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August New-Gear Thread


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Yeah I've also been seeing a number of vintage analogs being sold from Santa Cruz in the past few weeks.


I wish I knew a few places is SF though. Might be worth it to take the train up one of these days to try out gear I can't find anywhere but online. I have a caltrain station right by my house so it would be convenient.

 

check the VSE board, one of the guys always selling stuff in Santa Cruz cross-posts there.

 

i think Robotspeak has a shop on Haight in SF, and i think Computers & Music is around on Geary now. still, i've gone to some pretty amazing studios in the bay area just from craigslist and that's a foot in the door to finding other deals; often people offer other stuff that isn't listed. i've never bought a new synth!

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Yeah, I've been there twice. It's no Nova Musik {or AH circa last year, I imagine}, but is a fun place to stop by, especially if there's a workshop going on. I met Chachi Jones {owner? employee? Not sure} the first time I visited, and he was really friendly and nice - a bigger draw than the DSI/Moog/Elektron selection, IMHO!

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Robotspeak's just down the street from Toronado, IIRC, and Amoeba's nearby as well. Nothing beats getting pissed on great beers and blowing your wad on synths and records.

 

dont forget rosamunde's ....mmmmm... brat!

 

tweekin records is a pretty nice spot on that block as well

 

I could subsist entirely on that block.. i miss the city :cry:

 

 

also! just purchased screen recycler. fun times!

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I thought about that after seeing prices in Palo Alto. I may as well live in SF at those prices! Thanks for the recommendations on stores by the way. I'll be stopping by there to take a look!


-D

 

i should live here, too, i mostly work in the financial district (where i am now).

 

locally, be sure to check out Bascom Ave in campbell/san jose (around The Pruneyard/eBay HQ), my favorite haunt. Rasputins, Streetlight (the first), Guitar Showcase Consignment Shop (nice gear shows up time to time), Space Cat and a few places that are actually open late.

 

and checkout the shops on Telegraph in Berkeley, the best record shopping in the bay.

 

ON TOPIC: a new Moog Minimoog Voyager OS joins the fray! very, very, very nice, sounds nothing like the Model D, btw, those demos are accurate. much more programmable, though.

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I bought a Novation X-Station 61 a while ago, after looking at a lot of reviews on Harmony Central, so I thought I'd write a sort of mini-review for you all in return.

I wanted to teach myself keyboards almost from scratch (I played the clarinet a long time ago), partly for its own right, and partly to help me understand music better, especially harmony. I wanted something that would keep me interested and entertained while I was struggling to put the notes together, and I prefer the idea of making sounds from scratch to the idea of depending on processed recordings from other instruments, whether traditional or not. I thought that buying an X-Station was a gamble, because I didn't know if a virtual analog synthesizer would given me a wide range of interesting and useful sounds, or just a few usable sounds that were all very much the same, and a load of pointless noises (pointless at least for traditional harmony).

When I got the X-Station home I checked out my fallback position. I had downloaded MIDI-OX from the web, and I checked that I could at least use the X-Station to play the MIDI sounds that came with the (Windows XP) operating system of my home computer. It could, so I knew I could at least retreat to the sort of MIDI sounds that I could get out of any cheap keyboard. I also downloaded MyOrgan and Jeux d'orgues 2; if I wanted a pretty realistic copy of a real life instrument I had one. That worked too; somewhere I have also got a soundfont VST plugin (I'm using VstHost) and a soundfont for a Lute, but I haven't bothered to install it.

I haven't spent much time on these because when I am playing I prefer just to have the X-Station on its own, without bothering to connect it to a computer (especially my home computer, which has a rather noisy fan). The X-Station comes with a plain vanilla patch,. "Init Program"; I've fiddled with that a bit, and am happy enough with the result as a practise setting. By the way, if you use the X-Station for synthesis, you really want to get the most recent O/S off the Novation site, which allows you to inspect patches easily without changing them. I have looked round the web and elsewhere for information on synthesis . So far I have been most pleased with the CD "Secrets of Synthesis" by Wendy Carlos, and the freely available PDF "Music: a Mathematical Offering," by Dave Benson. The X-Station manual isn't bad either, and is also on the Novation site.

In theory, I could pretty much get by at the moment with a cheaper mass-market Casio or Yamaha keyboard, but I do want to have control of ADSR envelopes later on, which I think rules most of those out. If the X-Station was stolen I would definitely replace it with another one, if only because I would regret finding out that the replacement didn't have some X-Station feature that I was relying on without really noticing it.

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How do these compare with the Studio RTA Producer's Station?

 

 

Dunno, but I expect better. I saw that Studio RTA desk at my local GC, and looked it over. It's construction gave me the willies, and there was already some broken stuff on it. Granted, it's in a GC, but still.

 

New desk is arriving via truck (it's heavy), so I won't have it until next week.

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