Are 1980's cheap keyboards with FX pedals any good?

In todays episode of Mad Gear, Greg looks at the evil that is a "Home Arranger" keyboard from the 80's. Can it change your opinion from awful to awesome and how these keyboards can be tools and not just toys.

I have sampled a variety of my favourite synth & drum sounds and created drum loops with/without effects on my Patreon page. Link to follow shortly.

'The Yamaha MK-100 was a little gem of a home keyboard. Unlike it's contemporaries, the stereo-chorus equipped MK-100 had 12 standard presets consisting of two layers, and you could customise the waveforms and envelopes each used (the manual proudly proclaimed “1,376 sound possibilities!”). And it actually sounded good!

While it’s not an FM machine, it’s voicing's and waveforms (and colour scheme!) were clearly derived from the brand new DX range. As it result, it sounded fresh, and looked fabulous!

Not only that, but alongside the preset drum patterns you had a programmable drum machine - yes, for perhaps the first time in a home keyboard you could write your own drum patterns!

A big selling point was the “Multi-Menu”, an innovative device where you would spin a wheel revealing a new set of menu options - nine pages in all, giving the user the ability to customise sounds, access the Custom Drummer, Custom Bassist and Music Recorder functions, and save/load data from cassette.* ' (Copied from https://www.difficultaudio.com/)

00:00 Introduction
04:39 Features
06:19 Favourite Sounds
09:38 The Multi-Menu
10:44 Using Guitar Pedals
14:44 Using an External LPF
16:12 Sound design on the MK-100
18:54 Using the Pitch Shifter from the Ottobit
20:36 Drum Patterns on the MK-100
22:06 Drums with Effects
22:38 Programming your own Patterns
24:08 Individual Drum Sounds
25:01 Drums with Mad FX
28:08 Final Thoughts

#80s #musicproducer #Meris