Your First Synth: What was it? Have you still got it?

Hey
I wrote an article on affordable first synths: Your First Synth

Mine was the Novation A-Station, which I still have and absolutely love! I bought a Darkstar XP2 after that which was…mehhh…not so great!

How about yours? What was it? Do you still have it?

midierror

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My first synth was: MC-303, and second was Microkorg.
Still have them, but like all of my synths, don’t use them much.

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Roland JP-8000 and I still have it, don’t think I ever used it in a song as I hated Cubase and the other few software that could do midi at the time

Mine was the MC-303 too! I think I got rid of it when I got Ableton on my laptop, but I spent countless hours programming beats, row by row, on those chicklet keys.

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Yamaha CS1X in 1996, not in use since at least 20 years.

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Yamaha SY85 bought in 1995… no longer with me, but I do still have an AKAI K5000w I got in '97! Still pull samples from it every now and again, too

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Roland Juno 106. Simply a sweet synth with sounds that fix the 80’s to a “T” IMO. I’d still have it except some scumbag(s) broke into our storage unit, on Christmas Eve no less, and made off with it. Never recovered it.

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Wow nice!! I love both those machines, but only recently discovered the Microkorg uses the MS2000 engine! So you technically have one of those too. Do you have any Emu / Ensoniq things?

Ah wow, I know it’s a great synth - it’s here in Tim Wrights Studio: https://twitter.com/CoLDSToRAGE/status/1446495998734372870/photo/1

If only there was a Guru patch for it! The Renoise sysex programmer

Yeah some solid sounds on there. I still have a folder of samples off it I must have got in the late 90s!

Synth_035 and Synth_036 sound AMAZING!

Ah, a great synth though! I saw a band called Dr Meaker at Glastonbury and i asked them after what the super dark synth was… it was a CS1X! Do you use the programmer software? it’s bloody amazing!

Oh I got told to buy an SY85 many years ago. Never seen the K5000W, whats it good at?

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Ah man!! Sorry to hear that. They must have been carrying some pretty bad karma since then.

I sold my Juno 6 a few years ago - no regrets but I am still trying to find the final recording session I did with it!!

It was a Quasimidi Raven Max followed up by a MAM B33-II and a QM 307. I sold them 20 years ago.

Wow nice collection! Quasimidi made some excellent gear. The MAM is nice too, I once fixed one for someone by simple re-heating the sodler on it!

scuse me, but what is the “programmer software”? :laughing:
the time i was actively using the CS1X was between 96-00, where i was still using FT2 as my only “DAW” (lol) and CS1x served solely as a sample source.

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It had the bread & butter sounds.

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I’m afraid, it was just affordable and compared to else, the sounds were ugly, except from the MAM B33-II. But I didn`t know it better then. There was no wiki to look at. The QMs were definitely 22,5 kHz Samplers with lots of detuned sounds of the 90s with additional FX.

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My first one was in early 90s, a Roland D-50 which i still have and i still use it a lot in my productions. Today i have several Roland hardware in my studio. D-50, XV-5080, Juno 106, JP-8000, SH-201, Gaia SH-01, System-8, TR-606/707808/909.

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My first was a Korg T3, with built-in sequencer and a disk drive lol. Very similar to the better known M1. Sold it when I was 16 to buy a drumkit instead, but started to miss it when I grew older, so 20 years later I bought it back :slight_smile:

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