![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Gear Hatred
Sep. 20th, 2003 04:37 pmI just unbolted the Ensoniq DP/4 effects module from my rack and put it in the car to take to the Flea tomorrow. I stuck a little yellow price tag on it, marked it "$400." As I did so, I suddenly felt a great weight lift from my heart, and I realized something-- I HATE that goddamn module. I've hated it since not long after acquiring it, and that one piece of gear is probably single-handedly responsible for more musical apathy than Half-Life and the entire Thief series combined.
It's a nightmare of almost-usability. The interface is deceptively simple-- a dual seven-segment numerical display and a 2-line LCD next to a single large aluminum knob for picking patches and adjusting parameters and a row of buttons. Eight aluminum knobs for input and output levels for each of the four channels round it out, making it an impressive piece of hardware. Stick it in a rack, and you KNOW it's gear that means business. Here is a picture of it. It sounds good, too, which is why the ungodly interface is so frustrating. It's a quad DSP system, and can be configured in four ways-- as four individual effects, as two single-channel effects and one stereo effect, as two stereo effects, or as a single ridiculously complex four-DSP stereo effect of doom. It's got a really sweet pitch shifter, a pretty decent vocoder, and a lot of nice reverbs and so on (although it's got a very distinctive-sounding reverb).
The interface, though, is a nightmare. I never failed to struggle with even the most basic concepts of this unit. It's set up very very strangely, and a lot of things seem arbitrary. It's as if nobody ever sat down and tried to think about how somebody would use it-- they just threw it together.
At one point, I actually met the guy who designed the interface, and he turned out to be an insane Russian immigrant for whom English was a distant second language. I was looking for a replacement Amiga mouse, and I ended up driving to Somerville to pick up a bag of free Amiga mice that were advertised on comp.sys.amiga.marketplace as being bad, but with enough that you should be able to make a few good ones. Well, as it turned out, he'd carefully itemized what was wrong with each of them. Most of them were labelled things like "Squeaks when moved left and right." For this, he'd called them bad. It turned out that most of them worked fine. (It also turned out that apparantly the design for Amiga mice changed a LOT over the lifetime of the system, as there were no two that were the same in any way inside.) I ended up hanging out for a couple of hours and talking gear and music and Amigas and MIDI and so on with the guy. He was definitely a nice guy, but I could see how the DP/4 became the fucked-up box it turned into.
This, by the way, was not the strangest person I met while cruising for free hardware. The sort of the Nudist NeXT awaits another day, though.
Anyway, the DP/4 became this horrible trap for me. It sounded good, but it sucked to use. But it sounded SO GOOD! But it sucked SO MUCH! So I ended up fucking around with it and not actually playing music, and more often than not gave up after fooling around with it for a while and failing to get it to do what I wanted without destroying whatever had worked the previous time. The patch management was that bad. (Somebody who has one and grokked it utterly, like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gweepprefect, will probably pipe up now and say they loved it, or that it wasn't that hard. Maybe I'm spoiled, but I like my gear to make some semblance of sense.) It meant that I began to dread studio playing, because if it wasn't the patch issues, it was the inputs overloading or some other weird thing. Either way, it meant less playing time and more fucking-around time, and I find that very frustrating when trying to do music stuff. That's part of why I've started playing with guitars more, actually-- they're so pleasantly immediate. Pick it up, strum, noise! No patch cords (unless you want to), no patches, no LCD displays (unless you want to), just strings and pickups and knobs and a big-ass speaker. Very little setup time. Easy to carry around. So many things.
So, it's in the car. It's got a price tag on it. I doubt anyone at the Flea will drop 400 bucks on a hefty pro effects unit, but it can't hurt to try. Anyway, just the act of slapping a sticker on the front and envisioning it going away was a total relief. I hadn't realized how much this thing was bugging me.
In a heady whirl, I took a bunch of dead Macs from the basement, marked them "Free!" and stacked them in the trunk. While the DP/4 will come home if it doesn't sell tomorrow (and instantly hit eBay), those won't. They have a happy loading dock waiting for them if nobody hauls them off.
Freeing. Yes.
And if the DP/4 sells, I'll be hard-pressed not to go shopping for a nice simple Telecaster sometime soon.
It's a nightmare of almost-usability. The interface is deceptively simple-- a dual seven-segment numerical display and a 2-line LCD next to a single large aluminum knob for picking patches and adjusting parameters and a row of buttons. Eight aluminum knobs for input and output levels for each of the four channels round it out, making it an impressive piece of hardware. Stick it in a rack, and you KNOW it's gear that means business. Here is a picture of it. It sounds good, too, which is why the ungodly interface is so frustrating. It's a quad DSP system, and can be configured in four ways-- as four individual effects, as two single-channel effects and one stereo effect, as two stereo effects, or as a single ridiculously complex four-DSP stereo effect of doom. It's got a really sweet pitch shifter, a pretty decent vocoder, and a lot of nice reverbs and so on (although it's got a very distinctive-sounding reverb).
The interface, though, is a nightmare. I never failed to struggle with even the most basic concepts of this unit. It's set up very very strangely, and a lot of things seem arbitrary. It's as if nobody ever sat down and tried to think about how somebody would use it-- they just threw it together.
At one point, I actually met the guy who designed the interface, and he turned out to be an insane Russian immigrant for whom English was a distant second language. I was looking for a replacement Amiga mouse, and I ended up driving to Somerville to pick up a bag of free Amiga mice that were advertised on comp.sys.amiga.marketplace as being bad, but with enough that you should be able to make a few good ones. Well, as it turned out, he'd carefully itemized what was wrong with each of them. Most of them were labelled things like "Squeaks when moved left and right." For this, he'd called them bad. It turned out that most of them worked fine. (It also turned out that apparantly the design for Amiga mice changed a LOT over the lifetime of the system, as there were no two that were the same in any way inside.) I ended up hanging out for a couple of hours and talking gear and music and Amigas and MIDI and so on with the guy. He was definitely a nice guy, but I could see how the DP/4 became the fucked-up box it turned into.
This, by the way, was not the strangest person I met while cruising for free hardware. The sort of the Nudist NeXT awaits another day, though.
Anyway, the DP/4 became this horrible trap for me. It sounded good, but it sucked to use. But it sounded SO GOOD! But it sucked SO MUCH! So I ended up fucking around with it and not actually playing music, and more often than not gave up after fooling around with it for a while and failing to get it to do what I wanted without destroying whatever had worked the previous time. The patch management was that bad. (Somebody who has one and grokked it utterly, like
gweepprefect, will probably pipe up now and say they loved it, or that it wasn't that hard. Maybe I'm spoiled, but I like my gear to make some semblance of sense.) It meant that I began to dread studio playing, because if it wasn't the patch issues, it was the inputs overloading or some other weird thing. Either way, it meant less playing time and more fucking-around time, and I find that very frustrating when trying to do music stuff. That's part of why I've started playing with guitars more, actually-- they're so pleasantly immediate. Pick it up, strum, noise! No patch cords (unless you want to), no patches, no LCD displays (unless you want to), just strings and pickups and knobs and a big-ass speaker. Very little setup time. Easy to carry around. So many things.So, it's in the car. It's got a price tag on it. I doubt anyone at the Flea will drop 400 bucks on a hefty pro effects unit, but it can't hurt to try. Anyway, just the act of slapping a sticker on the front and envisioning it going away was a total relief. I hadn't realized how much this thing was bugging me.
In a heady whirl, I took a bunch of dead Macs from the basement, marked them "Free!" and stacked them in the trunk. While the DP/4 will come home if it doesn't sell tomorrow (and instantly hit eBay), those won't. They have a happy loading dock waiting for them if nobody hauls them off.
Freeing. Yes.
And if the DP/4 sells, I'll be hard-pressed not to go shopping for a nice simple Telecaster sometime soon.