If it's just for fun, it's ok. For people like me who had to work with these machines in the 90s, everything's soo much easier today. Still got some old gear for nostalgic reasons, but never use them for production.

For example, you only have 2 FX engines. If you want to use more than one sound at once (Performance Mode), you have to decide which sound can have it's FX and every other sound has to use these FX or none at all. So most presets sound dull and dry in mutitimbral mode, which was one of the most annoying caveats of these romplers back in the 90s.

 

dont be lazy! these synths are supposed to be difficult.. if you got everything you wanted in life everything you can dream of and not dream of..
what would you do next? if you had everything you ever wanted.. what are you doing next?

 

One of the things we (my former bandmate and I) didn't use in the 90s are onboard FX, because we used much better sounding outboard ones, but we surely used those additional outputs. Always craved more of those. They did usually have ok sounding modulation effects like chorus-phaser-delay, but reverbs were a no-no.

Interestingly, I still don't like to use any "onboard" reverbs you get with the synth plugin. Old habits die hard. Oh, the reverb on my Yamaha A5000 is really not that good... or the one in Akai S3200, but the latter sounds usable, actually. "Osirus" (Virus) has an interesting sounding reverb...

 

That's my kinda philosophy. Why would you have it easy when you can have it hard?!

The thing is, when you're dealing with something unknown, unfamiliar, it can get the creative juices going. It's an exhilarating feeling. But hey - different people have different workflows. What matters is to find your workflow and if it works for you, stick to it.

Cheers!

 

Lazy? What we dreamt of in the 90s?

Ok, let's go! Restrict your DAW like Studio One to 8 mono (4 stereo) audio tracks assuming you had a sub 8.000$ 8 track analog or digital tape recorder like me. Or 16/24 mono tracks if you had the opportunity to use a way more expensive recorder and mixer alone.
Then use one of the tracks to sync it to the Atari, leaving 7 (or 15/23 tracks if you were rich or in a commercial studio). EQs were 3-way with a fixed low and high band and a semi parametric mid band. If you had the money, you had one or more compressors and EQs and one or more reverbs or multi effects. And not to forget pay hundreds of bucks for some hours of track time on tape.

Being a big fan of analog audio and tape machines since I was a kid, I'm more than happy to have a modern DAW with more possibilities than you could have ever dreamt of back then.

 

i would like to get recommendations for the roland expansion boards.. i have orchestral but i thought hip hop or techno to buy but what do you think which one should i get?

 

Dance and Vintage expansion boards are most popular. And expensive. And hard to find. These cards are best for making dance and pop electronic music. Strings expansion sounds nice as well.

You can get a preview of the JV expansion cards with Roland Cloud SRX modules. Look them up. You can find them at AZ for a test drive. The cards are also compatible with other JVs and JDs.