Category: Gear
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Arturia Microfreak Review
Well I finally found some time to learn the Microfreak’s sound design. Until now I had mostly ARP-ing the Presets and tweaking the low pass filter of course! And so now, diving into the Mod Matrix, I can see why this synth receives so many plaudits, Arturia have stuffed this synth full of features, but…
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Synth Stands
While dedicated synthesizer stands are ideal for full-sized keyboards, laptop stands have emerged as surprisingly effective and versatile solutions for smaller synths, drum machines, and grooveboxes in desktop studio setups. Their primary benefit lies in their ability to elevate these compact devices, bringing them closer to eye level and improving ergonomics. This simple elevation can…
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Arturia RackBrute Hack
I picked up a used Arturia RackBrute a while back to pair with my MiniBrute 2s and dip into the modular world. I got a good price… but it only came with 2 of the fixing screws. No problem I will grab some bolts from the garage and figure it out, except it turns out…
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Roland TR-8 Repair
I picked up a bargain priced TR-8 with X0X expansion on the used market. To be good to be true, right? Right! Whilst the unit sounded great, I found that half of the drum pad keys were getting stuck. I gave it a quick spray of switch cleaner, which was only a temporary fix before…
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Drumbrute Impact Review
Legacy The Arturia Drumbrute Impact is a popular and affordable analog drum machine. A while back I had the larger original Arturia Drumbrute, it was easy to use and tons of outputs, but it had a large footprint and most importantly I did not like the sounds all that much that it produced. Here is…
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PreSonus Eris 3.5 Review
Until recently I was using an old Denon Hifi as my main monitoring solution in my home studio alongside a variety of headphones. The system was proving unreliable, so I looked around for a compact and budget monitor speaker solution, and the name PreSonus Eris 3.5 kept coming up in the searches. I knew that…
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Roland J-6 Review
The Roland J-6 Chord Synth is part of the AIRA Compact series, a line of portable and powerful instruments designed to bring classic Roland sounds to the modern musician. You can check out our reviews of other synths in the series like the Roland Aira T-8 Review. view the Roland J-6 on Amazon Quality Sound…
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Roland S-1 MIDI Control
The Roland S-1 is a tiny 4 note poly synthesizer, that has a great deal of functionality packed into it. Straight away the demos on the device sound impressive and hint at what is to come. Trying to unlock that power and actually use the thing to create new sounds I like, I found to…
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Analog Cravings with the Behringer Crave
The Behringer Crave is a very affordable semi-modular analog synth that offers a wealth of sound-shaping possibilities, available from Behringers store on Amazon. Although this synth is inspired by the classic Moog Mother-32, it brings some unique features to the party too. You will often find it has a central role to play in the…
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Roland T-8 with a MIDI Controller
View the Roland Aira Compact T-8 on Amazon The MIDI implementation chart on the Roland Aira T-8 is quite limited, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I setup the T-8 with an Arturia Minilab 3 MIDI controller to see what works and what doesn’t and finish with a jam. The MIDI implementation of the device…
