pouët.net

Used this in a few mods.

I own the one on the top of the picture, I definitly want the one on the bottom of the picture :D

oh and:

funny. i still own a korg n5 and love it, very nice keyboard with aftertouch, and all those lovely korg's pads.

and, you sure can do electronic music with it, why would you need resonant filters for that. ;)

In the early Amiga times i used a sampler, that Virgill built. it was so small, that he kept it in a matchbox. It worked, btu it looked like electronic-waste.

Vortex Tracker 2 :(

Ok, Adlib Tracker II is pretty crappy too. Maybe I'm spoiled...

Gargaj: I actually attended a livecoding party where a dude was making music with an excel spreadsheet looking software. He was typing formulas into spreadsheet blocks and there were some soft of arrow on the left of the whole document to tell him where the playback actually was.

I still prefer IT2.

it's spelt FT2.

Thank god I listened to my cynical side and never bought an MC-303; it seems like almost everyone that did regretted it! I remember at the time (as a teenager who was very plugged-in to what was current in electronic dance music) that it seemed like a lot of the hardware manufacturers were totally missing the point with all this 'groovebox' shit. Still, they all made huge bank in the late 90s (except Quasimidi, apparently...) so obviously they must have been doing something right.

Gloom, et al: I had a Supernova for a while. The tonal quality wasn't the best but I liked it a lot because it was, for me, quite easy to coax unusual sounds out of.

ton: I ended up using mine as a controller-keyboard only, for that very reason. As a piece of music-making hardware I hated it, but as a keyboard controller it wasn't bad.

4mat: that's one of Yamaha's old FM-based home keyboards, right? I had one even crappier than that that I think I sampled once or twice...

I dunno, name me any synth by Casio that doesn't suck, really (seeing a lot of Casios above). They're a watch company, ffs.

Ah yes, and I cannot find a screenshot anywhere, but my contribution to this thread is a horrible wave editor called SoundFX rather like Audacity which I used on Mac 7.6.1 rather a while ago.

It had amusing effects filters including one called Robotize, iirc. It was good enough for making custom system and program noises but that was about it. Between that, AgentSound and ResEdit I had rather too much fun . . . customising my operating system. Or that of exes who annoyed me. : D

Well, in terms of Casio, the CZ-series synthesizers, the FZ-1 sampling keyboard, and the RZ-1 sampling drum machine were pretty neat. I used to have a CZ-101 and regret selling it; one of the only hardware machines I wish I still owned.

In regards to the CS-1X, before bashing it you have to take into account when it was released, who the target audience was and what it cost.

It was released back 1996 (according to VintageSynth - it does sound a bit early to me, I didn't think it hit the market until 1999 but at any rate it was well before everyone started using VSTs and affordable high-quality software processing on the PC). Of course today it makes no sense to use the CS-1X unless you're feeling nostalgic or whatever since you can get better sound quality, filters and whatnot in pure software.
Also, it was quite cheap (like 1100 EURs or so as far as I remember) and as far as I'm concerned it's definitely an entry-level keyboard although plenty of established producers used it at the time (maybe because you can get results quickly and even though it does sound tinny I guess the sound might not bother a wider audience).

So when you think about it that way I don't think it's that bad. I would never use one, and I never used one back in the day but I totally understand why people would use it everything considered.

I'm no musician, but...

I'm pretty sure we had ours in 1996 already, so yeah, VS should be correct.

Also: Multi mode can also be used to make great music, you don't always need performance mode (though creating new performance voices was of course far more interesting).

Oh and the price was also more like 400 to 450 euros, not 1100, that would be a bit too much indeed. :)

Saga Musix might get in a huff about this but I think OpenMPT / ModPlug Tracker is technically a nice tracker with possibly the most ugly interface I've ever seen, comprising almost entirely of what looks like the widget set from Windows 95. (Disclaimer: I'm a total Renoise fanboy - but I do think MilkyTracker is awesome).

As far as equipment goes, I didn't like playing the recorder much. And I did want an MC303 but couldn't afford it, so no mistake made there!

When it comes to candidate for worst software I'd probably say Cubase SX2 (yeah, I haven't used a lot of bad software :)). It was after Emagic dropped the PC version of Logic Pro Audio and I was quite used to the way Logic worked. When I tried to make the move to Cubase I got really upset about things like you cannot move inserts around in the effect chain (they introduced this in SX3 or SX4 I believe). Nobody else seemed to be quite as angry as I was about this but to me it was a total deal-breaker since I experiment a lot and don't like to be restricted in that way. Also, I think the workflow in Cubase SX2 can be very clunky at times. Like... the GUI tends to open several child-windows for no intelligent reason and you have to visit dialogues that should be inlined in the multitrack editor or piano roll editor (I might be spoiled by how Ableton Live works, but still).

When it comes to hardware I'd probably say the Tuba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuba). Have you ever tried playing one of these things? It's fucking IMPOSSIBLE! And it sounds atrocious too ;).

The biggest music retailers around where I lived at the time had somewhat of a GROTESQUE price mark-up so I can safely say that I wasn't that lucky. It did indeed cost around 1000 EURs around my parts at the time. But, lucky for everyone that lived elsewhere I guess ;).

... ooor, I might be thinking of the CS-2X. I guess there might have been a price difference there. Still, everything you say about the CS-1X pretty much applies to the CS-2X too (same tinny sound, same flimsy knobs, same plastic keyboard etc).

That's where taste differs - for me it's the strongest point of the whole program (plus maybe the high compatibility with legacy trackers and supporting VST and such at the same time). For me, the Renoise / Milky / etc. GUIs are a pain in the ass. :) On the other hand, Impulse Tracker rules of course, and if I had to work with a "custom" GUI, it'd rather be an IT-like GUI than a Renoise-like GUI.

I thought the GM set was pretty ok in CS1x :) .. Worked fine as a master keyboard too

..and contributing to the topic, can't say I've ever seriously hated any single piece of hardware enough to consider it absolutely rubbish. Every bit of gear has at least _a_ use, if not _the_ use you're looking for ;)

On the software side though, I'd definitely pick 'Music Shop' on C64. That sure was rubbish.

4mat: omg, I used to have that same Yamaha keyboard! Or one very similar at least, with 100 "voices", if you could call them that. :) That would've been my crappiest hardware used, but then, it was my first.

As for software, my first tracker, er, MOD maker.. ModEdit 3.0. Composer 669 in 2nd place.