I know Behringer has a bad reputation for a couple of reasons, but I wanted a TB-303 type hardware machine without shelling out the money I don’t have for an original TB-303 and ended up buying the Behringer TD-3-MO second hand for a hundred dollars. I sort of wanted the yellow case version (TD-3-MO-AM; “Amber”) the most, but my country is pretty small so I took the one I could find. In the end the color of the case doesn’t matter that much, and I can always pick up a yellow one later if I come across it second hand and sell the one I bought to someone else, while having time to do what actually matters in the meantime which is to learn how to use this thing and make some music with it :D
I continue to think Casio is leaving money on the table by not releasing a retro CZ synth. The anti-digital synth bias has mostly faded from electronic music in the current generation. Yamaha and Korg and Behringer and Elektron and others have cashed in on FM nostalgia. Only Behringer is operating in the hardware phase distortion space, and their implementation is cheap but worse than a real CZ in some dimensions (more limited polyphony, terrible capacitive keyboard). Korg just boxes up a Raspberry Pi in a sturdy chassis with a decent keybed and some knobs and sells it at a huge markup. No reason Casio couldn't do that, too. I'd love a new CZ synth.
Disclaimer: I'm an admin there.
I still love them though. Phase distortion can make some really great noises with a bit of coaxing.
I have the bigger CZ-5000 with the built in sequencer I bought used in the 90s and still play. I think it was probably used most famously by Drexciya but the Kevin Saunderson "Reece Bass" sound was everywhere in early jungle.
I like this CZP-1 soft synth. It's pretty nice once you flip the flow from left to right to top to bottom.
I have CZ-101 and CZ-5000, I tried many emulations and wrote some myself but I also read technical manuals and what goes on analog side, after DAC, oh boy. The synth is is digital at the core but the sound is very much shaped by the rest of the synth.
I love that machine.
Something like a Yamaha CK61 would give you pretty light weight and compact 61 note battery powered keyboard with, I think, pretty good samples.
I have the bigger CK88 hammer action version and like it a lot.
I was just listening this week after not having listened in some time, as it's the 30th anniversary of Hi Scores.
Then we stopped at the Spar and got pizzas, and a coffee for me and a hot chocolate for him. "Dad, can we listen to something else now, like Rage Against the Machine?"
He's six but he's being raised to appreciate the classics. We bargained and converged on Iron Maiden - Somewhere in Time for the second half.
Yes, we did see the Shiel Bridge goats, but they were back nearer Kintail this time.
"yeah you just don't get the warmth and expressiveness from these shitty digital synths that you do with the Juno 106 which has 16 knobs and makes basically four sounds, oh that track, yeah it's all done with Serum..."
- recreation of a classic patch used in a well known song
- showing off some new-for-its-era feature
- Wow, how did they do that? I'm going to reverse engineer this patch and learn some things