Boutique Music Gear Manufacturers

The Lounge Other Gear
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Description at the bottom

Midi Tools:

Loopa V2 by midiphy seemingly one of the best dedicated midi sequencers. If the polyphony and step size of the Elektron Sequencer is not enough for you this might be the way to go. Prices are rather steep and the devices do not come prebuilt (but they do offer a builders programm) but as far as i can tell the functionality is hard to come by in hardware otherwise.

Electra One: Not only on this list because their forum was seemingly made with the same building blocks the Electra One is a premium Midi Controller with great specs.

Roland A880: The A880 is not really botique in the sense that the manufacturer is not well know, quite the contrary, but rather because it is not in production since probably decades. I am putting it here because you can still find them sometimes on second-hand sites for prices from 70 to 150 bucks and it does something which you will be just unable to find nowadays for this price point: The ability to route Midi INs to OUTs on the fly just using a few buttons directly on the device. I have been searching for ages for something like that and it seems your next best option in modern devices would be the Motu Express XT or the MRCC both of which will set you back hundreds of [currency]

Squarp Hapax and its now discontinued predecessor the Squarp Pyramid seem to be the actual end-all-be-all hardware sequencer on the market right now.

Signex MIDI Patchbay An actual (passive) MIDI Patchbay - just Midi Ports front and end. Sadly, unlike a standard audio patchbay, this one does not have any normaling, therefore the only connections available are the ones physically patched.

Synthesizers:

This will be limited to digital synthesizers.

Honorable Mention: Synthstrom Deluge. I think a lot of people know about this already, but as they do not sell to big retailers this great synth might not be on everybodies radar.

PreenFM: a DIY FM Synth which can also be snagged as a ready to play device. Very budget friendly. FM is not for everyone though.

Fred’s Lab Manatee: Fred is a german synth maker and the Manatee is the latest of his crowdfounded projects. He is currently still offering Preorders for the Manatee, a purely digital (multi-timbral) Synthesizer with a maximum polyphony of 16.

Plinky: This one i have been waiting for for years now (literally…) as only thonk have a contract to sell the DIY Kits and they have been unable to source parts for the better part of 2 (3?) years now. The whole synthesizer is open source though, so if you would like and are able to you can just build it from scratch.

One could look through various other threads around here with rich sources for this, like the Crowdfund thread , or the Mysterious Instruments thread, or the Unique Dirty Raw Fun Synths thread.

Music Tools:

I would like to mention Patch Bays in general here, as i think it might not be on everybodies radar but they can be extremely helpful! [[Also i will most likely test sending MIDI over Din to TRS cables through an audio patchbay and DIY a MIDI Patchbay, which just makes this so much more powerful in my opinion. Will maybe update this]]

I usually am more of a lurker in forums but i always thought that there should exist a thread for electronic music gear manufacturers that one could consider ‘botique’ or maybe call it less well-known. I couldn’t, however, for the life of me find such a thread (besides a sparsely populated thread on gearspace). Maybe i am just bad at googling and if there exists such a thread somewhere here please let me know so this one can be deleted.

If not, however, i would like to try and make this thread a collection for gear that might be extremely good/useful/unique but come from sources which aren’t well known and maybe readily available. I am aware of the capitalistic implications here and would therefore like to put out a GAS Trigger Warning.

The idea is to make a collection of links to items which might not be on your radar due to not being available on big retailer websites for example. If you find this helpful i would love for you to let me know or contribute.

I am probably forgetting a lot here of what i have found through the years but maybe this thread is useful for others as well and they’ll pitch in!

Cheers

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There are so many.

Like the Pluto from Modern Sounds ( thread )

One could look through various other threads around here with rich sources for this, like the Crowdfund thread, or the Mysterious Instruments thread, or the Unique Dirty Raw Fun Synths thread.

How about the Sismo ICE ? ( post )

I think it is probably good to be explicit that this isn’t about Roland Boutique, as they seem to dominate that word association.

How about the Ellitone E[64], which is rare and unusual ? ( video )

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Thank you for your reply, i have incorporated your suggestions into the main post!

I agree that the word botique has been really heavily been conquered by the Roland Series, which makes searching for them even harder.

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Cirklon seems perhaps the obvious ultimate midi addition. Seems like the wait is finally shrinking… just got mine after I think a 4 year wait but seems like they expect to get through the “pandemic preorders” pretty quickly as a lot of those people moved on. It’s expensive and kind of an exhausting set of features to learn all at once but the power is pretty incredible. Can really truly bind together a studio or even just turn a single multi-timbrel synth in a crazy groove box.

There is a lot of midi stuff out there. Squarp is another big one. Torso t1 seems popular.

As far as actual synths go… it’s like an infinity of boutique things, even some common-ish names we don’t often think of as boutique are, like Waldorf. I suppose sequential and moog have been gobbled up but many would still consider them boutique. Basically all of eurorack is boutique.

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Thank you a lot, i will get to including those.

Regarding the synths i am currently trying to have all of them fulfill being not for sale at major retailers: this is basically the reason i made this thread. A lot of information about music gear comes from these sites. You will probably stumble on to things you might need and other people have found useful eventually if they are on Thomann, Sweetwater, you name it but might never encounter them if they are sold somewhere else. Therefore i would not include Waldorf and the like.

Modular is kind of like a whole other hobby by itself - but you’re right, Synth’s is gonna be hard to keep sensibly long.

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Botique or Boutique?

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Butique … I fear this list might be too big to even compile. How about just analog synths for starters, and maybe limited to post 2000?

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I like your idea - but i will do it the other way around - only digital synths allowed!

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Also, for eurorack just go here https://www.modulargrid.net/

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thank you again for your input. I made some edits and added a part about patchbays, which has nothing to do with the title but are imo an extremely underused tool for studio artists.

obviously i am breaking my own rule with adding the Hapax as it is most definitely available on Thomann and the like. Should i remove all of these and keep the original spirit of the thread?

As always, i appreciate any input and suggestions!

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This was pretty common in the same era as A880. JLC MSB+, Kawai MAV-8, DMC MX-8, Ensoniq KMX-8 and KMX-16, etc.

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You’re right, thank you for adding to that. I was aware of the MAV-8 and the MX8, the rest is news to me. The A-880 was meant as a stand in here for the old MIDI devices which seemingly did fall out of favor. In my experience the MAV and the A-880 are the easiest to snag second-hand but maybe that is just the case for where i live.

I am though still confused about how seemingly ubiquitous these devices were and now this functionality is really hard to come by (at least at decent price points)

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how I feel explaining that I remember when Elektron was a “boutique brand”

image

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We need a voiceover like this mans for all new boutique gear.