Buy Low, Jam High
With the pandemic long in the rearview, I think a used gear apocalypse is on us a little bit, and the law of diminishing returns for synthesizers now starts at $100.
Months ago, I was cruising Marketplace and found a Behringer Crave for $100. I didn’t even know what it was. I just bought it. Turns out It’s a direct clone of the Mother-32 by Moog. Sounds amazing. It feels good. It has that analog punch-through factor. I’m no Luddite when it comes to this, but you just can’t get that with digital. There’s just something that happens. I don’t know what the alchemy is, but it’s there. It’s way more fun than $100.
More recently, I came across a Roland Boutique SE-02, which is an actual analog synth and a clone of the most famous Moog synthesizer of all time, the Minimoog. It also sounds incredible. It’s got a freaking delay on it. It has three oscillators. It will shake the foundations of your house. I got it for $200. They originally went for around $500.
Yes, the knobs are tiny—almost comically so—but when you’re setting it up in a studio, or in my case doing a table-beat setup with a Teenage Engineering drum machine and the OP-1, it just works. It’s such a great sound. You can sync it with the EP-40 or the EP-133, those really cool calculator-looking Teenage Engineering sampler/drum machines. It’s all just so fun.
Talking about cheap garbage—this is not garbage, but it is cheap—there’s just some lasting effect when you’ve overpaid for something. It’s like a shroud of lameness that’s a bit unshakable. Like you freaked out, you had to have it, you paid too much. That just doesn’t leave you.
There really is something to underpaying and over-delivering when it comes to the lasting fun factor. Yes, it’s fine when you get it home, but keeping it and playing it over time makes such a difference when you’ve paid well below what you “should” have. I find that feeling lasts until you sell it—but in the case of the Behringer, why would you ever sell it? Just keep it around. Same with the SE-02. It does a lot.
They all have issues. They all have limitations. I won’t bore you with how limitations inspire creativity, but basically what I’m trying to do with this little setup is get to a place where I’m totally fluid, have enough samples, know where they are, and can just endlessly jam and improvise. The goal, obviously, is to be in a small boutique doing some cool shit that nobody really worries about too much. Just, “Oh look, that nice old man in the corner is jamming away and somehow making the place better.”
I’m going to spend the month with my demos trying to chop them up, feed them into this setup, and see what happens. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m going to keep trying. I’ll report back.
The main thing here: buy low and jam high. It always pays off.