DnB sound module

Giganova

Giganova

gimmi your mic!
hi there --

what's your favorite Drum-and-Bass sound module? I am looking for some rack gear. Tried Reason and lots of other soft synths, but I hate creating music with a mouse coz it suffocates my creatives juices. I prefer knovs & sliders and a MIDI keyboard. Any ideas?
 
ENU ORBIT maybe...

Have you check'd out the EMU racks? They seem to be a good price and then they have that expandsion slot so you can add a little something to flip that up some. They seem to be pretty go at focusing in a a certain type of electronic music. I think the ORBIT line os geared towards the tecno and dance styles.
 
Yeah, nice 1 Lazi. The orbit and the phats are all dance based but the beauty of the modules or command stations is that they take the expansions and there are some great roms out there.
 
For which part of the music? Drums? Bass? Lead? All of it?

Emu's good
Virus'
ms2000
nords...
Roland

It's all in knowing the instrument.
 
If I was to flip to doing techno/dance styles of music being that i'm mostly hip hop i'd probably grab a MO PHATT and the ORBIT card. If iI was more dedicated to techno and dance then it'd be a ORBIT and a ORCHESTRA card. Really though that damn 2500 takes something like 4 cards and runs with 32 midi channels... That's perect for all the changes in a techno beat if you got the sequncer to handle that.

To top that off I peeped that they have the YAMAHA A4000's refurbished for $250. I'd have to cop one of these with a hard drive and load up the memory damn near for for the efx and filters alone. But the amount of custom crap you can hold in one of these things a the hard drive. I'm wishing I had 250 to blow like a bad boy right now. It can auto sample other mid devices.... Seeing as how I personally never had a problem with refurbished stuff.... I'd get it.
 
thank y'all for your reply! I'm looking for lead sound.

My current setup consists of an EMU XL-7, Korg MS2000, Oberheim OB12, Korg EM1 and tons of soft synths, which I don't like too much. I guess I might get the most mileage for my money if I'd install two sound banks in my EMU, maybe the Soundgarden and the Techno, or the MoPhatt. MoPhatt is a bit too hip-hoppy for my taste, though, but I figure its perfect for you, Lazi. My EMU XL7 has all the Proteus 2000 sounds already built-in, so I guess adding these ROMS would be a nice addition. BTW, Lazi: the Orbit has two sound banks installed, the Techno and the SoundGarden. These two ROMS combined are more than $100 less than the Orbit module, so I guess I'd be better of adding just the ROMS.

I just listened to some sound samples form the microKorg. This little box sounds amazing -- especially for DnB! Unfortunately it has these tiny little keys, which I figure are totally useless if you actually want to play that thing. Is there anything else (exotic?) on the market I might not be aware of?
 
The micro korg basically has the same engine as the ms2000, except with new patches. In other words if you know how you should be able to pretty closely replicate those patches on the ms2000. Have you been to the korg site and tried any of the extra ms2000 soundbanks? Check it out...

If it's lead sounds you want it's hard to beat the nord lead series.
 
hi subtractor --

uhhh, I wasn't aware that there are different sound banks for the MS2000 online. I'll check that. When I listened to the microKorg sample songs, I was wondering how I could re-produce that with my MS2000 after I read that they use the same oscisllators. They sound dramatically different compared to the MS2000.
 
Yo GIGs.... If you just got some money burning a hole in your pokects it sounds to me like you might want a sampler of some type. Thats why I kicked in that A4000 bit in.... Most people think about sampling other peoples music when they think about samplers but a sampler really opens up the doors to some creativity. You can sample anything you got for any reason. Even use the thingas a phrase multitracker. Export your 4 or 8 measure recordings to a wave file and resequnce from there with efx and envelopes or whatever . Just crazy possibilties. I think with the hardware you got you'd save yourself some midi channels to sample some o that stuff to on source.

I could go on or days about but I want somebody to agree with me.

But for real one thing I see is that with out spend a dime you got some tweaking to do. I've heard the MS and it's dope. Think about sampling some stuff of that...
 
subtractor -- I've just dumped the new presets on my MS2000. Wow -- they sound awesome! They transformed my "vintage 80s sounding" MS2000 into a cutting-edge dope machine. Perfect for what I need it. Thanks again for drawing my attention to the downloads. I've also installed new patches on my OB12 and they are dope, too. Maybe I don't even need a new sound module or synth!?

Lazi -- I saw that the A4000 is (or was) cheap as hell now at samash.com ($399.-; list: 1,595). The A5000 is just 499 (list: $2295). The thing is: I never figured out what a sampler is good for. My EMU XL-7 is a sampler, too, but I never used that feature. I don't even use the soft samplers that I have in Logic. I mean: if I have audio samples, I can just as well drag & drop them into Logic, so what's the point of having an outboard gear sampler? I think I don't get the concept ... stupid me :confused:
You are right that I have some funds right now. I've got a MusiciansFriend credit card with a 500 buxx spending limit. I want to max it out and was wondering how I could improve or expand my sound. MusicinsFriend has the A5000 for 900 buxx but I figure they have to match the prices if we tell them. But as I said, I'm not sure what I could do with a sampler.
 
subtractor said:
I just learned there's a ms2000B out now too....
FUCK! I hate having outdated shit!
Click to expand...
well, they just painted it in black and added a shitty microphone for the vocoder. Not a big improvement IMHO.
 
^ That's what i'm talking about... Remanufactored though... If I had three bones to drop it'd be on one of those, some memory, and a small internal hard drive. I already got a spare zip drive... Just hook all that up on a MPC and Damn!!! Another fifty bucks and grab that rack kit for the MCF filiter thing and just stick the A4000 on that.

GIG it's just be too much to explain what all you can do once you learn a samplers in and out. just think custom kits, custom sounds , and sstuuf like that. Sample a drum sound off the XL or whatever and change the attack, decay, pitch, add efx, merge it with another kick for a new sound, resample it at 12 bit for a grimey effect, man the list goes on. Make loops for sound efects and they don't even eat up but one note of polyphony... Say you make a drum loop on the XL and you konw it's just gonna loop without many changes. Sample it and trigger it from the sampler rather than eating up all those midi channel. Now it's just one note. Those are just some examples but it's wide open as far as what you can sample. Then you can resample that...

Of course there's a learning curve if you don't know much about even evelopes and crap. All worth the learning though... It took me over a year to even look at my ASR-X's enigine but now I feel like it's the most powerful sound engine I have cuz I can damn near do what I wanna do.
 
hmmm, sounds cool, Lazi. Unfortunately it seems like samash.com doen't haven the A4000 or A5000 anymore and the A5000 is 1,000 bux at musciansfriend.
 
Lazi, what do you think about the roland sp808ex? I'm with you on the sampler tip. I've never used the a4000, but looking at user reviews at harmony centreal the 808 is rated about 2 out of 10 higher overall. I've still not mastered the full capabilities of the 808, but I'm just wondering how they stack up...
 
GIG- The *remanufactored* A4000 is $250 in the latest sale catalog from Musicians Friend. After rereading the specs on the thing i'm just stuck on stupid. I don't know much about the interfaceand haven't even looked at any ratings or anything. I haven't compared it to the A5000 either but the only thing I can imagine to be better would be a remote control (joking). The thing costs what a efx processor would... And it can be used as a efx processor... I recently found the tempo delay on my ASR_X and plan to use it on vocals all day long...

Sorry but i'm just impressed as hell for tht price eeven remanufatcored ut i still gotta wonder what the problem was. But it'll cost me 50 bones just to upgrade my Peavey SP sampler to read AKAI samlple disks. No efx or wave support at all...

SUB- Man I never really messed with a SP808. When I was shopping around I kind of dissmissed it as a souped up phrase sampler.The phrase sample tricks are there and it's got a mutltitracker but it's just doesn't seem practical for a setup with a lot of gear IMO. Maybe if it had a sequencer (?) for external midi devices i'd rate it somewhere next to a MPC but without it it seems like too much of a standalone piece. Even with a MPC I think that the A4000 sounds like a perfect addtion because of the full sampler, resampler, efx, scsi port and wave support that could be used to share samples with the MPC using a zip drive. I think that's kinda why they label the SP a "remixer" and "groovebox". It seems real good for putting together and filpping up a bunch of loops and single shots but not much else. Kinda more like a hardware version ACID 3.0 (ya know without the VST support). I thinkg i'd much rather use ACID and a software editor.

Comparing to something like a A4000 (from what i've come to understand) it's not the same tool at all. You couldn't make a entirely new synth with it with one waveform I don't think. Wait.... I did a quick search on the net and didin't see dick about envelopes or multisampling or sample mapping but you can really flip the hell of a few sounds I see. Still, just being able to lay a sound out over the keys and set a gang of parameters has proven to be one of the sickest thing i've come across since diigin into programming. A full sampler can be like a MS2000 cept you'd have to find original waveforms and start from scratch. Very time consuming but you can get what you want down to a T with practice and time. Tweak city... If you have a good sequencer and a decent amount of sample sources i'd have to pick a full function sampler over anything gimmicky. Even to a to an certain extent the MPC can map a sample or even multisample sounds to be mapped out to the entire range of a keybaord and even with some decnt envelope settings. I'm pretty sure the A4000 can be a phrase sampler/resampler with efx and a damn good one, with the right seduncer even a better one than the SP (minus the sequncer), but a phrase sampler can't be a full fuction sampler. Makes a good groovebox though...

Good sampler + Good sequencer = Tweak factor to the fullest...

Long post... I'm outta breath...

NOTE: I can't stress enough what a real real bitch learning/using a full function sampler is at times. The songs may even still sound like crap but it's all about you chilling in tweak city. :D
 
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