Necro bump @Ess you still using Defmon? Such an under rated program, every time I dabble with it find something interesting, but documentation is woefully lacking, I periodically have a session on it every 6 months or so but forget how to use it, sidtab is straightforward enough but some of the other stuff still trips me up because there is so little info how to use it. Shame that development seems to have stopped now, and that it does not appear to have much of a user base (I think I know of about 10 people using it including you and me)