Boss ME-33

For someone who isn't a guitarist (ok I "play" a little, but take heavy note of the large scale quotes) I certainly have owned a number of guitar related gear. Maybe it's because these devices make creating the recognizable sounds of electric guitar so easy. A little strat piped through a Vox Amp (actual or virtual) puts you right on the beach with the Ventures, and a splash of distortion covers a multitude of technical sins (especially in the studio where you can always do a retake).

Previous posts have included the tale of finding a vintage Ampeg Reverberocket tube amp in the garbage and my experiences with the Pod Line 6 multi-effects unit and the Roland PW-10 Wah pedal. And oh how I loved the guitar effects on the Roland VS-880. Let's not forget the MXR Phase-90 pedal. I've had tons of others, and I'll eventually get to them all.

This post, however, is about the ME-33, a Boss multi-effect pedal, complete with wah style expression for volume, wah and controlling other aspects of the effect. To have it all in one, no more multiple cords daisychaining a bunch of pedals.

And it worked pretty well. Honestly, I don't know if it stacked up to the individual effect pedals it supposedly included, I never had them all there to do some scientific A-B testing. All in all it was pretty sweet. It cost me about $179 and I think it was well worth it.

Downside: an overall smallness to the sound, somehow, lack of travel of the expression pedal, and limited parameters. Sure you could chain a whole bunch of effects, but you could only turn on and off three of those with the footswitches. In the end I came to the conclusion that I always seem to with guitar gear that's worth even a little something: "Hey, I'm not really a guitarist, I could use the money for some other gear." So I sold it.

Importantly, this pedal introduced me to ebay.com. I put it on there, my very first item up for sale, over ten years ago. There it sat, without bids, into the evening the sale was to end. I went to bed early, but in the morning someone had bid it up to about $400 bucks. Crazy, really, considering I paid less than half that. But the postal money order arrived in a week and I was hooked on ebay for good. (I still have perfect feedback).

Dr. Rhythm DR-770

Hot and in the pocket?

I owned the 770 around 2002 and it's been since discontinued. Called "the most advanced compact rhythm machine ever" when it came out, this drum box was packed with features, patterns and samples. Goodness, it held 10,000 patterns! You could apply effects, the buttons had extreme sensitivity, you could trigger patterns on the fly right off the front panel, it had tons of samples — 52 kick drums alone! The first sample based drum machine I owned, the Roland 707 had 2, and a dozen or so samples in total!

Ok, ok, I'm bridging decades with the two machines, but am I the only gear geek who thinks Boss/Roland was referencing its drum machine heritage by naming the 770 so similarly to the vintage 707? I don't think so. When they introduced the 770, they were most definitely making a point that the new unit was a milestone model, like the 707 was.

Back when it was introduced in the 80s the 707 was the first affordable sample based machine with professional features like individual outs, memory cards and high quality sample resolution (12 bit, high for then, in any case). It had groove-box style, front panel, bar/measure based visual LED programming. It even had a hands-on front panel mixer with a dedicated slider per drum sound! It was easy to get in there and get musical. Who knew how limited it was back in the 80s?

Years later, the 770 obviously blows the old piece away in terms of what it could do, if you could only figure out how: pattern memory, samples, dynamics, effects, you name it. The problem was I couldn't figure out how without sticking my head constantly in the manual. What happened with the 770 can be explained using everyday math. Observe the following formula:

1000 x the capability
-------------------------- = Serious interruption of your flow.
a tiny front panel

A lot of user friendliness and musicality was lost along the long path that led from the 707 to the 770, and drum machines have become charming retro devices because of this trend in overly complex user interfaces. Computer based instruments make life at least somewhat easier with their infinite recall and generally more complete visual representations of parameters. I doubt most owners of the 770 learn how to use even to 10% of what it was capable of.

A bit of added drama surfaced online around this machine too. Complaints bubbled up about it getting extremely hot, possibly dangerously so, and possibly to the point of damaging the unit, burning the D.J. or even starting a fire. Probably unfounded, but enough to put a scare in me. And for the cost, close to $400, as I recall, it soon seemed like overkill. I sampled my favorite patterns and use those sounds in Ableton Live to this day.

But hey:

• if you want an over-the-top traditional style drum machine
  
• if you're willing to climb a steep learning curve
• if you have an ebay account

Log in and get one of these for about $159. But make sure it comes with a manual.

Alesis SR-16

Elegant, Modern Slab

Nobody is raving about it, it is not coveted or collected, yet it has been in production for like 20 years. This is possibly the best selling drum machine ever, if only because of its super-long market life. I had it once, got rid of it and bought another one a few years later.

What's the secret? Well, the thing just plain works. It's got a 200+ samples, it uses dynamic articulation to change up samples as you play/program louder or softer, making for an unusually realistic sound to the ear, in my opinion. You have all your techno sounds, all big rock sounds, percussion sounds, basically every drum sound you'd need.

The programming is easy too, and it makes for a really good playback module. With midi you get an enormous amount of sounds mapped across the range of midi key numbers.

It also looks very simple and streamlined, it's design an elegant, simple, unobtrusive modern slab.

At least that's my theory why it's still selling. Hey I just may get another one tomorrow. I'm having some serious nostalgia for the thing right now.

Yamaha TG-33, Vector Madness

Yamaha TG-33 (I've owned two over the years)

The TG-33 is a descendant of Yamaha's very successful FM synthesizers of the 1980s, notably the DX7, cross-bred with sample playback technology. Each patch was made up of four sounds, some FM, some sample based — with the added magic of "vector control." The joystick on the left was used to mix these sounds over time, or within the patch. Much like Korg's popular Wavestation synth, the sound of a patch could flow from one distinct timbre to another. That movement could be saved within the patch or controlled in real time. Very cool.

It was pretty cheap, but the polyphony was less than they claimed, because each patch could use up to 4 voices of that polyphonym. It was easy to use up all your polyphony in just a few patches. But the voices where allocated dynamically. You could set up 16 midi channels, each with a different sound, and have them all available in a performance for sequencing or live performance, without needing to switch patches.

Despite the fact that the sample resolution was on the low side, quality-wise, 12 bit, I think, in the mix the sounds were pretty convincing. Alone, though, the patches could sound a bit thin.

This machine was best for creating sweeping atmospheres, a combination of the vector movement and the ample sound choices, but the thing had drums and bass guitars and everything you'd need to sequence songs.

Which is just what I used this for back in the days before computers made any sounds themselves. My Mac IIci ran Cubase, sequencing midi that this thing played back. The whole thing worked pretty well, it was easy to use, and pretty fun at that.

A bit of a relic now, but the vector joystick seems to have been an prescient ancestor to today's many midi controllers that musicians an DJs seem to love for mangling audio on the fly.
You can hear the factory demo here:

Roland SH-32

This thing is an odd hybrid of desktop synthesizer, arpeggiator and groovebox. Yes, it had sort of an identity crisis– not exactly a synth, not exactly a groovebox or sequencer or drumbox. The arpeggiator is not easy to figure out, nor any of it, for that matter.

It does have lots on hands-on envelope sliders and knobs to tweak, and those are your basic ADSR controls, though aside from that, I remember a sense of always being lost in this thing, even when it was making a cool noise. Like a beautiful screwdriver that seems to need to be turned in a different direction every time you picked it up – I literally had a hard time getting a handle on the SH-32. The grovebox/drumbox functions were the hardesst to wrap ones head around.

Maybe the SH-32 was trying to hard to be too much? Or maybe it was a lot, but just packed into too tight a space. I don't know. But it sounded great. I'd recommend it for the sound quality and the hands-on tweakability of the synth part of it alone.

You can buy this on ebay for 200. You get yourself a great synth, and a lot more (if you have time on your hands).

Roland PW-10 V-Wah

My Pod Line 6 gave way to the Roland PW-10 Wah pedal. This thing models distortion AND Wah. I really like Roland's modeling, actually. I'm not the only one: BOSS pedals are crazy popular (Boss/Roland: same company) despite the fact that you pay a lot for something that basically does one thing, albeit does it really well and from inside of a super roadworthy metal casing.

The PW-10 did a few things - it had 8 of those Roland effects in there and modeled wahs. It was a big, rock solid metal box of a thing too, which lead foot here appreciated.

Despite it's armored exterior, it's a nuance thing. Totally noiseless due to the fact that it uses some sort of optical system, and great models, I thought, of all the classic wahs.

All in all it was much simpler and more direct than the Pod Line 6. I'm a simple man, and I like gear that's simple to use. Not that the Pod wasn't, it just had more flavors than I needed. You can still get these for $125, new. That is a deal considering the individual boss distortion effects this contains, if added up would cost much, much more. While it does "less" than the plastic pedals from Zoom, for example, it does it's thing better than they do, and is built so much way better. Oh yea add the wah. Deal.

Pod Line 6

Of course it was candy apple red. (I'm into b/w photography, however, so you'll need to use your imagination).

Amp modeling was a sci-fi thing at a certain point. Imagine: Run the response of popular amps and cabinets though some kind of computer analysis that enables you to recreate what it does to the sound of any guitar. No tubes, no heavy lifting! Of course it's not the real thing, but it's pretty good, and importantly predictable, and able to be reproduced easily. I first encountered it in my VS-880 digital 8 track's effects card, which could model popular amp and microphone responses and apply them to your recordings.

The pretty amazing Pod Line 6 V2 cost me $199 dollars, and it modeled really well, I thought — a great effects machine for electric guitar (or voice, for that matter). You can see from the picture the many amp models available. You could tweak those presets. And there was some kind of software librarian available, I seem to recall.

I'm not a real guitarist, I just play one in the studio, so any kind of artificial enhancement totally helped. I can't think of anything wrong with this except that I longed for a Wah pedal and to hook Line 6's add-ons to this started to make it an expensive proposition. I got rid of it and bought a Roland PW-10 Wah pedal which you can read about next.