Man, you are seriously getting yourself into trouble here, by being so helpful! Yer never gonna get rid of me!!! :-)

So the place I bought the Behringer from has made the return and credit process VERY easy. That's a relief. Credit should be on my card next week.

End Phase 1.5 of my Synth Journey. (Phase 1 was your video series!)

I found out I kinda know a Waldorf dealer, and he had an open-box never-used Blofeld Desktop for a discount. But the Blofeld was at his friend's record shop... which also happened to have a recording studio upstairs and he sells some second hand music hardware like mixers and ... synths. But his store was closed yesterday... but he responded to my text message.

So yesterday I went and picked up the Blofeld from the closed record shop, but because it was the Desktop version of the Blofeld it did not have a keyboard, so I needed a cheap MIDI keyboard to use. Turns out the shop had a Novation Bass Station 2, and I walked out with it for $200.

Now - for this long weekend - I have the Blofeld, Bass Station 2, and also iMaschine on my iPad, and I will be delving into (mostly) hardware synths FOR REAL. (And for about $200 less than the Poly D.)

The nice thing is that the hardware I bought maintains their resale value VERY well. So I can use the hardware to understand how synthesis works and get over the initial learning curve, and then sell it on to someone else if I decide to just go fully digital.

Live performance is pretty much the furthest thing from my mind. I've played in metal/rock/funk bands my entire life, and if I never play to a mostly empty bar on a Tuesday night at 11:30 PM ever again, it'll be too soon. I'm too old for that shit. (And too COVID-averse to frequent the kinds of dives I feel most comfortable in, anyway.)

I'll have my SoundCloud account. And if I ever get enough cohesive tracks together to feel like compiling them into some sort of digital entity, I might even check out DistroKid and release an album, of sorts. (Although it is more likely I'll just produce soundscapes and one-shots for use in video production, or something.)

But my music being heard by others is not an important goal for me. I just play for myself, and want to have the agility with my tools to just sit down, and in 5 minutes be playing and recording and jamming on some sort of groovy thang that came out of nowhere.

I'm not a songwriter; I'm a collaborator. And since collaboration is basically dead now, I need some tools that can surprise me and come up with interesting things that inspire me to build on the foundation they create. That's what I have found goofing around with synths... a collaborator that surprises me with interesting things that I can build on.

So. Starting this afternoon after work, I'm gonna be Synth Goofing for the weekend. I expect I'll wind up buying Ableton at some point when I get frustrated with GarageBand... or I might go to Logic, but I don't see as many helpful YouTube videos on Logic, as I do for Ableton/Reaktor/Reason/Maschine.

Let Phase 2 begin!