Teenage Engineering TX-6 & Other Bullshit
Pedal for size comparison... Yeah so a shit-ton of people are boohooing online about this particular device. "It's too expensive!" "What are they thinking?!" "Waaaahhhhhh!!" I feel people are missing out on the bigger picture with this. Sure, it's being marketed as a super small, portable "field" mixer, but it does SO much more than just that. Before I got this, I was using a PreSonus 16.0.2 USB, which offers four more mono channels altogether, but is about twenty or more times bigger and heavier. The reason I went with that digital mixer was because it allows simultaneous multitrack recording directly into the DAW of your choice. Also, each channel has a gate, compressor, limiter, flexible EQ, and four aux sends (though there are no aux returns). Each channel on the TX-6 has an EQ, high pass and low pass filter, and compressor. Fairly close. There is a global limiter. So, without sacrificing all that much (oh yeah the PreSonus has patch storage for mix scenes, which I never used) I now have an ultra portable mixer that I can easily take along and use in live shows. I've given it a good test drive as far as multitrack recording is concerned and it does the job quite well. THIS is the area most whiners are totally bypassing in their rants. Everyone jumps to small format analog mixers for their comparisons, but that's so far off the mark it isn't even funny. And anyway, the PreSonus was $1600. So to me, the TX-6 is actually a cheaper option, with which I can achieve virtually the same results, though with a total lower channel count, which I hope will force me to make the most out of fewer devices in my setup, which needs a trimming anyways. It IS super duper small though, so people who don't get along with the Volca series probably aren't going to jive with this mixer either. I'm super happy with it though.
Other bullshit includes me replacing the basically good as new original LCD on the JD-800 with an OLED white on black deal. Looks nice. A lot easier to read. I also picked up a JD-08, for no real reason other than there is no way in hell I'll be humping the JD-800 along to a live show. Fucker weighs a damn ton and is ginormous anyway so nope to that. The JD-08 sounds identical to the JD-800. There are annoying things about it though. OK it's cool that it has beefed up processing power and can do two layers at once but I wish they made it so that you could disable Layer B and just have it OFF, and that that setting would be retained when you turn the thing off. But no. AND it doesn't work with JD-800 sysex, which is a damn shame. There are tons of great programmers out there making awesome patch banks for the JD-800. WC Olo Garb! Need I say more? It would be cool if Roland dealt with the sysex issue in a firmware update but I won't be holding my breath. It's a great sounding teeny ass piece of gear though. That's all folks!