richardjneo

My Deluge Story:

I was a semi-professional local Melbourne DJ on and off for ~20 years, picked up "amateur" producing (two tracks on a free local CD compilation around 2001/2 but no paid/solo releases) around 1999. Mainly just doing it for the love of music and machines. Around 6 years ago my life went off the rails and all my gear went in storage at that time until about a year ago. When I got it all out, I had trouble picking up where I left off so I went looking for new/different ways to make music. Don't like using a computer to sequence, had a Sequential P3 from way back. In the meantime I learned to play a bit of keys and lots more music theory so I wanted more polyphony in my sequencer. Sold Sequentix P3, got a MPC1000 which I've used before around 10 years back, but this time it felt a bit clunky. Swapped that for a MPC One which is you know way more current, more features but oh man, that touch screen! Felt like all the good bits of a DAW but doing it on an iPhone. And I'm not much of a finger drummer anyway. So what was next?

I looked at all the current hardware sequencers. The first time I saw the Deluge I was put off by this giant array of buttons. But then I started watching the videos and thought yeah this is clever, and step sequencing is more my style. A few weeks ago I put feelers out in a local group to take the plunge, no one was selling but one guy offered to lend me his to try it out. Sweet. Then bam, we're locked down! No go. I tried again this week and found one selling, told the guy I was replacing my MPC One with it and the guy was like 'you want to trade?' (I gave him some money to even it out) so I was like HELLS YEAH!

So I've had it not two whole days and I gotta say, I've not felt this excited or fully engaged with a piece of gear since I got my Mk.1 MachineDrum SPS-1 like 12 years ago. It actually takes me back to the Fruity Loops (that's FL Studio for the kids) days when I first started experimenting with production like 20+ years ago! I've played more in the past two days than I did in the last 2 months with the MPC! It's so cool! A little arcane but I'm used to quirky machines (did I mention MachineDrum haha) and once you get a few concepts, it's actually quite intuitive from there on. And I've only just scratched the surface! I got the trusty (and hefty! 300 pages 😅) manual by my side. It did come with one of those hyper colour overlays which was really helpful as a cheat sheet to get started but ultimately hurt my eyes. And this is just playing with samples and built in synths. I'm looking forward to plugging in my hardware boxes and driving it all from this little (it's so little!) beauty and still yet to dig into arranger mode or (much) automation yet.

WOW it is so interesting and cool! Pushing me to experiment and come up with ideas I never would have thought of. I feel like Miles Dyson getting excited over the Terminator chip haha.

Been reading the forums and between the extensive video content, the manual and this place (search function is my friend), I feel like the learning curve is steep (literally just learning a lot in a short time) but not hard. Looking forward to tomorrow! I think I'm in love

This is amazing!! I love the Deluge so much but this is one area I always found annoying. I didn’t want a big screen, hate looking at screens, but also did not enjoy having always decipher these arcane 3 digit codes, or the worst was having it scroll a longer word through a three letter window. This is all I ever wanted, a tiny OLED no bigger than the 3-digit display

It’s PERFECT! :D/

Haha I was making a joke about fixing the squares in the logo, but yes that's the shortcut I meant

Out of stock? Did I miss it already? 🥹