Hey guys,
Believe it or not, I actually have some money to spend now :>

I'm talkin about gear for all genres, doesn't matter, let's say that I make world music for now in the literal sense.

So I was thinking of making a list of all the hardware effects and instruments that are low in price but high in quality. Alesis Microverb came to my mind.
Akai S-Series samplers were damn cheap too a decade ago, same for Roland Sp404 but Hip Hop producers (finally) caught on

It's my time now to scarf up before it's too late!

You could actually add things like MIDI-Controllers to this list, I'd like to have a motorfader controller.
Icon Qcon Pro is in the same price range as Behringer BCF but has quieter faders, that'd be one example of what I mean


And before people ask: "Whats vintage, a 90s reverb, are you serious?" Yeah dude, we are getting old, ask the Zoomers :/

 

The older Joemeek stuff (like the VC3 channel strip) is pretty good for sub $200 stuff. Also, the Yamaha SPX 90 and 900 you can still find really cheap and you actually will see those in some bigger studios still (mostly for reverb use), as well as the Korg equivalent, the DRV-2000.

 

something like a midi drum pad thing would be useful, I'm thinking of percussion and being able to just reach over and make an interesting loop quickly. if your monitoring setup could use any upgrades that's what I would look into first myself. maybe weird modular effects that you can keep adding onto over time? some of those don't seem to have much plugin equivalents besides in things like softube and vcv.

 

Oh, I completely forgot to add the first Akai MPD series to the list. I personally got myself a second hand MPD 24 and it works like a charm.
The pads are supposed to be soft like tits but pad controller manufacturers nowadays seem to prefer cement implants

Nah, not needed for now. Treating my ceiling by nailing acoustic foam into it because I'm a lazy ass that doesn't like installing the hanging basotect absorber, that'll be my only upgrade for my listening setup for now.

Yeah actually I wanted to get a Korg Volca Drum because apparently you can make really cool sounds with it and it's dirt cheap for a physical modelling drumsynth.

 

Get that Daft Punk Alesis 3630 Dual-Channel Compressor. Send your mix through it with louder drum transients and you have that daft sound

 

89€ on Thomms,
not easy to find this kind of vintage for this kind of cheap..

 

SPX-90 for sure... Roland has tons of reverbs in that $300 region too and imho they're the best. And those Alesis 3630s do kick ass.

 

I swear I didn't see the vintage part before, but reading comprehension meh- who needs it? I am a 2x ex owner of the MPD32 and yeah, as close as I could find to the mpc2000xl pad but they just don't have the same squish. at one point I think I even got extra thick pads but I might be mixing that memory up with the mpc2000xl which I know I got thick pads for. my conclusion was that the bottom part was the thing that wasn't the same, I teach engineering along with classic literature clearly. because of that I ended up not liking the velocity curves too much, or I never figured it out anyway. I think I'd get like one of those Rolands you can use with actual sticks to try now.

 

We all like reverbs and delays, right?

A couple of forgotten units that pop up every now and then for pennies, or sometimes even given away are:

For reverb: Behringer Virtualizer (the original one, not the V-Verb whatever "reissue"), for delay: TC Electronic D-Two.

The Virtualizer is one of those odd things that Mr. Beer Ringer got right by being entirely in the wrong. It was advertized as providing some psychoacoustic bullshit "3D" audio which it doesn't do. But what it does and does like nothing else is these dense otherworldly reverbs. If you do electronic music, say ambient, dub or minimal techno this is your jam. Also fits sparser indie pop/songwriter stuff to make it really sound out of this world. Also built well for a B piece of kit.

And for delays... the D-Two was one of those inbetween kind of things. TC didn't want to give up their stuff for native plugins just yet, but also wanted to approach a more budget conscious user who couldn't afford their high-end studio gear. So you get mostly the same algorithms, but with slight cutbacks.

But oh man... just a delay you say? What's interesting about those these days? Lemme tell you it's a fucked up box. First their "tape" algorithms are just fantastic. Not "realistic", just fantastic. But the whole delay line manipulation is quite something. Apart from the basic "decay time" kind of algos there's a mode where you just say "I want 5 repeats and nothing else" and it does just that. Then being an expansive multitap delay you get control of each delay line, synced/taptempoed/freeform if you like, and things like reverse delays... the way no one else does them. So you can program it to go "Give me 7 repeats only, and first two repeats play in reverse and the rest forward". Brain melting shit.

Also both are designed to fit both studio gear but also things like guitar FX racks so you get a wide range of inputs, digital, balanced, unbalanced with a lot of gain if needed.

And the units I've used were still pristine after years, now I've got a couple of audio fiends who've made permanent places for these in their studios and not a single unit has crapped out.

Be on the lookout.

 

damn, i've seen so many of those original Virtualizers for dirt cheap and had just written them off as the usual early behringer garbage (I do feel they have gotten way better than they used to be though, at least with their synths). Thanks for the tip!

 

Tascam US-2400
Motorfader controller that gets resold for about 500€ in second hand



iCon iStage
Costs around 30€ second hand
Note to myself: code a Reaper script that integrates it as step sequencer, like Launchpad95 does

So it's vintage because it looks like a Fender telecaster sunburst?
That's like saying plugins are vintage because they have GUIs looking like the hardware they were inspired of well, it was a joke anyways

 

you could probably find a decent dbx160 type reissue for a reasonable price like the range $ you are talking about.

 

You got that confused. Virtualizers can be bought for 30$ used and have no digital outs and sound cheap. V-Verbs have several digital outs, are 24bit/96khz sound like Kurzweil Rumors and are hard to find and cost up to several hundred $ on ebay or reverb.

 

I think the first thing you need to think about is what bit of hardware is going to improve how you work and how you sound. And I'm almost certain that cheap (even fairly good) gear isn't going to alter the course of your musical progress.