@anomalous jamming was the problem for me. I wanted to use it to play beats that I made on the OP-1 in a live set up. DJ mixer with the SP on 1 channel and the OP-1 on the other. At first, I sampled each individual track to separate pads. It was really tough to hit even more than 1 pad at a time at exactly the same moment to get the samples to line up. So when that failed, I sampled full 4-track beats to different pads, but it was still hard to switch between loops in a fluid way for me. The pads on the SP are too stiff for my liking. It has a lot of great features and sounds great, but I never got good enough at using it on the fly. Maybe with more practice I could have made it work.
@sammyjamsIs this what you were trying to achieve? Here I extracted loops from ableton projects, 1 for drums, 1 for main loop+bass, 1 for extra melodic layer and 1 for vocal sample. Basically jamming with them with built in fx. That was a couple months ago and I found more live jam tricks since. It took me a while to get a hang of it but now the SP is my only live performance gear. Love it.
Sold my OP-1 as I didn’t use it much while traveling as I moved and now use my bike. Also had a good price for it and still happy with Komplete 7 + Ableton intro + Old Macbook Pro - Novation X-Station - Tascam U800 and DR100Mk2 field recorder. Back to the basics.
I sold my old Yamaha RM1X a few years ago. Still miss it and thinking about getting another one. Sold a roland SP808 at the same time and dont regret it. Sold a Fender Cyber Twin Amp and Roland VS1680 and don’t miss them either.
Those Rm1x’s are the bomb and have become classics I think. Great workflow and limitations and the beat repeat and midi delay fx were awesome. Damn I miss it
Sold a Virus A, Microkorg, MC303 and Yamaha SU10, TG300 and RM1X to get a laptop and Reason. I didn't regret it at the time but now I'm back on a hardware tip, I'm starting to slightly regret all the sales. It's the Virus and (funnily enough) the Microkorg that I miss the most.
Recently I got rid of a Volca Bass. I thought it would be a perfect companion for the OP-1 but I just couldn't get along with it and found I was shoehorning it into songs just for the sake of it. Oh well.....
About a year ago I sold my Akai MiniAK (basically a rebranded Micron). It was just too big and “normal”, and a pain to program. Heavy on presets, low on being explorable. Sold of my Korg MS2000BR too for similar reasons, though I liked that one a bit more and at least it had more exposed knobs for tweaking and exploring. Sold my Electribe EMX-1 back then too, again for similar reasons. The Electribe was fun but it had that Electribe encoder-shorting-out problem that was getting worse and making it less and less fun to use.
A lot of those proceeds went towards getting the Op-1 and Oplab with aluminum case combo. No regrets, especially as the Oplab has become a critical piece of my small setup.
I’m doing another purge this year and the main thing to go is the Akai MPC500. It’s a good looking and decent sounding little box but the UI is horrible and while I was able to put together a few good little beats (and some experimental/noisy crap) with it over the years, I could never put together a complete song or a rich loop. I’m more interested in sample manglers like the Microgranny and have my eye on either a Phonogene or Octatrack for grander manipulations; the MPC500 just has little in the way of real-time manipulation and I understand that’s not its target or strength now.
Also about to ditch my guitars. I never get past learning a couple of scales. So to hell with six strings - I just want more cigar box guitars now!
Back in the day when I was painfully ignorant about analog synths in general, let alone vintage gear (like 8-9 years ago), I got into the possession of a Moog Sonic 6 duophonic synth, totally free of charge. It was originally purchased by the Hungarian State Radio in the early '70s, they used it to record sci-fi tunes and other noises for radioplays, then it went out of service and for decades sat on a shelf in the same room where my cousin used to work as a sound engineer. He would always tell me about this obscure instrument and how forgotten that was by practically everybody at the radio. In the '70s, the socialist model of economy was wildly popular in our country so no goods were officially allowed to import from Western countries, hence the Moog was kinda smuggled into Hungary. It was never taken into any inventory, officially it never existed. This I knew from the cousin. It took me quite a few years to talk him into grabbing that synth and ‘deliver’ it to me. (through his office window, in the middle of Budapest, in broad daylight… like in the movies… ). So, I had it finally, took it home, powered it up, started fiddling with the knobs and sliders, but then wasn’t much impressed by the sound that I love so much today. I just didn’t find it cool enough so, without much thinking, I swapped it for a desktop synth module, a Novation I guess (that is also long gone…). Here’s where the story of my analog-ignorance ends. In hindsight, I think this was just fair trade; got a vintage synth worth of US$ 3-4000 as a kinda soft-snap, a giveaway, but I was neither worthy of it, nor ready for it, so it went to someone who knew what he was dealing with. Still, my eyes start twitching to this day when I think about what a fool I was.
