[MUSICIANS PERFORMING AT THE EXPERIMENTAL SOUND STUDIO]

MICHAEL UNA: Hi. My name is Michael Una. I'm here at the experimental garage sale at Chicago's Experimental Sound Studio. The purpose of our gathering here today is to buy, sell, and trade music equipment gear, some of which factory specs, some of which has been modified or circuit bent, some vintage gear, some really old gear dating back to the '40s, some relatively new gear from the past couple of years, mostly in the form of children's toys.

It's not just the sellers or the traders but we've gotten a huge crowd of people just hitting off the street to check out what's going on, play with some of the toys.

We're getting to the end of the day here, and it's starting to become a little bit of slim pickings, but there's a couple of choice gems left and we can take a look at some of those.

So, this is the Akai MFC42. This is a filter module that's meant to be bundled with the MPC, Akai's big sampling unit popular with the Hip Hop set. So, this actually come with rack mount brackets that are meant to be mounted up and to the side of the MPC, and so it adds to the MPC something that it was lacking a bit, which is a filter bank, and it's kind of nice. You get stereo. You can run a mono signal but you get stereo also, and each channel has its own resonance and cutoff, and then these really nice big knobs which are tuned just so to be extremely musical. I used this myself for many years in live performance. Recently, a lot of my work has moved to laptop-based performance, so a lot of this hardware, drum machines, delay pedals, etc. that I used to find very useful -- you know, I played a lot more guitar, bass or something -- but since a lot of my work is more laptop-electronic-based, it isn't as useful to me anymore although there are tons of people here who it's going to be useful for.

I find this excellent for anybody who loves Dub or live reprocessing of sound. So, I've got a drum machine running through this: the Boss Doctor Rhythm 770. It was their flagship model until very recently, there's now the 880, but it has some good beats, a lot of good 808 samples from the classic Roland kits, and what I usually do is run this through just very straight. You know, because it's sampled, there's not a lot of variance to the sounds, but what this filter bank provides is rolling off the lows or the highs, and it's got an assignable LFO. You can vary the sync rate here to change the rate of oscillation of the LFO, and you can then assign the LFO not only a waveform shape, so you've got triangle, there's a sawtooth, a square, and a more noise type shape, and then you can assign that either to the resonance, cutoff, or both, and you can assign a depth value to that so how hard it's going to oscillate back and forth. Basically, that's great. What's nice is it also has a tap tempo, and not only will it assign the LFO to the that tempo but it tells you what the BPMs are. So, if you're running turntables straight through it, it's got a grounding jack on the back so you can plug the turntables through again.

It's extremely versatile. Here's a ground. You can take RCA. You can take individual 1/4" ins. You can also take mono, and you got an output. It also has MIDI In/Out too. It enables it to take a MIDI sync signal as well for the LFO. Yeah, so it's an extremely versatile object that's made to work many different types of working styles and workflow situations.

The only thing gained by using laptop versus this is that it's more portable because you don't just need this. You need this plus the drum machine plus the delay pedal plus like three other bags of like heavy hardware to cart around. And when I want to get out and play a lot of shows, I fly a lot to play shows and with my job so I want to be able to pack it all in one suitcase and put in on a plane and just let that be that. I don't want to carry 210 pounds of gear everywhere I go.

It takes more effort to get the same level of expressiveness as the MFC. With that said, it can be done. The other thing you're losing is the tactile sense of control like this is a fat knob for the cutoff, and this is the number one thing you want to ride as you're working it along with the resonance, but to feel this -- and it's got a really nice action. It's very smooth and the range is very expressive and it's far superior to your little mouse track pad.

The various MIDI knob boxes, I've looked at them. The solution I'm working with right now is repurposing a video game joystick. So, it has many assignable buttons, and using a couple of free utilities, you can translate those buttons into a series of keystrokes, so hitting one button hits like Ctrl-A, F, whatever which you command. I use Ableton Live so you can assign that to various parameters, and then the joystick movement itself and the trigger to mouse movement. So, you hit a button and it selects a track, moves to a certain screen, zeroes in on a parameter in a like XY coordinate and say -- I mean you can flick down the trigger for the joystick and you can move that around in a very expressive way. And so, I do try to take as much as possible out of the laptop again, but then all I need then is one joystick which is that key control to every effect that I have in my entire live setup rather than this knob only controls this one thing, and so then you need 25 knobs rather than one knob that's selectively assignable or something like that. So, the laptop does give you a certain amount of flexibility.

With that said, I mean it does take more effort, and there's something we said about I really enjoyed pulling all this gear out that I haven't touched in a year, setting it up and just playing it throughout the day, sort of as a little demo for people, "Hey check this out," and I've really enjoyed just tweaking the knobs and rocking it out.

So, what's funny -- what's great about this too is that you don't even need an input source. This filter, once you turn the resonance all the way up [MICHAEL TURNS RESONANCE ON AKAI MFC], it self-oscillates [MICHAEL FURTHER MANIPULATES AKAI MFC]. So you can hear the sync rate here so you get a little digitalization [MICHAEL FURTHER MANIPULATES AKAI MFC], put a bit of echo in here [MICHAEL ADDS ECHO EFFECTS AND FURTHER PLAYS WITH THE AKAI MFC].