I've been thinking about this for a while but watching some videos of bent Yamaha PSS20's on youtube has made me wonder: why bother spending ages shoehorning mods into some crap keyboard when you can just get something better in the first place?
It seems to me that some people spend days building LFO's and LTC1799's etc etc into something like a VL1 for no other reason than its a piece of crap, when you could save a whole lot of time and effort by just buying something better in the first place! At what point do you admit to yourself that the average effects you can get from a VL1 that you've spent a week creating could be produced far more cheaply and efficiently, with a lot more scope for interesting bends, by just buying a different machine? Inevitably people on youtube will comment about how fantastic and insane your VL1 is, but if you take a step back and look at the big picture all you've got is a crappy little keyboard making noises that you could certainly equal if not better on just about any other bent toy keyboard.
I guess what i'm saying here is, why bother spending days working on something just to make it equal with something else than can do the same things effortlessly?
I get contacted by plenty of people who are perfectly willing to pay some over the top amount of money to do some complex modification on some basic analogue percussion toy or similar, and i inevitably end up telling them that for the money it'd cost to do the mod they could just buy a better bit of kit in the first place.
Modding the analogue percussion sections from some Casio MT's is a classic example. I've seen some magnificent bits of work on Casio MT's with a whole new wooden cabinet and front panels with loads of knobs etc, but i can't help thinking, with the time and money you've poured into that you could have just bought a Boss DR110, modded that easily and had a far better programmable analogue drum machine for the same money.
I guess its all about the challenge and having a unique bit of kit but it does make me wonder what the hell i'm doing sometimes, especially at 3 in the morning trying to force mods into a Yamaha RX21 that someone has sent me, when i told them about a dozen times they would do better to sell the RX21 and get an RX17 if they wanted a bent Yamaha!
thats my rant for today!