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well, it gets the job done. sounds pretty good. if you want to go analog, you should look into the arturia minibrute. completely analog monosynth for $400-500. its well built and sounds great.
I've heard this is great as well. I'm thinking about picking one up cause I'm getting sick of menu diving with the microKorg.
What do you recommend for drums? I've got an akai XR20 and I'm hoping to get some good plug-ins for ableton to go with it.
i used ableton for all of the drums on my record. you can get really crazy experimenting with effect chains. i basically layered a bunch of different sounds at different levels to get the sound i wanted (some songs had 30+ drum tracks).
that being said, i haven't touched ableton in about 2 years. i use the octatrack for all of my drums now. i have a folder of samples with about 80 different vintage drum machines loaded on the CF card, so i just pick sounds i like and build my tracks up from there. when i was using ableton i thought of the drums more like a drummer, but now that i'm using a step sequencer it's made me think out of the box a bit.
so if you can find the money, check out the octatrack or even the Machinedrum or the Analog 4. (i'm now using the Analog 4 to add a sublayer of analog drums, and its making a big difference). the korg monotribe is worth checking out. the sounds are fixed, but there are a few mods you can do to open it up a bunch. lots of friends of mine like the korg electribe series. i think the most important thing is to find a piece of gear that has sounds that are inspiring to you. a lot of these preset machines have terrible sounds, and that can be really discouraging when youre working on music. the more you create and shape your own sounds, the more fun it will be, and the better it will sound. and keep in mind, any sound can be a drum sound. process/effect/automate the hell out of it, and you might find something really crazy and unique
keep an eye on the NAMM show in a few weeks, i think a lot of new analog stuff is coming out (new moog, korg MS 20 reissue). i think the market is shifting to make this stuff more affordable, so its a good time to get into it