roland mc-909 ???

[TechMouse]

Well I certainly dont jump onto VST plugin threads and suggest that people should go out and buy an Access virus because VST plugins are shit.

Never said you did, but I've definitely heard more people espouse a "hardware or nothing" attitude than a "software or nothing".

You have a thread here where some guy with a limited budget wants to buy a piece of hardware, and gets told to just use abelton & a controller.

Limited budget is the point though.

Your bang:buck ratio with a cheap laptop & controller pisses on anything you will get with a hardware sequencer.

I don't doubt for a second that if you have the cash to buy a drum machine, sampler, synth and mixer then you can do mad stuff with hardware - and I've seen it done on many occasions by all sorts of people.

But compare that with bog standard laptop & cheap controller pound for pound - especially if you have a laptop already as many people do.

Buying all that specialist hardware is a spectacularly expensive way to find out that it's not your thing after all.

Then you have people who "have used more hardware than I have seen" saying this is shit & that is shit when in fact they dont actually own the aformentioned piece of kit (and actually liked the sounds from it).

Everyone is entitled to an opinion.

In my experience the Roland Grooveboxes are pretty poor unless you want to make generic trance. (And who doesn't? :D)

You can get good sounds out of anything if you try hard enough, but you need something decent to be the backbone of your system. Something like an RS7K will do the job, but you'll be needing more hardware on top.

If someone wants to spend money on hardware. Encourage them dont discourage them. If someone want to use a wholly software setup the same goes. But please let them experiment.

Absolutely agree, but I still believe that for someone making their first forays into electronic music the computer route is the sensible entry point. Just my opinion of course.