2023: A Year in Gear (What You've Bought or Want to Buy in 2023)

[kritikon]

I'm holding off buying any new toys for a while now - getting towards the end of some postgrad work and I just don't have time to go play properly. But my final assignment will be in by mid October and then...I'm going to go berserker. I get my life back finally . Started the postgrad in twentyfuckingnineteen

1st is Minilogue XD - been on my list for too long. Possibly I might even stretch to a Polylogue 8, not sure yet (don't need that many voices, but....)
2nd is either a Behringer 909 or 101. Or maybe both. Don't need either but who gives a flying fk?
3rd hopefully they'll release the Proton by then - instabuy for me
4th VCS3 would be nice but I'm not holding my breath.
Then I might start saving for a Summit...or Pro3. Which will probably mean divorce, but I reckon I can hide it downstairs in the studio for quite a while...

[foosnark]

Bought at Knobcon: New Systems Instruments Harmonic Shift Oscillator (HSO). I was kind of thinking about a 14HP or smaller oscillator that could go up to 50kHz to clock Drezno (and other things) above audio rate -- but which would also be fun in its own right. I have been using Synchrodyne about 90% as a high rate VCO and not so much as a filter, and when I do use it for filtering it doesn't seem essential to me.

HSO goes up there. It's a sine at Its timbre is FM-like but not exactly -- there are no sidebands below the fundamental, and even inharmonic sounds are very smooth and and... creamy? Some analog adjective anyway. Gorgeous.

Decided that I want, will probably buy it tomorrow morning if Synth City has it on sale in their booth or hit up Reverb otherwise: Dreadbox Hypnosis. The funky synthwave-looking multieffect with BBD chorus/flanger, digital delay and spring reverb on board. I tried it with a PWM Malevolent, didn't love the Malevolent but the effect sounded amazing.

Decided that I probably want, but not available yet: Mystic Circuits Ana 2. Swap out Ana's attenuverters for bipolar VCAs, add a mix output and two more exotic combo outputs and give it a snazzy looking upgraded purple metal panel (but still 6 HP). I'll see what the price is. But this seems to add a lot of utility!

Might get just for grins when it's available, but probably not: Pet Rock. It cost less than this morning's hotel breakfast. In Hyatt's defense it was damned good bacon and a lot of it, good fruit, good waffle, and they actually have the genuine sriracha for their eggs and I want to know who their supplier is. Anyway, I tried Pet Rock, and by "tried" I mean I listened to the rhythm of the day for a bit because there is no other interaction (other than clocking it with something that has its own rhythm, I guess).

If I had a lot more rack space: Infrasonic Audio Warp Core. Like the VCV Rack oscillator but expanded to 8 waveshaping algorithms and some nice stereo detuning. It's like a more focused Plaits, kind of. Sounds pretty good, but not drastically different from what I can do with other gear.

If I had a lot more studio space and money: Therevox ET-5. It's gorgeous. I wasn't that thrilled by the Ondes VCO on its own (a couple of nice timbres and some annoying ones), but two of them with the filter and modulation and spring reverb and controllers and it comes together very nicely.

tried again and it's still great but no: Moog Grandmother. Earthquaker had one in their booth with a whole pedalboard. I didn't love any of the effects to be honest, but the instrument is

Tried but definitely no:

- A Fairlight CMI. It doesn't even sound retro, just... physically huge but monophonic and not enough sample memory and not friendly to use. Apparently not a museum piece, Synth City had a sign that said everything was for sale...
- Motor Synth mk2. It doesn't sound great, the slew caused by motor speed changes isn't great, and... meh. Clever mad science concepts don't always translate to a good instrument.
- Sequential Take 5 and Trigon 6 -- tried them both, just not my thing, too vanilla I guess.
- this is NOISE tiny Bluetooth MIDI controllers -- clever and fun, but Bluetooth MIDI sucks ass in WIndows so they're off the table. (Well, they're still on tiN's table.)
- Intellijel Cascadia. Probably with more time I could have coaxed sounds I liked out of it. It didn't instantly grab me and I'll take that as my excuse to keep my much cheaper MInibrute 2S
- Earthquaker Devices The Wave Transformer. A more or less vanilla analog VCO with some waveshaping, solid sounding but didn't wow me.
- LoBlast Bleepler: a little 9V battery powered oscillator with speaker, knob,button (think random QWERTY key). They had a table full of them and I tuned them to various chords and detuned drones, which was fun. The guy said I should buy 3. I asked how much they were, and he said $50 each. I stopped playing with them and moved on.

[kritikon]

Whoa, steady now and backtrack just a little bit...






...you had fruit with bacon? What kind of a monster are you?

[foosnark]

A hungry one, and I'm about to go downstairs and do it again! Probably less bacon this time though, yesterday was not exactly a healthy day overall.

[WatchTheGuitar]

BoredBrain has teased "something BIG" (like I have room for that, ha).

Mystic Circuits seems to have been teasing something that looks like an updated Ana, so I'll have to check it out... but unless it's got something really special going for it I'll probably keep the one I have. I do want to grab another Blinkus if he's selling the 0HP stuff at the show, for stereo, but that's pretty much lunch money.

Noise Engineering is going to be there and they just released Xer Mixa, but it's not really on my radar, I'll stick to mixing in the DAW. I'll still probably hang out there a bit and talk to them (I've beta tested some stuff for them and once applied to work there). Patrick is going to be performing Saturday and I'll have to catch that for sure.

Therevox will be there, and I hope to play an Ondes Martenot for a bit and also check out their Ondes VCO... but I probably won't buy one even so.

I hope OptX v2 is there from Boredbrain. I don't know if that'd qualify as "big" but it's one I've been holding out for.

I assume the ‘big’ new Boredbrain module was the “Xcelon”, seems a lot of people have started making big performance mixer modules.

[foosnark]

Yeah this seems like the Year of the Mixer. Very different approaches between Xer Mixa, Bluebox and XCelon. I didn't pay that much attention to any of them though since I'm happy mixing inside the DAW.

Synth City didn't have a Hypnosis. But it turns out, there was a revision to it with a few improvements, so I want to make sure I get that one (it's got buttons that light up red rather than white, and it's what I tried).

I got to play with HSO a bit last night and it's pretty fantastic. Sounds gorgeous on its own, with some classic FM-like stuff (and occasionally uncanny valley not-FM sounds), pretty easy to get bells and saw-like timbres from it and growly stuff. There are quite a few tricks that can be done combining the two outputs or using one to modulate something that's processing the other (their sines are 90 degrees out of phase and also seem to react a little differently to the added harmonics) besides just using them in stereo. And it serves my purposes very well for clocking Drezno or Interstellar Radio above audio rate but in a dirty and interesting way. I definitely need to experiment with running it through some distortion, or Koszalin, or Spectraphon

In a more general sense, the main things I learned from Knobcon this year:

1: The first time I went, I had less than a year's experience with modular and had never seen it in person except for my own gear, so I learned a ton trying other stuff and watching people perform. The second time, I had more context to put things into and learned a few more things (and a good bit about FM thanks to John Chowning's lecture).

This time I've been in it for 7 years, have seen a lot more, and I'm a lot more focused in what I want to do musically, so it hits differently. It actually felt less about the gear, and more observing the performances and just basking in the concentrated enthusiasm of fellow synth nerds. It was still nice to try a few specific things. But the amount of benefit is less, and I didn't come home with any inspiration that I didn't already have before I went. I could probably skip going for the next few years, or just stop going altogether unless I just want a synth mini-vacation

2: I've decided, I don't want to try to perform live, at least not yet. While I like doing "live" improv recordings and often get them in one take, there's a big safety net there. I can scrap a take and start over, or edit, or just throw it away. I don't have to fill any particular length of time, I can stop when the music dictates it. If I want a longer "set" I can record multiple different sessions and stitch them with transitions that I have time to plan out.

That last point was something that a few performers seemed to have trouble with -- despite having a lot of skill and starting out strong, they came to a natural stopping point but had another 15 minutes in their set and, with the gear they brought, no ability to transition into something else on the fly. The structure which either they'd planned or emerged from their improv wasn't able to hold up for the full set. My favorite performers had a combination of much more practice and solving this problem with a combination of gear selection, flexible transitions, and general technique -- or just shorter time slots! And I will solve this problem by simply not playing live.

(But I do want to tighten up some of my playing.)

3: If I go to one of these again, I need to recognize that there's too much going on to see everything, and that I'm out of shape and oldish and should just chill more. And I should absolutely have taken today off work for recovery and not had to rush home in the morning.

[D-Fusion]

The Behringer K-2 went back to the store (Tiny text, Didn't like the sound + Filter 1 was so noisy that i found it barely useable and it made the Korg MS-20 mini i owned silent in comparison which only had the Filter 1).

So now I am waiting for my B-Wasp instead which i think will fit much better in my little setup with + a CME MIDI Thru5 WC since my old and trusted Kenton Thru 5 has started to fail

[justin3am]

If I want a longer "set" I can record multiple different sessions and stitch them with transitions that I have time to plan out.

That last point was something that a few performers seemed to have trouble with -- despite having a lot of skill and starting out strong, they came to a natural stopping point but had another 15 minutes in their set and, with the gear they brought, no ability to transition into something else on the fly. The structure which either they'd planned or emerged from their improv wasn't able to hold up for the full set. My favorite performers had a combination of much more practice and solving this problem with a combination of gear selection, flexible transitions, and general technique -- or just shorter time slots! And I will solve this problem by simply not playing live.

I can relate to a lot of that. I've watch people get bored of their own set 2 minutes in and kinda panic when they weren't sure what to do next. I've seen people plan out really tight sets, who then had to improvise the whole performance because one thing stopped working the way it did during rehearsal. Doing a completely modular set is a ton of fun but it's nerve racking... for me it's like walking a tight-rope without a net. The net being something that can easily fill gaps and allow for easy transitions... like the Octatrack or a looper of some kind. I've been performing live with modular for about 10 years now and the Octatrack has saved my ass more than a few times.
It used to be that Shared System+Octatrack+Analog Four were like my ideal modular performance setup but now I feel like I was doing to much re-patching and the setup was too cramped. With my current setup it is so much easier to have more than one voice going, plan out transitions, and sample things live, so I can listen to the next part through headphones before bringing it in. I also have baked in contingency plans if anything goes wrong. I often save bits and pieces I record into the OT while rehearsing, so if something catastrophic happens, I can basically do my whole set from the OT and Analog Four.

[foosnark]

https://www.dreadbox-fx.com/hypnosis-reissue/

I almost bought the original Hypnosis yesterday and now this is announced.

- costs half as much as a used original Hypnosis
- easy DIY, no soldering
- patch points for delay times and LFO rates.
- Eurorack or standalone, should be easy to integrate with all of my stuff.
- mono only. This is sad news for the chorus/flanger and a little bit sad for the delay. I'm trying to decide if it's a deal breaker or not.

It's priced about what a Eurorack spring reverb driver & tank would be without having an analog BBD chorus and digital delay built in, so that's not a bad deal. I'm just concerned it won't blow me away the way the original one did when I demo'd it. The patch points don't seem like enough of an advantage to compensate for that.

But I can probably get decent enough chorus/flanging going on in stereo with the Euro gear (or plugins) enough to work with this anyway... I'll have to dig in with Mimeophon and Beads and whatnot and think about it.

[elxsound]

Just put an order in for the Kontrol S88 mk3.

After my CME-UF80 died, I kept holding out because I thought NI would release a new version. They didn’t until now

Still happy I waited. I didn’t want to buy anything this big that didn’t support Midi 2.0. The CME lasted 16 years, and I’d be happy getting 10 years out of this if possible.

[WatchTheGuitar]

The pricing seems a tad high to me. Yes they added poly aftertouch, but doesn't mean you can sell it for nearly as much as the equivalent Hydrasynth IMO. It is just a MIDI controller.

[elxsound]

The pricing seems a tad high to me. Yes they added poly aftertouch, but doesn't mean you can sell it for nearly as much as the equivalent Hydrasynth IMO. It is just a MIDI controller.

I think part of the price increase is what you don’t see above, and might not care for… is the onboard computer.

I don’t know what kind of specs these are since they’re not advertising it and it seems to be limited to processing graphics quickly?!?!

Either way, it’s $200 more than what MKII was sold for, which I think seems fair.

This one will fit in my desk… MKII was too wide.

[WatchTheGuitar]

Yeah, it makes a lot more sense for anyone who uses NKS heavily. I don’t so it’s overkill for my needs.

Did you say it will support MIDI 2.0 though? That makes it more attractive if it can integrate easily with new equipment seamlessly.

[cryophonik]

Yeah, it makes a lot more sense for anyone who uses NKS heavily. I don’t so it’s overkill for my needs.

Yeah, same. I had (unreasonably) high hopes that mk3 would be a more well-rounded MIDI controller with really improved support for hardware and non-NKS software, but it's really primarily an NKS controller and probably always will be. Honestly, the only NI product that I ever use anymore is Kontakt, so I'll probably sell my Maschine and Komplete bundle, then just buy a Kontakt license during the next sale.

[foosnark]

After watching some more demos, I went for the Hypnosis -- the stereo one like I tried personally. Stereo I think is too important for the chorus character (whether using it super liquid 80s style or high feedback slow flanger stuff), as well as the delay character. While being made for Eurorack seems nice at first, I have a lot of stereo stuff in Euro and that would require some awkward extra mixing. Going mid/side with it might work fine in some applications but not others.

Also the delay on the reissue doesn't have a Freeze button or gate, nor CV over feedback. I feel like a lot of the design decisions that went into it were about cutting costs more than doing the best thing.

I still think the reissue is pretty good, comparable to something like an Erica Black Spring Reverb (which adds a selectable DSP effect to the spring), it's just not an adequate substitute for the effect I tried out.