At first glance, it’s ticking all the boxes

February 10, 2022 7:46 PM

Bad Gear is a YouTube channel by AudioPilz that repeatedly tries to determine- is it the gear that is bad, or just the musician? Spoiler alert: it’s usually the musician.

Rigidly formatted, packed dense with synth memes, and released on a strict weekly schedule, the channel covers popular hipster synths, keyboards of yore, old studio gear, guitar shibboleths, musical toys and oddities, and so so so many drum machines and grooveboxes. Also on the channel are “better gear” attempts to hack equipment into a more usable status.

posted by q*ben (14 comments total)

It's a good channel - he puts a lot of effort into these videos and the conclusions he draws about each piece of gear are interesting.
posted by awfurby at 8:30 PM on February 10, 2022

His channel has sold me on a couple things, like the Modal Skulpt and the Zoom Multi-Effects Pedals. And I've got a few Korg Volcas, so every week there's some anticipation that he might talk about something I already own.

Also his finale song genres are fantastic.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 8:45 PM on February 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

I had and sold a Skulpt though it’s more a comment on my needs than the quality of the instrument. Also own a Zoom MS-70CDR and you will pry that out of my cold, dead hands.
posted by q*ben at 9:52 PM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

So bummed to hear him rip on the Korg NTS-1! It's a hundred bucks of pocket-sized fun, and is packed with features.

Okay, okay, his complaints are on point for the most part. The teensy keyboard onboard is all but unplayable and you need an external MIDI keyboard and/or sequencer. And if you sit on it, it's toast. But until you do, it a complete blast.

Fun channel.
posted by vverse23 at 10:17 PM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wouldn’t say he really rips on the NTS-1 (or almost anything, for that matter).
posted by atoxyl at 11:59 PM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

I love Audiopilz videos, even if he has covered almost every single piece of electronic music equipment I've owned.
posted by drezdn at 3:44 AM on February 11, 2022

Reminds me of the classic Farside cartoon where the audio engineer is turning up the "suck" knob.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:28 AM on February 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

He's groovy. A quite engaging example of this genre of YT music gear video demos (which is quite full of not great examples). It makes more sense once you get past the title's implication that "Bad" Gear means "not good", it's more than that. He often tempts me to want to buy wonky dated old devices that can do this one cool thing. But the world doesn't really need more 90s-style techno, or at least I don't.
posted by ovvl at 7:40 AM on February 11, 2022

Yeah the channel is called Bad Gear and on the surface it's complaining about stuff but mostly he is actually just showing some piece of gear and giving it's plusses and minuses. In the end he manages to make good music with just about everything.
posted by RustyBrooks at 8:27 AM on February 11, 2022

The premise of the show isn’t that he’s complaining about bad gear, it’s that he’s reviewing gear that has a bad reputation. And most of the time he’s implicitly going to rehabilitate it on some level - by making it sound cool, but his actual reviews are also pretty evenhanded.

If anything he casts a rather wide net for things that maybe somebody somewhere called bad gear (because he needs content). Like it’s true some people don’t like the MicroKorg I guess but everybody has one. Or the DX7 used to have a bad reputation with synth enthusiasts but it hardly does now.
posted by atoxyl at 8:49 AM on February 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh oh do the Neumann TLM 103 next! If your whole experience was reading music forums you'd either think this is the worst mic ever or the magic bullet to fix your voice, neither of which is true.
posted by aspersioncast at 10:35 AM on February 11, 2022

Reading forum commenters complaining about some piece of gear usually makes me want it more, or love it more if I already have it.

I feel like Bad Gear is making an easy-to-read-between-the-lines statement about "hate" of tools and perhaps hate in general... while also poking some fun at the weird design and interface choices designers make.

Not quite as satisfying as Hainbach's deep dives into more obscure and basically awful stuff like the soviet Faemi he covered recently, or the Suiko ST-50, and using them to make beautiful things.
posted by Foosnark at 1:32 PM on February 11, 2022

I'm kind of curious if prices spike on any of this gear after a "Bad Gear" video, like with guitar pedal prices and JHS Show entries.
posted by drezdn at 5:38 PM on February 11, 2022

Foosnark, love Hainbach and see the similarity but I actually have the opposite reaction - I often feel like the Hainbach treatment ends up making these weird instruments into mythical Gear of Desire, and while I personally like the music Hainbach is making more I really appreciate how the Bad Gear videos puncture the entire concept of magical instruments - his actual reviews are very straightforward and he almost never ends up making unqualified recommendations. But they are best when watched together :)
posted by q*ben at 6:26 PM on February 11, 2022