Suck factor is high...

[Prague]

Strap-ons. All of them. Period.

 

It was the end of keyboard players expanding the role of keyboard players. They wanted to be guitar players. And the gear didn't offer anything musical.

 

Only Edgar Winter made it work in that short period of time in the early 1970s (and his wasn't made as a strap-on).

[Botch.]

I was gonna welcome Dan South back to the fold, then I noticed the original dates...

 

And I'm also getting depressed, I owned a DX-7, Korg EX-800 (rack version), Roland S-330, and I'm still using my original Nord Lead. Guess I know how to pick em, huh?

 

And I'm still using my Yamaha EX-5, still a good-sounding instrument but so buggy it often doesn't even call up its own Factory Presets consistently!

 

Maybe I'll just go sit in a closet and plunk at my acoustic mandolin.

 

Or, maybe I should grab my Nord Electro, go down to the Blues jam at the Wine Cellar this afternoon, and Thank Bono for tech progress! Yeah, that's it! Good memories, Dave!

[DanS]

Originally posted by Jim Aikin:

The Prophet-VS pioneered some cool technology, but when I bought one I took it home, played it for an hour, and then took it back. The aliasing in the upper part of the keyboard was gross.

--JA

Which is something people apparently loved about it, so Dave Smith kept it for the PEK?

I'm not in love with that "feature" either.

 

From my end, the worst was my Korg DSS-1 Sampler. Heavy as hell, took like 30 seconds to load up sounds (not cool live), had a lousy 256k for ram, and $$$.

[Finale]

Originally posted by marino:

My gallery of horrors:

 

Mirage. Need to say more?

Naaaah. I disagree. I was on cloud nine when I got mine in 1986. OK, the interface was a little hellish (you kind of had to pass through Alaska and South Africa just to go get milk at the dépanneur) but it was reliable and I liked the filters on that thing.

 

Of course, I was poor as a church mouse back then, so you have to take this into account to understand my degree of high satisfaction. I actually kept eating hot-dogs and kraft dinners for months just to save money to buy it.

[alfonso]

Back in the eighties I have owned/hosted some of the synths that have been indicated as most hated here...

I've started with a DX7 and a music mate of mine had the Poly 800.

I agree with every bad thing said about both of them, the DX7 tinny e-piano is a crime against humanity, but the weird side of that Yamaha perversion was interesting...in those years I've done an improvised live act in one of the most important art galleries of Naples, where I was living, and used some tapes (cassette on portastudio) where I had recorded some feedback noises using a mic at the maximum trimmer level moved in an empty room, getting some interesting harmonics, all this through an "Aria" tape delay, hand modulated...on this nasty carpet I had some sequences on Poly 800 that where also sent from the MIDI out to the DX7 while I tweaked by hand operators parameters....well I wanted to be extreme, also because the exhibition was extreme on the "avant-gardness" of the paintings...and I succeded indeed. Was it music? I don't really know, but people were interested.

 

 

Except for this, after a while I got really bored of the DX7, it was like it could do only one thing well, all the other "normal" sounds sucked, cheesy pianos and organs, buffonesque brasses, cold strings, colder basses....awful!

 

Another friend I was recording some music with had an analog pre MIDI Siel synth, that still has, the Cruise, with a poly section and a mono section...I remember some very warm sounds, but a weird structure...

 

From that point I've had a Casio FZ1 sampler, it was only 12bits but sounded really well, I remember the best alto sax sample I've ever heard in my life, plus it had an elementar additive synthesizer with 64 partials...

 

I also had an M1. At the beginning it seemed a great machine, but i've hated it at such a point...only cool thing is that a friend of mine gave me an M1 editor for Atari, maybe illegal, I don't even know if it was a freebie or not, that could make random settings producing really interesting results sometimes...but I got bored soon again.

 

Another crap I owned was the Roland U220...I won't describe why I hated it, but I've learned that a box with fixed pcm data and some crappy effects can kill creativity, it was the same defect as M1.

[Markyboard]

I missed this first go around. For me - Korg Poly 6. Got one as a loaner when my first Memorymoog was in the shop (constantly) back in 84. I took the Poly 6 to gigs and would just beat the poopydoodles out of it. Just not an agressive sound and boring as it gets. I'm amazed when the other forum folks talk about this vintage "beast". Even 20+ years later with Korg Legacy I can't bare to play this. Of course I'm sure it more psychological going back to those traumatic days of hauling the Memorymoog back and forth to Nadines. Oh well just my opinion.

[MusicaL]

Originally posted by eriknorlander@thetank.com:

If I cited the Korg M1, I would surely offend several of my friends in the industry. So I won't.

I will since I don't have any friends in the industry!!!

 

I sold my analog synth, Roland Jx3P which served me well for leads and a great and unique organ sound, my primitive sampler (it was good nonetheless) to buy an M1. I had heard it was the board to own. Man, what a disappointment. I paid top dollar for it too. Couldn't get a decent Piano out of it or a decent EP. No leads to speak of and that thing which they called a sequencer of 3600 notes (from memory)... Huh!!!

 

I was happy to dump that board several years later and buy me a yamaha S80.

 

aL

[F7sound -]

Originally posted by Dave Bryce:

Originally posted by F7sound -:

I'd love to try to circuit bend a Poly 800. I did it to another "suck" synth, the Casio CZ-101, and it's become one of my favorites!

Having heard your music, I completely believe that...

 

Do you have an Evolver, Michael? I'd love to hear what sort of sonic mayhem you'd wring out of one of those...

 

dB

Dave,

 

I'd love to have an Evolver. Closest thing I have is a Voyager RME, which I love and abuse accordingly!

 

[captainmri]

Gotta jump on the Peavey train. My dpmv-3 is one of my favs. Hartley Peavey himself has expressed great dismay over the fact his instruments are deemed 'good for the money' as opposed to 'just plain good'. Your mileage may vary but their equipment has never let me down.

 

My Poly 800? I keep it JUST because it has strap buttons. You never know when you might need to wear a keyboard around the house, I always say.

[Ravi Ivan Sharma]

I bought a proteus MPS. I never loved the sounds, but it was a great 4 zone midi controller. Twice it needed repair. Now it sits in my closet. It makes no sound but is still a useful midi controller. I should have taken the $150 Roguemusic offered me for it a few years back.

[Ed A.]

Originally posted by Markyboard:

my first Memorymoog was in the shop (constantly) back in 84.

I had a similar experience with my Memorymoog back in 82. I got a Memorymoog Plus as a replacement, and it had problems like the Memorymoog I had before it. In addition, I think its sound is highly overrated and is nothing like the sound of "6 Minimoogs" as was advertised. It got boring very quickly.

 

The synth I had that sucked the most though was probably an Alpha Syntauri digital synth I got about 1980. It used an Apple II plus with a Mountain DSP card installed inside. This thing was a POS.

Runners-up were the Roland D-110 and the original Emu Proteus.

[Black Tomorrow]

Runners-up were the Roland D-110 and the original Emu Proteus.

Gotta agree about the Proteus 1. Bought one cheap (now I know why) and gave it away about a month later for free to a guitarist I know. He said it sounds great, but hey, what do guitarists know?

[zeronyne]

Crappity Crap Crap:

 

Roland JX-1, D-5, D-10. Not a single usable sound from that unholy triumverate.

 

Kawai K-1.

 

Korg 707, S3.

 

E-mu Proformance.

 

Akai S01.

 

Anything with Quikdiscs.

 

I would probably add the Roland U110 to this list, but I've never actually heard the sounds due to the hellish s/n ratio of the outputs.

 

Yamaha TQ-5. They should be ashamed of themselves.

 

Kurzweil K150.

 

And yes, I've owned all of these gems.

 

I actually liked the Bit99/Bit01.

 

And Dave, the OS on the TX16W made the S550's seem as simple as an ATM machine.

[DafDuc]

Ha! I like my TQ-5. Like DX-7's too, but fail to find anything likeable about a DX-9 (or 21 or 27 or 100). Never owned any of those.

 

Worst synth I had to use was an cheap Korg from the early days of midi, which used phase distortion synthesis, IIRC. Forget the model number, but it was awful. Belonged to my bandleader at the time - '84 or so.

 

Worst synth I owned, not counting my PSR-6 (because it's a toy), was a Roland XP-10, but I still kinda liked it. I just liked the rest even better. Well, maybe not the U-110, but it only cost me $75...

[resigned]

Worst synth ever was the Seiko synthesizer (I think it was a model DS-250 but Seiko only made one synth so the model doesn't matter). A school had one donated to their music department and they hired me to help them figure out how to use it. It was the poorest excuse for an instrument I ever played and I encouraged them to sell it to a student for cheap and buy something useful.

 

Worst synth I ever personally owned was the original Emu Emax. The most memorable feature was a dedicated function called "Bird Run" that caused a cartoon bird to run across the small LED display. Poor excuse for a sampler. I got it as part of a trade for some PA gear and luckily I soon traded it even for a cherry Korg CX3.

 

These are all stories from the 80's. In modern days the worst synth I have owned has been the Yamaha Motif ES 8, which I recently sold. I just never felt comfortable or musical with it, I hated the piano sound (both internal and from the AP expansion card), and towards the end I used it only as a controller for softsynths. And mLan sucks too. I've got several friends who went through similar trials and are selling their Motifs too while they can get decent money for them.

 

BTW: I would defend the Ensoniq Mirage as one of the most innovative and useful keyboards of it's day, and the Korg Polysix which was one of the first affordable polyphonic synths and equally useful. They were both also excellent learning tools for sampling and additive synthesis. I made a good deal of money in the 80's with these two instruments.

[Dave Bryce]

Originally posted by 09:

And Dave, the OS on the TX16W made the S550's seem as simple as an ATM machine.

I dunno, Sam...

 

The S550 had this amazingly annoying quirk that if you edited a sample you them had to save it, exit sample edit mode, and either import the newly edited sample into an existing program or create a new program for it before you could ever hear what your edit sounded like.

 

...and God help you if you tried to do anything of any substance without having the thing hooked up to a video monitor...

 

Man, I hated that thing...as I said earlier in the thread, I still have a slight disdain for all samplers as a result of that POS.

 

dB

[RABid]

Can my most hated also be one of my favorite? Yes? Great. MiniMoog. Loved the sound. Drove me batty on stage. Between hot lights and occasional burst of cool air from the air conditioning or open doors, mine would not stay in tune on stage. Nothing kills the mood faster than hitting the first note of your solo and finding that during the first 90 seconds of a song osc 2 has managed to drop horribly out of tune.

 

Worst sounding synth I ever owned Crumar DS-2. I bought it while frustrated with the MiniMoog in hopes that it would stay in tune, which it did. The sound was anemic. It was good for sound effects but not much else.

 

Worst sounding synth I ever tried Akai AX-60. To me it set the standard for thin and lifeless. It really made me appreciate the sound of my DX-7.

 

Robert

[Tonysounds]

For me, the worst synth was the DX7....that sound was so ubiquitous at the time, that it made me change to bass. Its sound bugged me so bad it made my teeth hurt.

[JeffLearman]

I agree that the poly 800 was a huge disappointment.

 

I got a Juno 60 when they first came out. Though I liked it a lot, it sucked as a lead instrument, and shortly after I bought it, the Kork Polysix came out and I wished I'd waited a bit longer.

 

A year or so later I was considering ditching the Juno and upgrading to a MIDI keyboar, and checked out the latest "replacement" for the polysix - the 800. UGH! It had NONE of the charm & warmth of the polysix, and really sounded like crap.

 

Big disappointment!

 

Other than that, my least favorite synth (also one I've never owned) is the DX7. I think that instrument led to the downfall of keyboards in the 80's.

[The Real MC]

For high suck factor, a lot of softsynths today fall under that.

 

I LOVED the DX-7. Everybody was selling "obsolete" analog synths at rock bottom prices to buy a DX-7. DX synths sounded liked crap and were impossible to create your own sounds, so I bought cheap analogs instead We need another DX-7 so vintage analogs can become cheap again. I wrote a letter to Electronic Design back in 2000 that got printed.

 

OB-Mx. Most anticipated polysynth with the biggest disappointment, and it had a shady R&D history that doomed it.

 

Ensoniq boards have always sounded lifeless and brittle to me. I can instantly pick out an Ensoniq piano on a recording, they had an identity and it was pretty bad.

 

I've been a happy Memorymoog owner since 1986. It has lost CEM3310 EGs and CEM3360 VCAs, but it never blew up oscillator cards...?!?

[Dave Bryce]

Originally posted by The Real MC:

Ensoniq boards have always sounded lifeless and brittle to me.

Me, too.

 

I kinda didn't mind the ESQ-1 nor the TS10/12, but the rest of them didn't appeal to my ears at all.

 

dB

[kad]

Originally posted by The Real MC:

Ensoniq boards have always sounded lifeless and brittle to me. I can instantly pick out an Ensoniq piano on a recording, they had an identity and it was pretty bad.

Indeed! It is really tough to out-suck an Ensoniq. I remember how everyone was ga-ga when the Mirage first came out because it "played samples". I thought it was the worst-sounding POS I had ever heard at the time.

[JeffLearman]

Originally posted by The Real MC:

[QB]I LOVED the DX-7. Everybody was selling "obsolete" analog synths at rock bottom prices to buy a DX-7. DX synths sounded liked crap and were impossible to create your own sounds, so I bought cheap analogs instead We need another DX-7 so vintage analogs can become cheap again.

LOL! That's a side of it I never considered. I guess I should have been shopping for used gear in those days.

Ensoniq boards have always sounded lifeless and brittle to me. I can instantly pick out an Ensoniq piano on a recording, they had an identity and it was pretty bad.

Even with MR76 & ZR76? I think those pianos are as good as and often better than the better ROMplers of today. I mean, I love real Yamaha pianos, but their digital pianos sound dull and lifeless compared to the Ensoniqs, which fit with a gazillion other sounds in what, 4 MB?

 

Lemme know if you want to hear clips.

[ITGITC]

Originally posted by Dave Bryce:

Well, we already have a thread about people's favorite synths...

Where is this thread? Can we ressurect it?

 

I'm tired of hearing all the bitchin' and moanin' (which is why I left the house for a beer the other night).

 

Frankly, I think we've got it pretty good today... With Casio making $300 boards for Radio Shack. Wowza.

 

But synths... lead synths... polyphonic synths... I wanna hear about old favorites and what you replaced it with... and perhaps what context it was used - name a tune that where it was used.

 

OK, I'll start. The tune is Doobie Brothers "What a Fool Believes" and other songs on that album. Now, I think that was an Oberheim 8-voice setup with filters that would open and close in kind of a 'wah' fashion when the note was played. Since each Oberheim module was completely separate, yet each was a tiny bit different from another, what you got was truly a chorus effect of individual voices. So, this has got to be one of my favorite polyphonic synths. I've heard nothing since that could replace that sound of the individual modules.

 

For solo synth, I'm sticking with the Moog from the old ELP albums. I haven't heard anything that can replace that sound either... not really. Those filters were there just to make me have accidents in my pants.

[RABid]

Originally posted by Is There Gas in the Car?:

Where is this thread? Can we ressurect it?

 

...

Where is Sven when you need him?

 

Here is one about favorite keyboards ever owned.

 

Using the search function I also found topis about Favorite Soft Synth, Favorite current synth, favorite etc...

 

Robert

[ITGITC]

Originally posted by Rabid:

Originally posted by Is There Gas in the Car?:

Where is this thread? Can we ressurect it?

 

...

Where is Sven when you need him?

 

 

Robert

You are a cruel man.

[Ed A.]

Originally posted by Dave Bryce:

Originally posted by The Real MC:

Ensoniq boards have always sounded lifeless and brittle to me.

Me, too.

 

I kinda didn't mind the ESQ-1

I could never understand how a company that had such promising early products (Mirage, ESQ1), could later lose their direction so badly. There was a period of well over 10 years (maybe even 15 years?) from the release of these two instruments until they tried something different with the Fizmo. IMO, the Fizmo might have been a hit if first, it wasn't purple, and second, they chose another name for it. Maybe something like Ensoniq Aurora, but anything would have been better than the name Fizmo.

[Finale]

Originally posted by Is There Gas in the Car?:

Originally posted by Dave Bryce:

[qb] Where is this thread? Can we ressurect it?

 

But synths... lead synths... polyphonic synths... I wanna hear about old favorites and what you replaced it with... and perhaps what context it was used - name a tune that where it was used.

 

Yeah, but what exactly is a synth?

Do you consider ROMplers as synths?

Is a synth equipped with a sequencer a workstation or a synth?

Is a Vocoder a synth?

Why is a synth called a synth anyways?

 

I think we are not ready for such a thread yet, without opening at least 7 or 8 threads about the definitions of what is what and let them grow up to 500 replies each.

[RABid]

Originally posted by Cydonia:

Do you consider ROMplers as synths?

Yes. If it has filters, eg's and other means to alter the sound then it is a great synth. One with more osc waves than just saw, triangle, sine and square.

 

Is a synth equipped with a sequencer a workstation or a synth?

Both. Does it have to be only one or the other?

 

Is a Vocoder a synth?

It can be. More likely, a synth can have a vocoder option as part of the synthesis process.

 

Why is a synth called a synth anyways?

 

I think we are not ready for such a thread yet, without opening at least 7 or 8 threads about the definitions of what is what and let them grow up to 500 replies each.

I think you underestimate the crowd that hangs here.

 

Robert

[Soundquest]

Is There Gas in the Car?

 

quote:

 

Originally posted by Dave Bryce:

Well, we already have a thread about people's favorite synths...

 

 

Where is this thread? Can we ressurect it?

 

+1

 

Even a new one can be interesting.