reignbear wrote:So i posted up that link to the cheap ass MV near me and I've been thinking about it a lot actually. recently I moved into a much smaller space and have been looking into trimming down and streamlining my set-up. So my biggest gripe with the MV is it's physical size, the thing seems to be excessively big to me...like if I got it i would only have room for it+turntable on my desk and maybe my mopho.
I know what you mean, but you should measure your space then, plus an additional give or take 10 to 20 cm for wires and stuff. Don't forget you probably don't need much more than an MV, mopho and turn table too, so it might be just the thing for you.
The main thing that I've been looking into is a dope sampler/sequencer that has lots of sample mangling capabilities. how does the MV excel or fall short in this area? are there a lot of (or any)looping/modulation options for samples?
The sampling capabilities feel very much complete to me. It probably excels most in it's powerful sequencer though. Non-destructive quantize, different quantize for each track, tempo tracks to change the tempo, pattern tracks to do cool DJ style stutters of patterns, step recording. It's the sequencer and the main sampling capabilities why I am such a big fan of the MV.
can you push your samples into synthesis levels of sound mangling?
Not quite sure what you mean here, but if you're talking about LFO, envelopes, filters and all that, then yes. You can stretch sounds and make entirely new sounds. Add reverb, resample and continue. It's really very versatile in my opinion. In my opinion, in this area the MV delivers what you'd expect from a high-end sampler.
how is the synth engine? pretty flexible or pretty basic?
It depends a bit on your approach. You get basically about 10 'base flavors' of synths you can mess with, changing them into a more unique bass synth.
I think for synth standards, this is perhaps relatively basic, but def very flexible. You get to tweak quite a lot of parameters. (I'd look into the manual to see what, as it's too much to list.)
It's awesome for (mono) basslines and melodies right out of the box. But with some more effort, if you resample the bass lines with FX, chop 'em up into pieces and resample them again with some FX, you'll see you can get excellent high quality synth chops.
how about the efx?
The FX are good. Basically every standard FX is there and is of great quality. As with every machine and depending on your style, there might be some FX you're never going to use, but there's a good arsenal of FX to do some proper sample mangling for sure!
Having owned both the SP-555 and SP-606 I can say the MV it's FX are of higher quality.
so sell me on it, i have no bias or preconceived notions coming to the machine other than it's size...
Yes, it's definitely quite big, but I like that. Something you've paid a lot for, is supposed to be big, right?
The only gripe I've got with the machine is that it can be slow. Not with mangling samples or sequencing, that's really all very straight forward and fast (check Warren Harris aka Hanna on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ielczDVnHQQ&feature=related) , but when you're importing samples or saving a big project it will take a few seconds.
In general this doesn't influence the work flow a whole lot though.
Also, it comes highly recommended to upgrade to 512MB of RAM as soon as possible. You're going to need it as a standard big project easily is over 256MB. The average project size is likely to be about 300mb to 350mb for most people I think. (Without optimizing and deleting unused samples in my case, I'm lazy with that.)
I think you should check out many of the MV demo videos on YouTube. It's what made me consider it over going for the MPC2500 and ultimately why I bought it.
Sampling side it is also very versatile has all the functions you would really want from such device. The only shortcoming is that if you want to manually edit instrument patch you do it one sample/note a time so some people are complaining that it does not allow you to edit those in a batch. But this also never was a big shortcoming for me because I've used to all basic/limited instruments I previously had.
Yeah, that's true. But there is a work-around for that. If you want an entire patch to have a certain filter setting, just use an FX, go to sampling and play all the sounds with the FX active. Then do auto chop (or auto divide) and you've got a new patch with the new FX applied to all samples. This is usually done within 5 minutes or so, but like Olby it was never a problem for me.
Most samples will need individual editing anyways. Especially if you haven't time stretched them all to a perfect match.