Any audio examples and mods description? Curious! Love vintage Korg sound (MS20 and Mono/poly here)!
In honour of the necro bump, I’d still say the montage is now my funnest piece of gear after selling off the OP1 (which may have been a mistake). Tried a bunch of other stuff since then but nothing ever really came close. Unfortunately, it’s been sitting in storage a 5hr drive away for the past few months for reasons.
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Ciat Lonbarde Plumbutter and Sidrax + some nice pedals like Chase Bliss MOOD, Thermae, Red Panda Tensor and Eventide Ultratap + Blackhole
The Moog Model 10 now rivals the VCS3 for the most fun piece of gear in my room. It’s certainly the one with which I am most productive.
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The other night I was explaining to my wife how the Steiner-Parker filter is vastly underrated while watching the love drain from her eyes. That didn’t happen, but it could have. Anyway, I recently acquired a Norand Mono and it got me thinking about gear that I like simply because it is FUN. Like, an OB-6 is fabulous sounding, but is it more fun than a 303? Well, that obviously depends on your taste, intentions, and skill. I’ve had a wide variety of gear over the years and it’s kind of interesting to ponder why certain gear stays on the desk longer than others. If I’m jamming and not necessarily trying to write a song, certain gear is just more of a blast to work with and keeps me in the chair, grooving.
Elektronauts, what gear is this way for you?
These are mine:
Arturia MiniBrute 2S - A well-rounded, capable synth with a balls-out, 4-lane sequencer. It warbles, barks, bounces, and screams.
Behringer TD-3-MO - I feel like I have to whisper that a piece of gear that has become among my all time favorites is from Behringer. But it is undeniably filthy fun.
Elektron Digitakt - How many people have to die before we can finally agree that this is a good drum machine / sampler?
Norand Mono - Brilliant machine with a bland name, modulation for days.
Erica Synths DB-01 - Makes devil music.
Roland SH-01a - Makes me laugh out loud, short bemused snorts, like unexpected sneezes.
Special mention goes to the Cyclone Analogic Bass Bot because it has guitar-style hammer ons.
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Music gear is just all so flippin fun.
Fun is a word that I think of when I play with the Moog semi-modulars (preferably when all connected together). Often don’t really know what’s going to come out of them, but they’re approachable enough to not have to rack your brain too hard to get something musical happening. Always sound great, endless adventures to be had. Fun.
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Korg Monologue is just plain fun. Having that switch to flip between note, slide, and motion on the sequencer is great. It is immediate, a blast to use, and is battery powered for quick pick-ups. It also just happens to have a nice and capable analog synth strapped to it.
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Came here to say Norand Mono and DB-01. And I have no 303/acid history at all.
My modular is fun but that’s a very personal thing. I know it has caused a lot of misery for many people.
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For me it’s the digitone. I love the process of creating sounds and patterns and squeezing as much as possible out of that one box before I bring in any other gear. My prophet rev 2 can have more wow factor on sound but it is much less fun to program.
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Randomly patching semi-modular gear is the most fun I’ve had with electronic music equipment, so long as I’m purely seeing what happens when this affects that rather than trying to exactly replicate an idea in my head. Otherwise, something that just works like an acoustic guitar. Menus are fun-killers.
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a drum kit. pretty difficult not to feel absolute joy while playing drums. whether you’re good at it or not.
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Novation Nova. Its been my main synth for years. I have the knobs and sliders on an M-audio Ozonic mapped to oscillator levels, sync amounts, mod amounts (all the ones available in the cc implementation) and under-hood parameters like ‘formant width’ and ‘sync skew’. Mixing and tuning the three oscillators and two ring mods together while playing with all the waveform parameters is endless fun. You never feel walled in by it. It’s like the designers left open all kinds of weird, intense, noisy possibilities that might be too much for some users. It’s a great example of what a low power dsp (late 90s tech) synth engine can do. The rest of the synth engine has plenty of functions to make the most of those weird oscillators: Multi-filters, 3 envs, nice reverb and distortion in the fx section. It can sound like an underwhelming VA if you don’t push it the right way though. It’s 6 part multitimbral too with independent fx per part, though I use it pretty much for one patch at a time.
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I find most portable standalone devices fun because of the immediacy.
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roland handsonic hpd-20 is fun!
loupé is fun
enner is fun
(three most fun purchases as of late)
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I’ve been having a lot of fun using the Roland TR-8S recently.
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Roland System-1M
Roland TR-8
Nord Rack 2X
All rather simple and straight forward instruments which sound good no matter what I do. Oh, and a microphone, even though I can rarely produce something listenable with that. This is where my heart lies, though. My head prefers the RYTM, A4, the (semi-) modulars. Fun, but not fun.
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Behringer MS-1 is a hell of a lot of fun, there’s so many sonic possibilities and it always takes me to new places. Also having a lot of fun exploring what’s possible with the Blofeld. I’ve only had it a short time and made heaps of patches and haven’t even started getting to grips with modifiers yet.
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feedback chains
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hell yeah! but i like HPD-15 even more – it has ribbons & more knobs.
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model:cycles is probably number 1 due to its format. feels great to play and program. sounds satisfying
digitone is very fun. everything sounds so lush and beautiful plus you get a wide timbral range of extremely musical sounds very easily just by tweaking around with the intuitive interface. the multi-track engine makes it the most fun experience ive ever had composing full patterns/tracks in one device, or in general really
behringer crave is really fun. sounds huge and very very easy to make surprisingly rich fat tones
take-5 is fun because of how great it can sound then how much you can mangle that analog sound after. also fun to have the best vco/filter sound available as soon as you init a patch
bastl thyme and mtl asm 856 for zellersasn are really fun to tweak and warp buffers like molding putty from sampled audio
octatrack is fun in it’s infinite options and live tweakability with scenes. i find its the most fun to sound design percussive sounds from noise with. even moreso than the digitakt
rytm is the most fun to play (next to cycles) and sequence drum patterns. i’d probably like soun design more if i had the more precise encoders of the mk2 and the resampling ability, but still very nice to interact with
electribe es-1 is very fun to sample and program. i miss this one almost solely because it feels good to play. love those rubbery soft buttons and big data dial. love the crispy 16bit internal sampling and the edit sample functionality
malekko manther is kind of fun too, because there are a lot of waveshaping otpions on the panel so its very quick to transform the sounds with per-function fader. plus you can p lock automation to the onboard sequencer. it just doesnt sound great ultimately
rene is the most fun sequencer i’ve used aside from elektron. clocking with 2 external lfos which can also be modulated with cv. using the touch pads to enable arp-like gate patterns from incoming cv on a muted grid. plus snake mode and other cyclical play modes
qubit nebulae is the most fun grain sampler i’ve used aside from maybe norns granchild script with midi mapping to a few midi knobs/faders. nebulae has the best knob-per-function a tool of its kind. very satisfying to have pitch and time decoupled with their own knobs. every knob is significant in shaping the loop, re-arranging the segments for playback, scrubbing through, altering the blur/window/density of the particulate
dd-7 was fun to capture quick loops with
analog four is my current fun-guy. love taking it away from my other gear and seeing what i can extract from its deceptively complex sound tweaking controls and interconnected routing by itself
i imagine the nord 3p is pretty fun. maybe pulsar 23, soma cosmos, mega fm, iridium, deluge. could never justify owning them but those are in my “fun” category on my want-list
agree with both of these statements very much. the digitone point applies to a4 for me too, although not as much as it applies to the dn
(also the take-5 is more fun to program than the rev2, since you asked for my suggestion)
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