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official MG16XU reaction thred
 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-24 21:48 [#02586066]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



i splurged a little

phase i ~ rambly prelude

the first proper mixer i had was a yamaha mg 16/6fx. it
lasted me a decade, with only one tear-down servicing done
by yours truly, and finally walked off when i left a bunch
of my stuff with a guy i'd been renting a room from with the
understanding that i would be coming back for it. months
later, he's "given away" most of my stuff. we're friends --
still are -- and i could tell he just felt totally shitty
about it. he was worried i was going to freak out and
scream, which, but instead i just wanted to cry. i went
right for the mixer: can you just get my mixer back? i've
had it since high school. nope, gone. had a 24/14fx for a
bit, but had to sell that off before the 16/6fx even walked
off on me.

phase ii ~ oh, fuck it

i keep meaning to try playing the moog grandmother and just
freehanding live overdubs and seeing if it goes anywhere or
not. i finally get around to it, today, and i realize: i
can't record an overdub without the first track being mixed
into a second track. some frantic attempted rewiring
ensures, and, well, i free up a channel with clever, but,
no, if i want to do multitrack, i need a mixer with busses.

fuck it. does yamaha still make my babies? ok, yes, there's
an equivalent model. they've added some 80s vaporwave
graphics and a no-adjust "comp" knob... and more aux sends!
aux sends are like oxygen to me

phase iii ~ impulse

guitar center has it. i can get it right now and keep
working on stuff. i do. but, when i get it home, fuck: they
have no 1/4" in on the mono, just XLR. so around to a local
store where i promptly buy all the female XLR to mono 1/4"
female they have (6) and some rca to 1/4" too

phase iv ~ impressions

the XLR jacks feel a little cheaper. the FX still sound
nice. the layout is effectively identical, making me feel
right at home. more later


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-24 21:51 [#02586067]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



apparently it can record stereo mixdown to USB!

couldn't give less of a shit. will likely never use USB port


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-24 22:12 [#02586069]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



updated impression: my korg monotron delay's aux input jack
has clearly become slightly desoldered from the board and i
will have to take it apart and fix it. poo


 

offline umbroman3 from United Kingdom on 2019-09-25 12:56 [#02586150]
Points: 6096 Status: Regular | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02586069



that sucks

i have a cheap soundcraft desk
cost me £100, it works and was cheap enough
it has onboard fx which i never use



 

offline umbroman3 from United Kingdom on 2019-09-25 12:57 [#02586151]
Points: 6096 Status: Regular



that grandmother is a work of art


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-25 17:24 [#02586172]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



I got it to fill the void left from selling my sh101 a few
years back. It doesn't sound... Roland. It sounds Moog. The
PWM on the sh101, the filter, sounded richer... But the
grandmother still sounds fantastic, and it's way, way more
flexible than the sh101.... so, decent compromise, really.
If you need a monosynth, it's a great choice. And, yes, it
is purdy

(And the aesthetic matches the mixer nicely)


 

offline umbroman3 from United Kingdom on 2019-09-25 17:48 [#02586175]
Points: 6096 Status: Regular



I sold my sh101s
Now I have just a teisco 60f which you can find for cheap


 

offline umbroman3 from United Kingdom on 2019-09-25 17:49 [#02586176]
Points: 6096 Status: Regular



Grandmother sounds sweet man


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-25 19:48 [#02586196]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



Oh I'm good, now. It was my long-winded way of saying it's
lovely to have this mixer back, bit of an emotional reunion.
Would have done this sooner but since I'd been able to make
do with what I had, I opted to just save money instead. But
I got the limit yesterday and it's no longer frivolous

I use the internal fx. Limited, but really creamy. Also know
their stable of FX options well from years of having the
mg16/6fx's built-in fx be my only multifx for my first few
years of hardwares


 

offline umbroman3 from United Kingdom on 2019-09-25 19:54 [#02586197]
Points: 6096 Status: Regular



Yamaha do good fx


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-25 23:31 [#02586219]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



I got the grandmother to kind of replace the sh101 I had to
sell off afew years back. They have very different
personalities. The sh101 sounds nicer -- or, well, like an
sh101. But the sh101 just does the sh101; the grandmother is
much more flexible. And, yes, it is purdy.


 

offline Zephyr Twin from ΔΔΔ on 2019-09-26 01:30 [#02586226]
Points: 16982 Status: Regular | Show recordbag



What I think would make these mixers really sweet is if you
could have separate per-channel FX, rather than one global
setting.

I recognize it would require double the DSP power again for
every additional simultaneous channel, but it would make
onboard FX much more useful. Can't have everything for $499,
though.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-26 01:56 [#02586227]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to Zephyr Twin: #02586226



my old 16/6fx had "insert" on every channel -- a point where
you're deliberately allowed to interrupt the signal chain.
you plug a stereo phono into the insert jack. one channel
out, one channel back in. if you don't send it back in, you
hear nothing. the idea is you could plug it into a
quadraverb or something and set wet/dry to taste.

i absolutely never used this. if i wanted FX on just one
thing, i'd just wire the FX into it before it even hits the
mixer. like, putting a stomp box after a synth.

meanwhile -- how the hell would you lay out the controls?!
you need at least one knob to select the multifx type, and
another for ~parameter~ -- reverb time, whatever.

i suppose you could have buttons and an onboard computer,
like -- select channel 7, change fx type, then just a
dedicated ~parameter~ knob per channel -- but then you're
into computers and menus and patches, exactly the opposite
of what you want in an analog mixer. it should all be there,
direct, no menus or abstraction (unless you're an expensive
studio with a board that features full automation).

this is why i say aux sends are "like oxygen" to me. i don't
want per-channel FX, i want access to a fair number of FX at
once. i want to be able to send the output of FX back into
the FX and create unholy feedback loops


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-26 02:15 [#02586230]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



no, you'd also need a wet/dry knob....

fx type, fx parameter (i.e. reverb/delay time), wet/dry.
three knobs, you're talking physical real estate here. 16
channel standard that'd be bad enough, but scale it up
further and it gets worse. no, i'd rather have three aux
sends instead, or two and an aux send to a common fx bank

but i do suppose it depends on how you do. plugins, i would
tinker with per-synth FX forever, automation too, but with
hardware, i more prefer to have a palette of FX available
and use it sort of like a watercolor wash. particularly love
feeding fx back into each other, through the filter of a
synth, mix the output of that back in for recursive spirals


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-26 02:31 [#02586231]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



vaguely back on topic, there is the MG16XU, which is
what i got, MG16, which does not USB, loses the FX
for another aux, and MGP16X which has no USB, 2x
onboard FX -1xAux, and has words like "ducker" and "stereo
imaging" that clearly mark this as a board for live audio
engineering at some venue and absolutely not what some acid
house hed wants.

my first propa board was an MG16/6FX and it was
amazing. i have deep nostalgia for the FX built into that
fing. it was actually quite pleasant to rapidly sweep the
"which effect" rotary switch in time to the beat. it was one
of those corners, where, eventually, i would just sort of
reach out and do it at the right moment without even
thinking about it

this is why i opted for the 16UX -- because i want those
effects back. unfortunately, it's now some rotary encoder
push-and-select crap and i can't sweet the ~which FX~ with
hedonistic abandon. they've added a nice 8-segment display
kinda deal, though, and the engineer in me sez this is
because the USB crap needs to output a message sometimes and
so the eight segment display can do that but for input to
the USB settings we need to turn a totally satisfying rotary
switch into tedious menu shit

could care less about USB ability in the thing. i might try
it someday, though, who knows

generally, though, feel yamaha gets it. here's a board with
no fx, no usb, lots of aux. here's a board with usb and 1 fx
and a bit less aux. here's a tuned hybrid for live alt rock
gigs

never mind a board that has per-channel fx. layout is really
what i have some words for


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-26 02:53 [#02586232]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



LAZY_TITLE ~ yamaha MG16/FX, korg ms2000, mpc1000, circa
2007. i had gone round back the mixer and plugged the
onboard FX out back into channel 1, at which point i could
feed it back into itself. the MS2000 had its own flange/tape
delay but that was just on itself, rest was just the board's
fx talking to itself about what it'd just herd


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-26 03:55 [#02586234]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



oh, poo. i went to try that again just now, and there's no
output jack for the internal fx return. but, i'm not using
buss 3-4, so i could just monopolize that; sent it out on
just the RETURN FX channel and none of the rest to
effectively simulate that one jack

i have plenty of nitpicks, but, gosh, designing a mixer
would drive me crazy. not the circuits, just the general
layout. there will never be an absence of compromise. this
is why it makes sense that yamaha has two models along a
continuum and then one that's swapped a bunch of bits out to
optimize it for a different context.

in an ideal world, we'd have a few more models than two
aside from the live sound fiesta, but oh well, i respect
economics, again, for $499. the lo-end model doesn't have
yamha fx, the live model has 2 yamaha fx; the mid model has
1x yamaha fx and usb shenanigans. process engineering kicks
in; all three models are designed/milled to minimize
differences between them to reduce manufacture costs. so you
have the barebones model, with loads of unused panel space,
the model i have, with 1x yamaha fx and a stunted interface
constrained by the demands of MGP16X, which has all sorts of
esoteric widgets, and so the other two models have to just
be that layout with some empty space

makes me nervous working on new nice fings, but perhaps
there is some modding hedroom, here.


 

offline wavephace from off the chain on 2019-09-26 06:43 [#02586235]
Points: 3098 Status: Lurker



Fucking epic!


 

offline mohamed from the turtle business on 2019-09-26 07:07 [#02586236]
Points: 31139 Status: Lurker | Show recordbag



congo brazzaville


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-09-26 14:36 [#02586242]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



...thanks, guys. I think


 


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