BlahBlahCafe - Jean-Michel Jarre forum

The thing rocks big time!

Just got my ARP/Rhodes Chroma with midi, heavy bastard !

I've just bought a Moog Little Phatty and Memotron. Absolutely love them both.

Not exactly instruments, but both the Moog and Memotron each get routed through a Small Stone Phaser and Boss DD3 pedal. Both pedals add a great extra dimension to some of the sounds.

I also bought the LP editor, excellent little piece of software which also provided the 100 presets from the LP Tribute Edition.

Apul wrote:I've just bought a Moog Little Phatty and Memotron. Absolutely love them both.

Not exactly instruments, but both the Moog and Memotron each get routed through a Small Stone Phaser and Boss DD3 pedal. Both pedals add a great extra dimension to some of the sounds.

I also bought the LP editor, excellent little piece of software which also provided the 100 presets from the LP Tribute Edition.

Good choice,I've got a Phatty,and also recently the Voyager,(Got the Moog Bug after buying the Phatty)although limited in polyphony they are wonderful sound machines,the Phatty is rather deceiving,it looks rather limiting but its Quite flexible and you can coax some interesting sounds out of it,every synth head should have one..even if you don't like or understand much about programming its superb

synthx wrote:Just got my ARP/Rhodes Chroma with midi, heavy bastard !

Congrats SynthX,
post some sounds from it if you have time, I am very curious...
I watched once this video from Herbie Hancock and someone stated the beautiful polysynth he is playing is a Chroma.



Great addiction to your palette (!)

Pete wrote:

synthx wrote:Just got my ARP/Rhodes Chroma with midi, heavy bastard !

Congrats SynthX,
post some sounds from it if you have time, I am very curious...
I watched once this video from Herbie Hancock and someone stated the beautiful polysynth he is playing is a Chroma.



Great addiction to your palette (!)

Thanks, it is not working right now so have to see about those demos a bit later. Lucky me people are making new CPU cards and PSU assemblies for it so there is a greater chance to restore it and make it work.

But I know, it does sound wonderfull. A friend of mine has one and I think it is one of the most expressive instruments I´ve heard so far.

Best regards,
/Syn

Equinox, Yeah, I totally agree. Some of the sounds you can get out of the LP are seriously impressive. Some of the bass sounds shake the room. It's exactly what I'd hoped it would sound like. being picky though, I'd really like some wooden end panels for it, rather than the rubber ones.

I've got my eye on the Voyager Old School next, I really like the idea of no presets/memories/Midi. However, at some point I need to fulfill my desire for an EMS machine, either VCS3 or Synthi A/AKS. I've dreamed of one of these for as long as I can remember.

The tribute edition LP does look nice with the Wooden cheeks,but the SE LP looks just as cool with the rubberised ones.
I had my eye on the Voyager OS,but when it came down to a decision to buy a Voyager,I felt that having memory storage was something I really would have missed,its good to think it would force you to be creative not having any Patch storage,but I like to have some means of storing my own without having to create Patch sheets,the Voyager does have 896 patch locations which is a Bit overkill,the original Operating system had 128,but you get all the additional patches created for the Performer editions and select series as well as the Rack versions which is nice ot have all those extra sounds created for the different Models

If you Like the Idea of a synth with No memories then the OS will save you a bit of cash,in years gone by they had no choice of patch storage,today we do,so think about your choice wisely..you may not think its not a necessity to have storage,but you may just wish you had...I knew I would have missed it,I have created a lot of my own patches and I would have hated to manually have to write down all the settings.

As for the EMS VCS,you could (Or still can maybe)buy them new from the EMS guy in the UK(Robin Wood)for around £1500 UK pounds,not sure if he's still doing them or not..

Yeah as far as I know he still does, but delivery time is quite long. I was told it can take up to 1 year before they're delivered..

Just got a Korg EMX-1 inside the door Finally a hardware drum machine AND sequencer. This had been on my wishlist for a while after the conclussion that it was the one i liked best

Jakob BC wrote:Just got a Korg EMX-1 inside the door Finally a hardware drum machine AND sequencer. This had been on my wishlist for a while after the conclussion that it was the one i liked best

congrats

Ok so far I have only checked out the factore patterns and the drum section. The drum section works like the typical x0x systems, so no problems there. You can then assign one of the 207 drumsounds to one of the 9 drum parts. You can create your own sounds but the onboard drumsounds are very nice. There are 808 and 909 style of course, but also Linndrumm sounds and a few other famous drum sounds. Then there are some other useful drumsounds for most electronic genres. Especially D'n'B and trancelike Bassdrums.
I often dislike gear with submenus and this is full of submenus, so I haven't figured out how the synthpart works with the sequencer yet. The manual I got was in German, so I only have a software copy of the manual, which is not as easy and interesting to read as a hardcopy. It will probably take a few days before I have figured out how exactly this thing works. After all I have a drummachine with the most wanted sounds for me, but I'd like to learn the synthpart ot know, as you can get some nice result according to the presets. The onboard arpeggiator section is nice for different kinds of flam. It can do a lot other things but I still have a lot to discover of this beast. Therei s no doubt that it is powerful.
Btw. am I the only owner of this machine on this forum? I'd like to hear some opinions and tricks from other people. This is definitely a nice and hands on machine as soon as you learn how it works 100%.

Btw. It will probably be used in some forthcoming projects I have in mind, so results of this machine will be shown in that occasion.

Jakob BC wrote: Btw. am I the only owner of this machine on this forum

.

Never use it nowadays though,don't think It even been switched on in the last 6 months,I never really liked the Presets much so created my own and wrote over most of the onboard sounds.Its a good Minisequencer,and great for easy build pattern arrangements and you can get some good sounds out of it with a little deeper digging,Pretty easy to use although the step recording is a little bit unlogical,you need to really keep tabs on what your doing when inputting melodic parts,(The display could show a little more representation to help)drum parts its a little more easier because your basically using a non melodic pitch instrument,so you simply just use the Roland type pads to input the note intervals,when doing melodic parts you need to keep going between menus to see where you are and what pitch your inputting,and over 8 bars of notes can be very confusing and lose your position,this is where its better to either use the Arpeggio or realtime playing for melodic stuff,Great grooveBox and nice sound if you push the Valves,great for distortion,or running external audio via them..

One of the things I find annoying is there is no way to control the amount of wet/Dry signal to the FX for the parts which are using FX,they are either full on or off,a bit non sensical when you have to share 3 Global efx,it would be more sensible when sharing efx,if you could just add a little wet signal for some parts,ok its workable,but a little frustrating when all you want to do is apply a little bit of modulation to some drum parts,rather than swamp them and full on or nothing.the only way around it is to use a single efx for one sound,which is a waste of an effect when you only need a little bit of Modulation

Good box of tricks and pretty easy to create your songs,and some strange noises,personally now though If I was to choose a groovebox,I think I'd opt for the MC808 or the Older 909,the 808 has more multitimbrality and its not limited to mono notes on each track like the EMX,This is where it lags behind,16 parts would have been nice and larger polyphony rather than simply just 10 parts and better external control over other deivces would have been nice

The EMX is more aimed at a sort of self contained DJ/Producer,which I think most would possibly have both the EMX and the ESX to get round those polyphony issues and the lack of sampling on the EMX

Yes the lack of polyphony is a downside and that was also in my considerations when buying this thing, but I won't be using this as a productionstation, as the concept indicates. It was more intended to be a drummachine, for basslines and 303-like sequences. A software editor would have been nice for the synthsequences. So far that's what I have feelt most confortable with, especially when using the 201 with its softwarepart. That works like a matrix and it's easier to control each note.
For the onboard drumsounds, I am fully satisfied, as I was mostly after the standard 808 and 909 sounds. The drumssounds fits my needs. They are completely what I was looking for. I miss the 808 cowbell though

I'm considering buying an EMX too, to replace the ER mk2... It sounds to me like it has deeper basses than my ER mk2... Have some fun with it!