Beat Machines

[Loose Cannon]

*(Skip to the bottom if you dont like stories)
One of my friends taught me how to beatbox. He taught me how to bang out beats on the lunch table. And he stole me my first CD. He moved away after that. He just moved back.
I been hangin wit him a lot and i told him about my studio and all this recording stuff i got. And he came over and im teaching him everything i know and now he wants to get into the real stuff too. But he dont want a computer, and he dont have $2000 to go buy an MPC. He wants some Beatmaking Hardware. Something that can sample and/or has hott sounds built in. I think he likes the Boss (Roland) SP-303, but he wants to look around some more.

*Does anybody have any beatmachines they have layin around that they want to sell or they like and think it would be worth buying?


THANKS

 

[Cold Truth]

i say go with the yamaha rs-7000 at this point. this is now dirt cheap (a floor model for $839 at american musical supply.com) and he can get it on payments at that, it is a "sister" to the motif soundset, has 6 outs for mixing, samples, sequences and has decent effects, and all that for a low price as compared to the empty mpc. i do not know how good the sequencer is and the pads really do not compare at all, buti would highly recomend this when considering the alternatives. the emu command stations are $150 cheaper and have an inferior soundset,no sampling, and offer little flexibility as compared to this. the mpc has zero sounds and effects built in, unless you get the 1000 in which case you will be the guinea pig for its initial bugs and flaws. and you still have no onboard sounds. so get this and decent midi keyboard, and for $350 over three months he has a decent "do it all" type hardware piece, and then he can buy a small behringer mixer and cd burner and he has a very good setup for under $1300.

 

[themucka]

i have a asr x i can sell you for $400

how sounds in it,.,...

drums are classic

 

[nas2000xl]

i just sold an asr x a couple of weeks ago for $450.00. dude i sold it to was very pleased.

 

[Formant024]

MPC1000 for 850/950, guaranteed fun, though I do not know their OS update skeme. It bothers me that I'll never see a 1.15 on the 2kXL.

on a note; I don't know why, but the MPC1K has a 5mb rompler. I don't know why since it should be fairly easy to chunk it up with samples, why the need for presets ?.

 

[Loose Cannon]

Ill probly get the Akai S20, it aint pro shit, but itll be good to teach him on, and good to make some beats when im bored and id rather be on the couch then in a chair.

Mucka,
Id love to get that ASR X off you but i dont have $400.
Thanks Anyway

 

[bigdmakintrax]

Faced with having sold all of my shidd and then being demoted to software...I don't care what anyone says, I miss the hardware...I had...repeat had the following...Motif..Rs-7000, sp-808, emu sp-12, triton le, mpc2k, mp7....hard times caused me to sell all of my stuff now I am fiening for it back.....software is ok to work with only because I had no other choice....I know all of the pieces above inside out.....Rs7k is aight...I miss it....mpc is aight....I went out and bought a sp505 last week to get me over....I was sooo pissed off at that piece of crap....I took it back the next day....so since I didn't have enuff cash I came up on a mo phatt......it is aight...I had an mp7 but truth is correct....the sounds are not the realest sounding sort of synthetic they got punch don't get me wrong they just sound different from samples.......I cannot wait get my new gear, ,fugg this computer....LOL....sorry but I am from the old school...hahahaha...if you can get your hands on the mpc1000 it looks like the most affordable...BRAND new akai sampler there ever was that has features that are better than some of the previous ones......someone explained something to me that made sense and it kind of solves the beef I had with not always being fully satisfied with the real punch and power my computer production is providing...this guy is a seasoned engineer in a top production studio...he said the reason is because your power source and drive is limited and anything done on a computer or casio a cheap piece of gear will lack the low end punch that gear design for real studio production....he said you could buy one of the casio keyboards and hook it up at his studio but it will never have the punch and bottom of one of the other keyboards like the triton or motif...it has to do with energy and power output and samples too ( a little)....same goes for computer based production, but if you run your output outside to a preamp and mixing board you might get some close results compared to the punch you get from a seasoned engineers analog mastering setup.....most of those places use a combination of software and some external mastering via analog to get those real punchy high quality tracks you hear on a Rocafella or Neptunes or Timbo tracks.....bottom line try and save your money a lil longer, wash cars or mow lawns, shovel snow get some good gear that will last...splurge on the akai gear....you will like the investment....

 

[B.Hawk]

i suggest an asr-10. thats what i started with and i ended up with some hot shit

 

[DjDelay]

Bigdmakintrax you say you had an rs7000, what did you think of it? I'm gettin one this sunday, and its going to be the first major investement for me. It gonna go along with my new computer, midi keyboard and 2496.

What role did your rs play if you had all those other machines?

 

[Freakwncy]

Zoom 123... mad cheap and dope...

 

[bigdmakintrax]

RS7000 is very powerful and it has lots of preset phrases you can alter, overall I think it is a very good production piece....I miss mine but I backed up all of the songs that I made onto smartmedia, I have contemplated getting another one....I got it the first week it was released and kept it for about a year.....you will love the RS and it loads samples quickly and you can do a lot of good production with it, the longer you have it the more you will find it can do...

 

[Formant024]

I wennt for the mpc2kxl when It just came out, I considered the specs worthy enough to build my setup around it. Now I use two. Then a few years later they come up with the 1kxl. It sorta pissed me off since it's smaller, still has enough midi I/O and features a 3 bus ( wel 2 actualy) fx, assignable sliders and USB. Talking about confort, even the price tag was lowered and you're not losing any specs to the 2kxl. But I am not willing to sell one mpc2kxl in order to buy a 1kxl, damn those assholes @ akai.

I never liked the spx0x series, not enough seq. not enough power. weird interface. The motto, how much can we embed, doesn't come to it's right when talking about limitations.

@ BigD.The summing of the internal busses on a Digi 01 for example, is done with algorithms and number crunching, so naturally it's your biggest compromise when you're trying to fit 48 tracks onto two. The summing of a an analogue desk, even a cheap one, is greatly improved because it's using voltages rather than numbers. "What is wrong with digital processing?" in some cases the answer is quite a lot. Basically it comes down to either not enough silicon or not enough knowledge, or both. There are certainly digital audio products which are engineered to superlative standards but theres also a lot of stuff, particularly inside PC s' which truncates (not dithers) the audio signal to ridiculously small internal word lengths, or doesn't interpolate coefficients, or uses on -screen controls with far to little accuracy or other basically silly techniques.

 

[bigdmakintrax]

Hey formant you are an engineer fa sho.....also you are correct about the processing.....if you are not using a sound card that has a kernel independent of wdm....then you get major loss on what you could get as far as maximum sound retention, and also you lose out on all of the sub level frequencies that are responsible for punch and hi quality audio reproduction usually associated with analog mastering and production....and there you go again you also gave a good explanation why sounds tend to thin out as you mix on a computer for some reason especially if you have more than 4 or 5 tracks to mixdown....

 

[Formant024]

A bit further on kernel, you know how OSx works ?

 

[Noace]

I've owned an RS for about 4 months now, I used FL before and can honestly say that the RS is a dream come true. Not to say FL can't do the same things, but the RS is a "monster" if you use it right. The only flaws is the mediocre pitch changer and only 64mb of sample memory...AHHHH!!!! not enough!!!

other than that, you can crank out pretty much any style of hip hop/rap w/ this baby, depending on your sample library. I've gotten the cleanest/punchiest beats (ala Dre) to grimmy Madlib/Rza type shit out of this baby. And the best part is...she's damn cheap man!

 

[Formant024]

can anybody tell me how many midi I/O it has and the amount of midtracks are offered. Is it like 99 mpc style or 4 to 6 roland style?

 

[eka]

My sampler is a Zoom sampletrak st 224.
I love that machine.
it has it's own sequencer, drumpads like their drummachines, resample function and some weird ass fx.
the only setback is that it is 32 hz and not 44.1 but it has a sound of it's own. I like that but not everybody does.
a friend of me has a roland sp 303 wich is a bit more expencive and it's sound is better but he likes my zoom for it's drumpads, they are very nice to work on.
it's a pretty cheap machine for about $200,-
http://www.sonicstate.com/synth/zoom_st-224.cfm

 

[bigdmakintrax]

It has 2 midi channels...RS...A and B and a thru....so 2 ins and 2 outs...which is perfect...

 

[Formant024]

cool, just like the mpc.

how many tracks though? I mean, roland tends to supply sequencers with 4, 6 or 8 tracks, which just isn't enough opposed to the mpc's 99.

 

[bigdmakintrax]

I think 16 tracks per section and like 16 sections, anyhow man it is crazy and will do more than enuff for you I think plus it has parts....it is a little more complex in what it can do than either of the MPC2X samplers....it might be more on the level of the the MPC4000 as far as the features that it has......I never ran out of midi channels or audio for anything that I produced it should serve you well....go to their site for the exact specs though....