I have been feeling the need to get back into making some music again, in that respect I regret selling a couple of pieces of kit many years ago, a couple of Korg Kaossilator units, but there really is no point in this regret thing, move on and either buy them again or buy something new. I still have my Korg Karma synthesizer and my Roland Piano, but I wanted something to play with while sat on my arse. I know, I can play on my keyboards sat down, but there was an urge to replicate the portability of the Kaossilator days.
This wasn't the solution :
The Behringer JT-4000M seemed to be a good idea at the time, and for a few hours I did have some fun noodling around and learning how to use it, but, despite all of the amazing Behringer promotional videos on youtube, I have to stand up and disagree with how useful this thing is, and I will tell you why.
Great sounds come out of this, 32 programs/voices and they can be adjusted, filtered and played with, but the reality is that because this is a very limited synthesizer, only one voice can be played at a time, with four notes played, not polyphonic, paraphonic, a term I only learned since buying this. It was a cheap unit, a hundred bucks including taxes and shipping, and I sort of knew there was a bit of deception going on with the Behringer videos, yet my need to have something exceeded logic.
The Behringer claim in videos online, touting "all sounds from the JT-4000 or JT-4000M used in the making of this tune" are correct, however, what they avoid to show in the videos is that quite a bit of peripheral equipment is also used, I would guess a MIDI keyboard, an effects processor and a DAW at the very least.
This thing called a DAW is a Digital Audio Workstation which is a software application used for recording, editing, and producing audio files. Think of it as a professional recording studio condensed into a single computer program and the tunes "demonstrating" the capabilities of the JT-4000M use a DAW to construct multiple tracks.
Think of the JT-4000M as a potato, and the software is used to play multiple potatoes via MIDI or even layer multiple audio tracks (not MIDI) mixdowns from a single potato and Behringer have had an audio engineer use the maximum capabilities of the DAW (not the JT-4000M) and publish the results as a promotional video on youtube to sell their product, at the end of the day that is what they need to do, sell potatoes to idiots like me.
The silver lining in all this is that I have reinstalled Ableton Live 12 Lite on my main computer and I will attempt to learn something in the next few months, however, if I do buy another piece of hardware I will be avoiding paraphonic synthesizers in the future and spend a little more cash on a polyphonic, 4 voice and a drum channel unit like the Roland MC-101. As you could see in the last blog, the JT-4000M was included in my "free" list so in my mind at least, no harm has been done and I will see how much I can flog it for to raise cash for more things I don't really need.
Onward and downward!
