New Gear Showcase : 2 Upcoming Acquisitions

A recent windfall with tax returns (being a student really pays come tax time) has resulted in my making two interesting new gear purchases, and in this period of excited anticipation prior to their physical arrival, I thought I'd share the good news here.

My original plan was to use the unexpected dough to buy a new MacBook Pro i7, which in fact was released the same day that I learned of my fortuitous windfall. But I came to my senses (just barely) and decided to spend a fraction of that amount and get a couple new pieces of hardware music gear, and [cough] save the rest.

I should also mention that buying actual hardware is, gear-wise, an interesting turn of events for yours truly. My setup has generally been almost exclusively software-based (not counting a years-old k2000vx that serves as my midi controller, plus a couple guitars and a microphone). A software-focused workflow helps to keep things tidy and organized both in my room and within my DAW, while also avoiding any number of possible routing complications, not to mention keeping things vastly cheaper. And yet, things have been changing, starting last year with the purchase of  the APC-40 controller, then continuing earlier this year with an out of the blue gifted Access Virus-B (which I've yet to use!) and, presently, two new exciting items purchased in the last few days....And here they are:

NATIVE INSTRUMENTS MASCHINE 1.5
I probably don't need to introduce this monster, as NI has been steadily hyping it for the past nine months or so. In any case, the very recent 1.5 update added some DAW-integration functionality (most notably drag-and-drop of midi, audio, or midi rendered into audio from Maschine's sequencer into the host) that probably should have been there the first time around, in addition to a lot of other cool functionality updates. Maschine's beat-slicing ability is pretty irrelevant to me as an Ableton Live user, so what I'm most interested in here is the physical pads themselves, the library content, the software that drives it (which is like a big step sequencer and matrix arranger with various additional bells and whistles) and just using it altogether as a giant drum-sampler workstation. Oh and it looks cool, too.

ENSONIQ ESQ-1
Now this was an unexpected purchase, to say the least, but I couldn't help myself. I stumbled upon this admittedly outdated legend on Ebay earlier today, and my reasons for bidding are as nerdy as they come: this is the affordable, mid-80's digital synth that was put to very extensive use by Skinny Puppy during the late 80's and early 90's, both in the studio and on the stage (extensive but scattered online information will inform you that SP had two of them, and that among other uses it provided the bass and synth-strings on the classic 'Worlock' track from Rabies). From a tech standpoint, the ESQ-1 can't do a fraction of what a majority of modern digital synths can do, but the value here is purely and deeply nostalgic. It's also just a pretty interesting synth: it boasts a hybrid combo of digital oscillators with actual analog filters, the latter of which supposedly are quite excellent. The sound itself represents an interesting period of synth history, when everything was popularly moving toward sample/ROM-based replication of "real instruments" (culminating, you might say, with the Korg M1 in 1988, which shaped everything that followed) and with technology that wasn't quite up to the given task, which is to say, it sounds distinctly digital and crunchy, with notable aliasing -- none of which is necessarily a bad thing for industrial musicians. In any case, I'll be giggling like a madman knowing that I'm programming snappy basslines on the same synth model that Cevin and Dwayne infamously put to use all over numerous seminal Puppy albums.

I'd say that this will be the last of my hardware-purchases for a long time to come, but my word on such a matter is, to say the least, rather dubious. Hmmm do I see a DX7 auction over there....