so the Beat thang is actually at my local bestbuy

[starving student]

Comparing the Beat Thang with software is more than fair, it's inevitable and it's happening right now. The Beat Thang is a purpose-built sampling machine that runs on custom software. A laptop with Ableton or Maschine is just another hardware system running software that can do be made to do the same thing as Beat Thang. Everyday, people all over the planet sit around comparing specs of these programs for computer + controller with the Beat Thangs, Electribes, and MPC's of the world trying to decide which suits their needs best. I certainly have, and so have you to some degree as a Maschine owner.

this I know and I do it too but I wasn't doing that in this thread when matthew decided he was in the mood to debate, I was just looking at the videos and speculating on the thing, now I've messed with it a bit... talking about how beatthang pales in comparison to computer stuff is just sill for instance.

maschine definitely wasn't made in 1997 but I'll tell you this, the beatthang shares some of the shortcomings that I don't like about maschine, like not being able to string together sequences of differing tempos wtf is that?

what about battery , you can't even slice samples in battery but you can on the beat thang

the layering on the beat thang kills maschine and battery and the mpc for that matter, anyway that's all I got today but monday I'll have more

[starving student]

I like how in the space of a few minutes you went from declaring that it wasn't worth the money to saying you'll buy it tomorrow.

just to test it out, they've got a 30 day return policy I just want it for 3 days. the beatkangz marketed it as sampler last and sounds first, they really love their own samples and for good reason they put the samples into the zoom streetbox drummachine and for a drum machine they're pretty good but I don't give a fuck about none of that, I need to put it through it's sampling and mangling paces I never buy a sampler for it's library.
haha i bought maschine for $200 and if it was $300 I still wouldn't have one, if the beatthang wasn't being sold exclusively at best buy I wouldn't even be testing it out.

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[starving student]

cause any place else would not give you 30days and would charge a restocking fee when you brought it back 3 days later. anyways they just got into selling kit recently and they're really not equipt to demo shit correctly, I ended up teaching the guy allot about the machine and I still don't know shit about it.

[matthews]

Therein lies the rub. I can bang the keys on a piano, but that doesn't make me a musician. Nevertheless, the piano is still an instrument. DJs that mix are not playing the turntables, they are playing the records. Turntablists that manipulate the pitch slider to create a musical rift completely separate from the original recording ARE playing the turntable. It is still an instrument. It's just that one knows how to play it, and the other doesn't. It's not terribly difficult to distinguish one from the other.

You're not being ignorant. Perception has everything to do with how we view the world around us. You perceive the turntable differently, and that's okay. But it's good to see things from a different perspective now and then.

Great post.

[starving student]

Therein lies the rub. I can bang the keys on a piano, but that doesn't make me a musician. Nevertheless, the piano is still an instrument. DJs that mix are not playing the turntables, they are playing the records. Turntablists that manipulate the pitch slider to create a musical rift completely separate from the original recording ARE playing the turntable. It is still an instrument. It's just that one knows how to play it, and the other doesn't. It's not terribly difficult to distinguish one from the other.

You're not being ignorant. Perception has everything to do with how we view the world around us. You perceive the turntable differently, and that's okay. But it's good to see things from a different perspective now and then.

Great post.

ditto

[starving student]

even though the build is great I mean really great, it still looks like shit to me, it looks like a transformer, no offense to all the transformer fans out there, which I'm one but I don't want a sampler that looks like one. but that combined with all the lights got on my damn nerves, do you know it even has a dedicated button called (blang) yes blang as in bling, that makes the lights super bright in 3 stages, and thankfully a 4th stage that turns the damn lights off. when the lights are completely off it looks like a dead optimus prime. apparently this is to conserve battery life.

[starving student]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wypTe1ibLg

[starving student]

just a little more perspective

the mpc-1000 cost $999.00 no not for me ( I paid $350 for mine but I'm just sayin if you bought it at the store. the mpc- 1000 is an incredible piece of kit if you're running the jjos but still the fx, even the ones that jj put in it do suck

ok think about the implications of this

the beat thang- has great fx compared to mpcs, and way better mastering fx also

the bt can save and load audio, songs, sequences from an external hard drive, thumb drive (what fuckin piece of hardware beatmachine do you know that can do that, can the mpc 5000 even do that, i don't think so

the bt can export songs or patterns or sequences in two ways, in realtime while you're just letting it play out or while you are remixing it doing shit on the fly. and by export I mean back into itself, or onto an external drive !!!!!! what hardware sampler do you know of that can do this shit, do you realize if you were so inclined you could make a song while you were on the way to a show and export it in realtime or not in realtime to a fuckin thumb drive and then load it into live, traktor or whatever and play it at your show imediately...............what fuckin beat machine allows you to do this without using a computer !!!!!!!

watch this clip and think about the implications, think about the price they are charging for a new mpc-1000 or mpc-2500 and then think about the beat thangs price again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pkbW1ng ... ideo_title


and while you're at it tell me how the hell did these first timers, some beatmakers or whatever manage to get something like this product made when we couldn't get any of the other manufacturers to do shit like this no matter what we paid. I don't even know how the guy in the video can be so calm when he talks about it, this shit is fruitloops, this thing even allows you to save songs into it's internal ram and won't loose them when you turn it off. and on top of that there's a button that you press and then it goes into what I can't help but call maschine mode cause then you can't control anything on board but it turns into a midi controller for the beat thing software on a computer and it does it seemlessly like maschine does.
fuck I'm soooo mad at these guys hahahahahahahaha they need to do a vh1 story on this shit, this is like some Obama became president type shit of the hardware beatmachine world more power to the little guy

[glenn303]

Why have a four page debate? Just buy it if you want it. .....and get yer crunk on

[starving student]

that debate was not really about the machine it was about something else, you know what happens when we start talkin about obama oops I mean big butts oops I mean rappers oops I mean djs oops i mean hiphop over here but matthews as you can see is a decent guy

seriously though, this thing has 3 hours of rechargeable battery life, how much more do you think it's worth than an mpc-1000 which cannot has no additional rechargeable battery, granted the mpc-500 can run on batteries for close to 5 hours but it doesn't really compare to the beat thang, unless you love'em to death like i do which is why I'm asking peeps for one in the ableton gear forum right now.

[tw1nstates]

Ha ha,

The kangs have released their thang.

I predict, it's gonna be gone in less than a year.

Ipad's gonna kill that sucker...

£1,500 (which is what it would likely cost over here when it gets here) hmm, there are so many other things I'd spend that money on - I think a good rule of thumb is dont buy digital equipment for more than 1k as it never holds it's value. Analogue kit oth - seems to stay the same (if it's decent)...

[andydes]

It's not half as ugly as I remember. Not exactly pretty though.

Not sure about the arguement that it's a waste of money compared to live + controller. It's a bit like saying the the nord wave (£1800) for instance is a waste when you could just get soft synths and a controller. Or why spend thousands on a mixing desks, outboard compressors etc when you can do it all internally.

I suspect it's the name and styling that make people think it's not pro enough. What a bunch of snobs. That said, I feel no gear lust for it- mainly because of the name and the styling. I'm not going to try and rationalise my opinion though.

I suspect they might have shot themselves in the foot by trying to be a bit gangstar. That kind of branding might impress 15 year old wannabes, but I can't see it swaying anyone who has that kind of cash to spend on music gear. Maybe filthy rich 15 year old wannabes. But the thang was seen as a joke around here before anyone knew what it could do. Not a great way to start out, but time will tell.

[starving student]

^^ I agree andy, the specs are quite impressive, there is some conflicting info that I've got to sort through like does the rechargeable give you 3 hours or 6, their website specs list 6 but in the create digital music video demo they did the vp said it was 3 hours
and also I've read that it does 24bit samples as well as 16, but I'm not certain, will have to figure that out

that said the sound of this thing is stellar I can attest to that from the 1hr and 1/2 I spent with it yesterday.
back to the specs though, it's just crazy that you can hook this thing up to a hard drive and not use your computer and go nuts making music, i just can't get over it. and I see they've taken good ideas from other stuff we use, they took the idea from ableton where you drop a sample in a clip and then press the range on the keys that you want to spread it across and there you have it, a tonal instrument.
and they've taken the whole integrated thing from maschine, press a button and all of a sudden you're controlling the beatthing software or you've got a midi device for other shit.
frankly I just can't buy it for $1499.oo on principle but like I said compared to what they're charging for the mpcs new and maschine new it's actually not that bad of a price.

if they put this thing in a box that looked like a monome people would be salivating, I remember when maschine came out I was like wtf I'm not gonna spend 500 on a damn midi controller and I got lucky, ended up with one for much less but it's hard to bypass principles.... still I'll have fun with it for 5 days or so.