i recently bought an Maudio pro keys 88 note stage piano and midi controller and i would now like to get some more sounds. There's a lot of stuff to this synth business. I want basically would use it for recording and occasional live use. I want good sounds. any suggestions, not looking to spend a huge amount of money either.

There is only one rack that immediatly comes to mind-Oberhiem Matrix 6R. For the price, Its hard to beat the programming freedom within it.

The other racksynth is the Yamaha TX81z. This FM box sounds great and is plentiful.(Cheap)

People generally dont use them to their full extent. If you go to Wikipedia and look up TX81z, I posted a demo of mine.

I suggest you get both, as they'll cover a wide swath of sound in one hit. Both edit better from a computer, but it appears you're all set. I use soundiver.

[This message has been edited by Justin Gazda (edited 06-21-2006).]

Best bang for the buck..
Roland JV-1080. Good all rounder.

Hi,
I've had the Roland JV1010, JV1080 and XV2020. I now have a classic motif rack. I would say without a doubt the Motif classic rack is the best sound module one could get. They're fetching a little over 500 on eBay. They have 4 insert effects. Tons of great sounds, hunderds highly usable if not all of them. Great stock EP's and organs. Very good but not great strings. Very excellent woodwinds. 128 polyphony! 2 expansion slots so you can add the DX7 engine later if you want or any of the Yamaha plug ins that actually ADD polyphony, they don't take away. Is a 1 unit rack which is nice. To me this is the very best bang for the buck. The JV1080 could be had for about 200 on ebay, but has less effects, less polyphony, very little to offer in the EP section (imho), but can be expanded with four SR-JV-80 cards. The JV1010 contains all the JV1080 sounds but has less output options and only 1 expansion slot and requires a PC for editing. you might beable to get a JV1010 for about 150? i dunno.
the XV2020 is like the JV1010 but with an updated sound set. it is built off of the XV sound set, which to my ears is better than the JV sounds set. It too has an expansion slot but for the more expensive SRX boards which are made up of multiple sr-jv-80 boards.

My recommandation is to go for a motif classic rack.


best wishes

Bob
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The above are all digital machines designed for discovery channel background music. I mean, the build quality is fine, and some of the sounds are okay, but if the digital route is the way you want to go, buy an esi 4000 or any 16 bit emulator for that matter that you can shove 128 megs of ram into. That way you aren't stuck with whatever expansion cartrige-tek that you have to hunt down. You can sample whatever you choose, your sound pallette limited only by your hard drive. I dont know why I didn't think of this before. If you want to get off cheaper, download an illicit copy of reason 3.0 and just use your desktop computer, as thats all a motif, triton or jv-XXXX is anyway.

There are all kinds of "good sounds" and I personally own a few dozen "rack synths" here ('bout half of what I used to own). In other words, you were right when you said that there's a lot to this synth stuff.

Thus, before buying anything or following anyone's suggestion you *must* have some understanding on how different synths work. There's a lot of stuff to this synth business. Quite a lot.
Best place to start is to go to check out all kinds of synths in music stores. Try them all. The more, the better. Do some googling on different kinds of synthesis and history of synthesis and electronic music.

If you really don't know where to start and just need a rack synth that can do a bit of everything and obviously sound good there are a number of older synth workstations I can recommend. My number one choice would be a Kurzweil K2000R. IT's great for both synth freaks and preset whores. Even if you don't know how to program it and have no interest in diving into that stuff tooo deeply the sound library for that instrument is huge! With the latest ROM revision and some 128MB of RAM it's an awesome synth/sampler with lots and lots of cool features and fantastic sound quality. Great for both live and studio work. Can't go wrong with the Kurz.

I'd also recommend:

Yamaha Motif rack* (my favorite)..
Korg Triton and Trinity series.
Roland JV, XV and Phantom series.

That's if you want a bit of everything in one box.

... And don't forget about software synths! Another subject I've probably beaten to death in this forum. Do you use a laptop by any chance? If you do it may be worth getting something like "Reason". But thats another good discussion for another time.

So here you go. may be isn't as simple of an answer you were looking for but that's the best I could come up with right now.

Shoot any questions you like. I'll be around.

-ED-



[This message has been edited by 3351 (edited 06-23-2006).]

YES! do what ed said above. the kurzweil v.a.s.t. engine has not been surpassed. the units are pricier than modern emu harware but it's certainly worth it for the amount of control you gain over what you can do.