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I once thought Prodigy used mod trackers (those in-game chip tunes), but I found out they just use loads of Roland equipment. After years of using soft sampler
by zandorg 17y ago
I once thought Prodigy used mod trackers (those in-game chip tunes), but I found out they just use loads of Roland equipment.
After years of using soft samplers and synths, I recently moved into a bigger house and set aside a whole room for my music studio. With that much space, I now have:
+2 Akai S950 samplers (with enough memory for about 16 drums)
+3 mixing desks (2 vintage, one newer - the Yamaha vintage makes everything sound great
+Already had an Oberheim Xpander and a Bit 1, and a Crumar Toccata organ
+2 outboard compressors, UC200 chorus pedal
+Laptop with 192khz soundcard to master and sequence MIDI
My basic tactic is to make the entire track sequenced - recording only vocals and the non-MIDI Crumar Toccata - and then record it straight from the desk. A hardware mixer mixes better than Cubase can mix.
So overall, the older equipment was harder to use, but to my ears, sounded more 'real' than computer instruments. But I'm not in any way saying a music setup is 'better', just different, and sometimes different is what you want.
- messel 17y agoWill forward these comments to my brother. He's a long time digital producer although I'd be hard pressed to get him to mix together ambient/electronic/d&b/whateverIlove. Sounds like a pretty sick and expensive setup. Nice job putting it all together.
- zandorg 17y agoActually, I bought the mixer after I couldn't split about 10 signals to the soundcard any more! I had splitters going into splitters and it was a mess. Then the mixer I bought had FX inputs, so I bought the outboard FX units. Then I read about the S950 and bought 2 . They have 8 outputs which you can run through a mixing desk and EQ, adjust gain and volume, and even put an FX unit on a drum. The great thing is all this equipment was bought on eBay in just a couple of months. I put together a spreadsheet of the costs. The Akai's, mixers and effects units came to about £1000. The Xpander wasn't cheap, but I bought that in 2004. The organ was about £200 including postage. But the point is, you can build a retro studio quite cheaply and experiment.
- brunoc 17y agoI'm impressed that you still use hardware samplers. It's pretty much the first thing that I would think of replacing with a computer (quasi unlimited sampling memory, unlimited storage, etc). I have a S2000 somewhere, gathering dust...