Rackmount gear; rubbish, or just a pain?

[D-Rainger]

It's both really.
Nasty grainy 80's sounds, cursor hell, kills you when a stack of it falls over on you, etc.

Except... I'm loving my old Yamaha SPX90. Superb triggered compressor (footswitch or MIDI), insane reverse reverb extremes... classic Digital stuff.
Anyone else like this kind of thing?


I'm talking crap, aren't I?

[Toonster]

I don't have rackstuff, but maybe it's nice to explore that way when I have 1 or 2 filled pedalboards..

[snipelfritz]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtKCWzRXolk[/youtube]

[Derelict78]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtKCWzRXolk[/youtube]

If I had a studio This would SOOOOO go in it!

[kosta]

[Achtane]

in before rfurtkamp

[theavondon]

[Fuzz_Pi]

It's kind of a dead 80's thing. Like most things from the 80's (save for the underground music)
It should stay dead

[GardenoftheDead]

It's not always bad stuff, but the good stuff is really expensive.

[rfurtkamp]

Argh, site not responding ate an otherwise useful post. The quick summation instead.

What you're getting with old rackmount stuff, if you buy well (check for manuals online to see that you're not buying a preset-only piece of shit):
- Editable sounds well beyond musically useful. Filter sweeps, LFOs, ranges are generally set up by insane engineers, not SRV-worshipping bluesers.
- Instant cheesy 80s metal on the basic patches.
- Very very ugly grainy stuff if set correctly; the pitch shifters and distortions on the ART units are so awful they're wonderful. Running a pair of finetuneable pitch shifters that can't track very well so that you've equalled out to unaffected signal if the math is run right makes nastly, malicious overtones and belches under a wall of fuzz.
- Generally decent vintagey delay.
- Something that doesn't sound like today's stompboxes.
- Insane modulation options on standalone delay units (Digitech RDS-series delays, see below, are particular favorites). Why spend $300 on a boutique pedal to get seasick? RDS delays have the LFO and delay time tweaking done post-recording, so you can sample and hold and go to town twiddling knobs too. All the fun of a PDS-8000 without the expense, and higher headroom.
[soundcloud]http://soundcloud.com/rfurtkamp/digitech-rds-3600-samples/[/soundcloud]

- Decent analog distortions. My particular favorite is the Boss GL-100 Guitar Driver. Who doesn't want to be a guitar driver? I want to crash into walls and shit. Don't you? Seriously, though, the thing has all the classic Boss circuits in one unit with adjustable parametric eqs (2 on 1 channel, 1 on the other) that lets you basically have the equivalent of the "Boss Distortion Factory" in a 1U rack for well under $100.
I use mine either in classic HM2 mode or to chop the low end off and go for a buzzsaw that makes anything enter splattery transistorland:

[soundcloud]http://soundcloud.com/rfurtkamp/mean-existing-fuzz-sample/[/soundcloud]
- Stuff that hasn't been copied 1000 times by other manufacturers. The Lexicon Vortex is still an amazing unit after all these years. It puts most boutique mangling modulators to absolute shame.
- Ugly, strange gates and reverbs, including reverse. You might not get that cool shimmer sound copied by Line6 and everybody else, but the core sounds of Ministry's good albums and NIN when they didn't suck are buried in the ART SGE/X series.

Avoid:
- Digitech cheapo units.
- ART anything other than SGE M2, SGX 2000.
- Stuff that only has presets.
- Stuff you can't get the manual for that has a LCD screen unless you love pain. I learned most of these units pre-net when you couldn't find manuals. It was fun to get something for $50 when a digital delay pedal was still $150 for anything even tolerable because you could make it make squelching static and the GC didn't realize it, but....you don't want do do that now.

Summary: no reason to buy cheap Behringer stuff if you want to sonically mangle stuff or experiment with a wide range of wierd. There's way cool stuff out there under $100 just waiting for you to play with it. Just because idiot shredder didn't realize the ugly black and pink rack could destroy the world doesn't mean you can't get one cheap and do it yourself.