The Astounding Yamaha FBO1

Lame little DX module, say you?
When this arrived in 1986 or so, with it's unbelievable EIGHT note polyphony with up to 8 discrete midi channels, all for about $400 bucks, it really was revolutionary. I got mine when it dropped to $299.
Let's remember the little FBO1 as the module that broke that $500 price barrier, bringing multitimbral midi, internal memory, ability to patch edit on a computer and the sound (almost) of the DX7 (only 4 operators for the FB01) to the common man.We're used to our multitimbral workstations and computer instruments, but back in the 80s you needed real cash to get a multichannel midi setup happening. Two of these could be linked for a full 16 note polyphony as well.

It's limitations were also it's strengths. For example the polyphony was not allocated dynamically among the voices. You needed to assign 1 voice to you bass patch, 4 to your string pad, 2 to a percussion thingy, and the last to something else. Accidentally lay a fifth note on the pad? You'll not steal from the churning bass riff. Lack of flex brought control.

At least that's how I thought about it. Anyway, who ever heard of dynamic voice allocation back then? That was Star Wars stuff.

Soon I got two of these and used them on a primitive sequencing setup: A Voyetra sequencer on a DOS PC XT without even a hard drive. The dual floppy discs really were floppy those days. A few other modules for drums, some effects. And I had something going there.

And two of these screwed into a rack nice and neat.

Here's a nice link.

BOSS ME-30

Let's face it, after a bit of practice, any 12 year old can hit an Em power chord on their Chinese built Stratocaster and sound reasonably cool. A soup of distortion will forgive a plethora of sloppy fingering sins. And these days lots of effects pedals are available to give you an incredible palette of ear candy on the cheap.

Hardly a guitarist, I truly appreciate playing by someone who does it well, but lean heavily on sonic enhancement when I play and record guitar myself. My stomp box chain eventually grew to compressor-distortion-chorus-delay-noise gate and required scores of deep knee bends to tweak those knobs and hundreds of 9-volt batteries a month. Arthritis kicked, my tongue became numb from checking batteries and I grew frustrated searching for that combination of knob positions that sounded so good 2 minutes ago.

The BOSS-ME30 seemed plasticy but promised a dozen or more Boss pedal effects under the hood, and was totally programable. Once home, it was actually more solid than it looked in the pictures. It's not idea for performance since tremolo, chorus, flanger pitch shifter — all the timebased effect, as I recall, were under one switch, all the distortions under another, and so on. It wasn't exactly like having all 22 effects (or whatever the number was) strung together; you weren't free to turn one off or on as you wanted as if you actually had all the pedals hooked up in a chain.. But you could make the combinations you needed and just switch up to another patch.

For me it was great. My crappy Fernandes suddenly had 100 personalities (well, 30 anyway) and recordings sounded better. Mostly it was really fun to play.

Eventually I bought a Roland VS-880 digital multitrack and the effects board in there had great patches for guitar along with the added value of them being saved into your song files and being programable in the mix. (Actually I'd recommend an old VS880 with the effects board, or VS880ex, fx built in, as a great effects unit, that happens to have 8 track digital recording included).

I decided I didn't need the ME30 anymore and thought I try that ebay aution site I'd been hearing about to get back some of the $200+ I'd paid for the Boss. To my utter astonishment the ME30 went for almost $400 at auction, far more than I'd paid for it (and I became an instant ebay fanatic).