So how you buy second hand and don’t get screwed in the process. First of all you need to try to estimate the current value and the future value. Google is great for that, you’ll even find information on the most esoteric pieces of gear, but it’s hard to put a figure on it. The internet is global, the second hard market mostly isn’t so prices are relative. And it’s even harder to estimate future value, although, with decent gear, prices don’t change much over they years. This fact is very interesting since you can buy second hand gear, and if it doesn’t suit your needs, sell it off for little to no loss, or if you did a good deal, at a profit. In the mean time you had the joy of using it.

Of course, to do at good deal, the item you are willing to buy should be in good condition. This is a pretty difficult thing to be sure of. If at all possible you should try to get the item of the seller personally. That way you can test the unit before handing over the cash. However, you probably don’t have anything more then a few minutes to make up your mind. It powers up, everything seems to work, and that’s it. If you’re lucky you might be able to put some audio through it, or play with it. There are some things you can look at in a few minutes that tell you a great deal.

One of the most important things are the screws. If some gear has been opened up there are always marks of the screwdriver on them. You only open up gear if something is amiss. Most people don’t know how to repair this kind of electronics, so unless the seller can come up with a believable story about the repair you shouldn’t buy gear that’s been opened up in any way. If the seller is any good he will probably notify you of the past repair.

You can also try to value the seller by looking at their other gear. The unit you’re buying will be cleaned and sparkling, the rest of their gear won’t have received the ‘selling’ treatment probably. It will tell you a great deal on how your seller actually maintains his gear. The selection of gear the seller has is also a good indicator as to how legit he is. If he’s selling a great synth and doesn’t have anything left, there is something simply not right. You shouldn’t be set off by a smoker or some dust. Whilst it will indeed affect the gear, a bit of cleaning can solve most problems.

You also need to make sure it works ok, although you probably knew that. Digital gear is quite simple in this respect as it either works or doesn’t most of the time. Analog gear needs a bit more attention, especially because most of these things are pretty old anyway. So you should look up beforehand how things are put together. If you buy an analog polysynth, you should check if ALL voice boards are working as they should. You should always check connectors and all buttons/pots/sliders, etc.. they shouldn’t cause any crackling or odd noises (unless that’s their intent off course )

in short. Try to buy locally and be wary of anything that’s a bit off. Prepare yourself to be disappointed as well from time to time if you do take risks by buying something that’s not in top condition. I’ve been able to get synths for very little because they were in a terrible condition, but still worked fine with some minor repairs I could do myself.

Some friends of ours have released a debut album. Which is really cool and, to make it even better, one of the tracks was recorded at our humble studio. So we’re kinda pround to present to you milk the fish – I hope you don’t … check out the video below and go buy yourself a copy..

more info on their website

The works?

You should be able to get a lot out of the Mbase without a look at the manual. Selecting a parameter to edit is as simple as pushing up/down and seeing where the led is lit. The right side of the controls are pretty simple and self-explanatory and consist of the main 8! parameters used to shape your sound. Playing around with those settings, you quickly notice the wide range of possibilities you get from these. But unlike many synths with lot’s of control, they say what they do on the tin, want more attack, dial in more attack, want more click sound, dial in more .. they don’t really come in your way, making editing a breeze.  So far, live is simple and you’ll get decent results fast.

But it has some more tricks up it’s sleeve. This is where the left hand controls come in play. On the basic level there are the midi settings (channel, pitch, split) which enable you to define how it should react to incoming midi note signals (you can make it behave as a little bass synth if you want it to) and then some LFO settings. The LFO can add some interesting modulation to the kick for more experimental use. It’s a nice addition, but that’s about it.

And then we have the audio input tracking. It’s designed to accept audio input or CV input and pump out a bass drum according the threshold. There are only a handful of controls, but It works very well and shouldn’t take more as 10 minutes to set up to your liking. As with all these things it can be a bit tricky to get a good trigger point and if you feed it a complex signal you’d better EQ it first a bit to remove unwanted triggers. It might be of less use in the studio (you can do the exact same thing with almost any DAW and get tons more control over the process) but it’s certainly opens the unit up to drummers who want to spice up their kick drum beyond what’s physically possible. Or people, like me, who like the more experimental angle to this feature.

And yes, on top of it all there’s still MIDI. As expected everything is addressable through control changes so it’s remotely controllable if you’d wish. It also sends out those controllers, so automation should be a breeze. Jomox used the same midi cc’s as on my Jomox xBase so a simple out to in connection and I had a remote controller for the mbase. nice.

it’s not all good

As you can read, there are a lot of good stuff to say about this machine. But there are still some things which I’d like to see differently. First of all, the ‘play’ button. Pressing it plays the sound you’re editing. So far no problem, but the knob produces a loud mechanical ‘click’ sound, which makes it very hard to judge the attack of your kick drum sound at normal studio monitoring levels. Not really a ‘problem’ if you trigger it by midi, but still.. it’s annoying.

The next thing we noticed kept us pondering an hour or so trying to troubleshoot the situation. In our studio every port outputs a midi clock as mostly everything needs a sync signal anyway.  When the Mbase 01 receives a midi clock (useful to sync the LFO) and midi notes only the first note played and all consequent notes were muted. When we restarted the sequencer, first note plays, everything else after that.. nope. It received sync all right, but since it wouldn’t really play any notes it was pretty useless. Stopping the sync signal to the Mbase would return behaviour to normal. Baffled by this, we spend a while figuring out what happened. Turns out enabling MTC (midi time code) solved the issue resulting in the Mbase having sync and playing every note. I still don’t know why this happens, nor is it indicated in the manual this sync configuration is needed. It’s weird as I have many synced synths and sequencers and none of them require MTC, normal midi clock is sufficient.

conclusion

There is very little wrong with the Mbase. Provided your music needs an electric bassdrum kind of sound, there is little reason not to consider it. Getting a good kick drum sound can be a very difficult and time consuming thing and the Mbase simply makes it a breeze. so.. it’s worth a look.

Akai VX 90 - sorry for the louzy picture quality, I'll try to put a better one up if I'll can take one.

This was the first synth I bought of which I couldn’t find any decent documentation of on the web. It was pretty cheap, and after all, a 6 voice polyphonic analogue synth. So I took my chances and bought it. Analogue polysynths are hard to come by, they are either old and expensive or new and expensive. And to make things worse, they are also subject to all problems analogue synths have, times the number of voices present. The Akai VX90 is pretty much an exception on the typical analogue poly. It doesn’t look sexy with loads of sliders and it certainly doesn’t have that synth stardom flavor to it. Nobody will be drooling over this in your studio, like people (well, fellow home studio enthusiasts, normal people don’t seem to care that much) would do over something like a Roland Jupiter 6 for example .. but it’s cheap, sounds pretty good and has a few nice tricks up its sleeve.

The user interface

The interface is pretty straightforward. It looks like any other akai product, a white 19″ rack with Akai written in red on front. It has a digital menu driven user interface, which may scare some people off, but it’s a simple affair and you don’t even need to get the manual out to operate it. Simple up and down buttons take you through the pages, one parameter a page, no global settings or branched menus or anything else that can confuse you. Most of the descriptions are directly understandable to anyone who has used a synth before. It’s as simple as a menu driven system can get. So, on the UI part, there is nothing to bitch about if you can live with this way of editing. It’s not all that bad, such a menu driven system also has its advantages. It’s easy to see the current values, you can ‘name’ your sounds and there is enough room on the unit to save lot’s of them (100 to be exact).

The midi implementations is about as basic as it gets, which is not really a shock given the unit’s age. It reacts to notes, velocity, program changes, bending and modulation .. and that’s about it. No sysex or controllers. But, at least it does have midi, and it works just fine. If you really wanted to create a backup of your sound, it can backup to tape or well.. soundcards in these days.

Can it play the boogie?

so, what everyone probably wants to know is how it sounds. The pre-sets (if you happen to come across them) don’t really do it any justice at all. they’re mainly emulations of classical instruments. But even the  professional sound designers at Akai weren’t able to make one oscillator sound like grand piano. But I don’t suppose anyone would be interested these days in such a unit for such sounds, and if you do, you should immediately stop whatever drugs you’re on.

After diving into the menu’s and poking around a bit some decent sounds came to emerge and it proved to be a pretty decent all round analogue synth. It doesn’t really have anything it can’t do, but, at the same time, also not something which makes it really shine. You can do the typical acid leads, techno basses, screamy syths, pads, etc.. the lot. In fact it really has a stunning sonic range and, with a bit of work you can get some pretty decent sounds out of it suitable for any style. It’s not an emulation of other designs (Roland, Korg, Moog) so it does have its own sound to it. To my ears it can do pads and soft sounds best since you can play chords, but you could as well use it for industrial sounds. If you do happen to need to compare it to some other synth, it would be the Roland Juno 106.

So what makes it tick

Although it’s a simple one voice one osc setup, akai has really put in a few tricks to expand the sonic possibilities. It has the predictable poly, dual, unison modes with a detune option to fatten things up. But that’s the least interesting thing. There is also a nice chorus, which seem to me to be more or less exact copy of the Roland choruses , not surprisingly also found in the juno series. It has the same basic controls (off, 1 and 2 ), sounds very noisy but is really useful and warms up the sound considerably.

There is yet another thing which indicates they got some inspiration from their Roland friends (apart from the fact of building a 6 voice analogue poly to begin with). It’s the implementation of a HF after the LP . It’s was not really a new idea, not even at that time, but it really broadens the sonic range and is a feature well worth having. Apart from the HF, you’ll find something else in the filter section called VCF OWFM (which stands for Oscillator Waveform Modulation) and it, as it’s name indicates, modulates the cuttof frequency with the selected VCO. This opens up quite interesting FM type sounds and a shitload of unpredictability.

The Osc it selves features some little interesting facts. Apart from the usual square, saw, triangle modes there is a saw+tri mode which gives you a richer waveform which has become my favourite. The pulse width modulation isn’t only limited to the pulse wave either and is usable on all other waveforms as well. So, even since it’s a one osc affair you still can come up with some interesting source waveforms.

That’s about all interesting stuff to say about it. Maybe I should mention the auto-tune function, it’s a nice thing to have on an analogue synth. Apart from all the stuff mentioned above, it still has an LFO and 2 ADSR’s and controles for velocity, pitchbend and everything else you’d expect from a synth. You can take a look at the manual (find it here, it’s the same as the AX73) to find out how everything works, but they are pretty much standard what you expect from any synth.

one more thing.

If you have read the manual, you have noticed it also has a pink noise oscillater which can be swapped for a sampler input. On the back is a female DIN-13 connector which lets you attach an S612 or some other early Akai sampler. Some searching on the internet provided us with little information on how this cable was build. But it seems possible an analogue input could be build with as little as a DIN 13 plug and a soldering iron.. so if anyone has some scematics around on this unit or on the cable, please contact me, that could be very helpful.

This green machine seems to be quite popular amongst home studio owners. It’s a filterbank, not too expensive, from a very little known, and out of buisiness last time I heard, company.  So it has everything on it’s side to become ‘the piece of kit to add some unique sounds to your setup’.. Does it live up to those expectations,..

nope.

It’s a simple filter, and not very much more then that. It filters a sound, depending on your settings, and does that very well. It has a HUGE range, from the subsonic to the extreme highs, loads of resonance (more on that later).. but it all keeps sounding very plain. Even the ‘buzz’ don’t really make up for the lack of character. In fact, it’s such a plain clean filter that I have used it for recording purposes rather as sound mangling. It’s a great HP filter and the one on my desk isn’t variable . .. so it’s very useful after all, but a bit expensive just to use as an extreme EQ.

IMHO, the designers of this piece of gear had a bit of a product placement issue. It seem to have 2 intended markets. Home studio owners and DJ’s. I suppose DJ’s will get more use out of it as they will benefit from a clean filter, as that works better on whole songs.. The thing also has some ‘performance oriented’ controls which are clearly targeted at DJ’s. Although, anyone who has punched in a distortion and/or filter in realtime knows it’s just a matter of time before you run into a huge difference in volume (and a possible a blown amp if you’re having a bad day). That will make you think twice before trying such a thing again… especially in a live situation, which, ironically is the intended purpose of these controls.

And about high unpredictable volume …  there is resonance. I already mentioned there was a bit of a wide range. On my unit, everything in resonance above 5 (so that’s halfway) is useless. It starts to self resonate, and can generate such insane amounts of sub-bass energy you’ll risk blowing anything else in the signal chain such as your amp and/or speakers. I know, some of you guys out there will be thrilled about this, but too much is too much, and it’s really too much. It can simply jump into a massive sub-fest leaving your mixing desk lights flickering, your speaker cones moving, and any other gear in the signal chain going nuts, but you’ll hear nothing as it’s simply below human audible frequencies. And that’s a problem.. if you’d push it too far you’ll end up losing everything, a bit like a sports car. If you’ll push it too hard cornering, you’ll suddenly find yourself crashed into a wall wondering what happened.

Now, there are off course also good things to say about it. One thing that immediately becomes apparent is the build quality. It’s in one work excellent! It’s solid thick metal casing probably can survive the most brutal beating, stop a bullet at close range and survive life on the road. But not only the casing is solid, the controls all feel very decent and trustworthy. Clearly a lot of effort went into this and as a result it’s a joy to operate. I wish more manufacturers would put such an effort in their build quality.. there are way too much flimsy knobs in any given studio.

Another nice thing about it is it’s decent IO. It has decent midi implementation, phono inputs (including a ground) and pretty much every other connection you’d wish from such a unit including CV. The knob on the back to set the midi channel is a great idea a lot of other manufacturers should consider (instead of implementing yet another weird push buttons sceme to do it.). The LFO syncs nicely to incoming midi sync, and everything else can also be midified. I’m not the kind of guy who autmates a lot, but it’s nice to know it can be done. A tap function can be used to get a tempo in absence of a clock input which is nice, but I rather wished some kind of audio tracking.. I never use it without midi sync so.. what do I care ?

Featurewise though there is little interesting stuff going on. A ‘Buzz’ provides some overtones to the signal before being filtered. It feels more or less like a simple fuzz box rather then a classic distortion and sounds, IMHO, rather basic. Then there is the filter, switchable between modes and can function stereo at 12db of mono at 24db. There is an envelope follower or LFO with the appropriate controls (amount speed, etc..). And that’s it. No weird or nifty stuff like you’ll find on most other filtering devices. All you get are the basic filter controls you’ll find on almost any synth. I truly find this pretty annoying as it provides little incentive to experiment. You could get yourself a synth with external audio input for more or less the same price and end up with far wider sonic palette. Heck, if you’re lucky you could pick up a Korg MS10 for around that price.

As a conclusion.. it’s everyone for his own. It’s a good filter, a bit too clinical for my taste, but it may suit yours fine. It can handle complex signals without turning them to mud, but, as a result, lacks the abillity to turn simple signals to something more interesting. It’s very userfriendly to operate and does what it says on the tin. If you’re interessted in this machine I can only advise you to try it out before parting with the cash. It’s not cheap to get on the 2nd hand market, and with a little extra cash you can get a Sherman filterbank which simply offers tons more soundmangling power. In fact,  You could replace this filterbank with a decent plugin for your computer not even costing half the price… but then again, no one likes to sweep a filter with a mouse, such a big ass knob simply is much more fun, way more fun !

I found this one back last week when going through the studio’s iTunes library. It’s a test version we did with Stefan ( vocalist of highway ) on a sunny afternoon somewhere last year I think.  Upon hearing it again, it might be a nice idea to get him back and finish this off..

Download audio file (electrotheque.mp3)

wel, the second Vermona synth getting some attention on this blog. It’s pretty simple to tell what it is. 4 analogue monosynths packed in a single (pretty high) 19″inch rack. They can be configured in more or less any way you chose (unison, dual, fm, 4xmono, poly).  Each synth on its own is a simple yet adequate thing, with 1osc, 1Lfo, 1filter, 1env, all in all, nothing special there (all the gritty detailed specs you need can be found here). The friendly guys at Vermona even tossed in some insert points, analogue input per synth and separate outputs giving the whole thing a bit of a semi-modular feel. You could, if you’d want to, create such an insane filterbank with it, you’ll be tweaking knobs till the cows come home (whether it will result in something useful is not yet known, researchers are still fiddling with the settings, to get the sound ‘just’ right .. ) .. in short.. nice toy.

So. What does it sound like. well, it sounds like an east German synth. It has quite a characteristic sound of it’s own, and isn’t a copy of anything else on the market, nor does it pretends to be one. I only can applaud such an approach, as the current trend of ‘emulating the old famous synths’ is getting a bit long in the tooth. It comes close to TB like sounds sometimes, but apart from that, you’re done with the famous comparisons. There are plenty of sound demo’s to be found on their website ( or here ), which should give you some kind of idea about what it’s capable of. Take notice though that, unlike you’ll hear in the demo’s on their site, it’s bare bones analogue, there are no fancy waveforms or chorus/reverb thingies going on to fatten up the sound. In fact,  the clean osc doesn’t provide very rich overtones. It’s a pretty dry square and sawtooth oscillator affair. Nothing wrong with that, but, even with 4 oscillators I never could make a convincing pad/string like sound. That could just be me though. Such oscillator tones does provide a good base for more straightforward sounds (basses, leads, etc..), in which the perfourmer feels more comfortable.

It’s all a pretty raving ’till now, .. synth with character, nice sound, plenty of routing options. But what’s wrong with it? Well there are 2 major issues with it..

1. Tuning… This is the most annoying thing about the vermona. The tune button ranges from -13 to +13 (26 semitones), the button has approx 300° of travel, making the semitones lying 11° apart. That’s not a lot, I am used to having a fine detune control with such a travel for a single tone! And a second one for semitones. The best has yet to come though, it’s a continuous dial? It has ‘NO’ little dent in the middle position (just a begin and end), which means, good luck guessing where the right pitch is. So, you’ll end up spending a lot of time tuning the machine, a process which involves a steady hand, some waste of time, a pair of ears (or an electric chromatic tuner). When you’re all done and tuned up, you’ll hope to never need to touch that control again. Which brings us seamlessly to point 2.

2. The controls. It’s a nice looking machine, with nice big chrome knobs. In fact, 72 of those nice big chrome knobs, nicely, evenly horizontally and vertically spaced across the front panel. This makes for a nice look, but a terrible user experience. There is no visual grouping per synth, let alone per function on a given synth, other then a small black printed line on the front panel. This makes sure you’ll screw up your finely crafted sound often, simply by turning the wrong control by accident. Given the average studio lighting is pretty dark to begin with, this happens a lot. Vermona fixed this issue by using color coded knobs on their new models (we took some markers to ours (see pic)). This doesn’t completely fixes the problem though but, at least it does provide some form of visual grouping of the UI.

ohw.. and there might be a small 3th issue. It has absolutely no way to store your sounds. none.. well, apart from a pdf you can print and put marks on, but that doesn’t really count .. for a synth in this price range it should include at least a basic way to store synth settings these days IMHO. Ok, we all have near unlimited digital recording time these days, so it’s not a BIG problem,  but I consider it a basic feature that, apart from modulars, should be on any synth.

Now that’s out of the way, what’s there to be liked about the machine. Midi implementation is as simple as it gets without a display, in fact, everything is pretty straightforward. No steep learning curve, yet enough possibilities to keep you interested.  The poly mode is a really nice and can be a great source for weird effect. It works simply by assigning every note you play to a new channel, after the 4th it starts back at 1. If you set the 4 synths exactlly the same, you kinda have an analogue polyphonic synth. The best fun, off course, is to be had when you set the 4 sounds to different timbres (I’ve been told the korg mono/poly could do the same thing). In fact, the whole routing and 4 times a synth thing is well thought out, well implemented and pretty much everything works as expected. Ideal machinery for knob tweakers and cable pluggers.

Conclusion.. is this a good synth? well, that’s kinda subjective off course. It’s good if you’re in search of that kind of sound palette or want something a bit more experimental, although at this price you already can have a big piece of a real modular going. These kind of synths are simply not for everyone, but if you’re into the market of a semi-modular analogue synth, and can live with the tuning issues, it’s worth a look. However, the lack of decent tuning, no ram and confusing UI makes this, unlike it’s name, not a performer synth. I wouldn’t take this with me in a live situation, or any other kind of performance. It’s something for in the studio, sitting in a rack whiching it was a real modular.

You can download the manual at the , so I’m not going to go too much into technical details. It’s the last instance of the famous Space Echo line of reverb/delays roland has produced, and it’s the only digital one in the series, which means not a tape in sight. I suppose this is the reason why it has been neglected by a large part of the people looking for that specific Spae Echo sound. Furthermore, it doesn’t look impressive either, solid black (although very deep for a 1 unit rack module) with only a handful controls.

so.. How does it keep up these days? Surprisingly good actually. It’s not as versatile as modern effect processors and plug-ins, but it has a very warm and lush sounds that fits a wide variety of applications and can be used for subtle effects to spacey reverbs. Controls are minimal, only one control for reverb (more or less ), the delay is the usual repeat rate, size and level. There is also a warmth control, which is in fact a some sort of pitch modulation, … and that’s about it. Having only access to such basic settings makes the machine very easy and fast in use. A welcome change from the feature loaded plug-in world we know these days and it also makes it the ideal reverb for giving your vocalist a little reverb in the headphones while tracking as it’s quickly set.

From the 5 modes, only 3 are delay/reverb, the other 2 only have reverb. Midi implementation is very minimal for today’s standards and is basically limited to selecting saved user patches. You’ll find more details in the manual, but I never stored any patches in the machine as it’s interface is so simple it’s not a problem to dial up any sound you want. I only whished the midi could be used for some kind of sync.. but hey.. this isn’t a modern machine.

Aha, the sound. Well, there is just only one, albeit a nice one. It has very little variety sound wise, but what it does it does extremely well. I should go on trying to compare it with other reverb units but that’s a bit of a silly thing to do. I wonder if there is any other reverb on the market that is this minimal and of this high quality (signal to noise ratio is rather good for a unit that age for example..). Don’t get me wrong here, it does sound amazingly good and can be used on a wide variety of sound sources.

And now we’re on the subject of sound, the unit comes with 2 very decent quality preamps on the front. Ideal for guitars, and very usable in a home studio environment. They deliver a nice clean warm tone, and with a tad of the effect thrown in it is really hard to not make a comparison with that typical dire straits sound. I won’t be surprised if it’s the special sauce for quite a few guitarists clean tone. It can do the same magic to analogue synths as well, making them sound huge and rich, whist keeping the punch and not washing the sound out in a big blurb .. in fact, it does what a good reverb should be able to do.

Would I buy it again.. sure. even thinking of picking up a second one. They’re pretty cheap actually..

Download audio file (super%20galactic%20gargle%20blaster%20denoised.mp3)

a video of a live jam session (the camera ran out after 10 minutes, so it’s kinda abruptly cut at the end). Hope you guys like it, maybe we’ll do it again in the future.