Bad Gear - Korg Electribe 2

I figured it out! The real purpose of this channel is not to shame manufacturers of bad gear (although it helps, and probably feels good), it's to shame bad producers who blame their bad gear for their own musical shortcomings. You prove that you can make good music with any kind of gear. Thank you.

I can’t wait for the release of “Bad Gear: The Album”

Unbeliewably hilarious Nick Batt sample 🤣

I've gotten a surprising amount of mileage out of mine as a production tool, once I embraced its limitations and started exporting the tracks as wav files to finish songs. It's a weird mix of old school and modern and I think it's got its cult following because of that.

I love my E2... I don't own a computer, so it is the centerpiece of my rig. Bought it used for $300, never once regretted it. The synth section is capable of some great sounds if you use it right. Using the Overdrive insert effect goes a long way towards beefing up the synth sounds. Each of the 16 parts is on its own midi channel (part 1 = ch1, etc), which is useful when live playing it with my Keystep. I use the gate arp all the time; in combination with the touch scale function it makes for killer improvised leads. I'm fine with all the hate it gets, just means it's possible to find them cheap. Haters can hate all they like, I'll take mine with me to my grave! Great video as always, Bad Gear is one of my favorite youtube shows. Keep it up!

I'm a true novice at making electronic music and always had trouble successfully making music in a DAW because the unlimited options end up becoming overwhelming, so I bought an Electribe 2 (synth version). It is the first piece of music production hardware I've ever purchased, and after figuring out how to truly use it I've come to love it. It certainly has many limitations that I've even experienced myself, but the excellent build quality and highly flexible synth engine with tons of waveforms, filters, and modulation options has allowed me to produce a number of patterns I'm genuinely proud of. For someone with serious ADHD like myself, getting an actual piece of music hardware has been a godsend that pushes me away from the computer and phone, eliminating distractions. Unfortunately now I have the synth bug and want to make a whole music studio full of equipment 🤣 Thankfully I have a job that pays well enough for me to pick up some new shit!

It's always scary when something on my wishlist ends up in bad gear, great video as always

Thanks for systematically going through all my equipment. Would it help if I sent you a list of my entire studio gear to get this over and done with? 🙄

As an ESX aficionado, I skipped on the Electribe 2 literally because of the shortened pattern length. I don't think a successor should ever scale back any feature. Remove/combine feature? Cool, but never scale back.

Good god, that last track was pure heaven.

The E2 was my first major hardware synth and I absolutely love it despite its shortcomings. It's just plain fun and it's capable of some super wacky and interesting stuff if you take the time to learn its more obscure features.

I loveeeee the final mix and edits u made ur such an enigma

The E2 is underrated. It has some obvious, infuriating limitations, but it’s also uniquely capable. I love that it doesn’t sound like all the other more current groove boxes, and being stuck with those samples really encourages creative exploration to get new vibes out of it.

I've found out something interesting with the "voice stealing" issue. I decided to export my favorite preset samples and then clear the memory. When I had the WAVs in my computer, I had a look at the samples and was surprised that quite a few of the samples had very long "quiet" sections ranging from 50% to 75% of the entire sample. I think there is a small amount of reverb on these samples, so trimming off the tails will alter the sound slightly (I don't think you'd notice though). My point? I think this is part of the polyphony problem. I can imagine these long samples are still playing long after you'd assume the sound has finished, imagine too if you're playing at a fast tempo. In any case I trimmed all the samples, much happier now! I keep my own personal samples as short as possible as well! I think 24 note polyphony is just enough if you're very disciplined like this, but it would be great to have a Korg Electribe Sampler 3 with at least 48 note polyphony or more. And while Korg are at it, a proper sequencer with the option to turn off quantising (ok, there is a workaround, set sequencer to 32 steps a double the tempo/double the measures), also FULL sized midi DIN ports like its 1999, Audio over USB, color touchscreen with waveform display and for goodness sake, PRINT the shortcuts on the unit, so we don't have to put bits of tape all over it! Oh yeah, and proper sample importing with the ability to import samples and at least 1GB of sample RAM!

I always love and LOL at the names of the music genres you create as you introduce the awesome music video.

Love the tone of the channel and I've learned quite a bit on various hardwares I didn't know about (coming from the acoustic instruments world) . Used covid times to build myself a handy synth setup I can use and your fun videos have helped me quite a bit with some of my choices ... including some bad gear :)

You can’t make this thing sound bad, it’s a classic.

I’m starting to realise that Bad Gear is just a list of every device in my studio!

I always enjoy your sessions and the sonics and visuals and the work you put in is really extraordinary, Thanks love n Cheers

that "more elaborate piece" is absolutely FIRE, maybe my favorite thing you've made so far!