What synthesizers (and other gear) do you regret buying?

Everyone posts about their cool new toys, but I think we all would learn a lot from shared stories of regret. What gear do you regret buying?

I would like to clarify. Simply selling something doesn’t count. Neither do stories like “I quit hardware and fully switched to a DAW”. I’m interested in cases where you bought a particular piece of music hardware, used it for a while and decided it’s not worth keeping. If you’ve upgraded from one device to another, it counts as regret only if you wished you skipped the original device in the first place.

For example, I regret buying Korg KaossPad 3. Now, it’s a very well-designed device, with a lot of interesting features. You can sample, chop, apply effects and re-sample stuff, slowly morphing it into something unrecognizable. Very dynamic process and lost of fun. Sample looping usually “just worked” for me, with no clicks, pops or much misalignment. But I have to admit: I bought it after watching one of the older Beardyman’s videos. He used his voice. I play keyboards. Big difference.

I wanted to use KP3 to build backing loops in near real-time. Never managed to do that well. It wasn’t a pedal, so starting recording was tricky. It couldn’t record very long loops (IIRC only around 14 seconds). It only had four sample slots. And when you triggered an effect, you applied it to everything at once. Which meant that if you wanted to morph a sample, you had to mute everything else and resample to another slot. The way I was using it was clunky, not truly real-time and resulted in rather repetitive patterns that I couldn’t change precisely enough. KP3 can do anything you can imagine with a sample (speed up, stretch, reverse, trim, chop, whatever), but you have to press some arbitrary space on the pad to get the right length/pitch/speed, which was really tricky. Sold it when I decided to get BigSky.

DSI Tempest, my mate got that when it first came out, after two years on waiting for firmware updates to fix the huge amount of issues he had to sell it.

Tempest is one of the best drum machines ever made period. It’s common knowledge that nothing is released without it’s share of bugs. If you’ve been patient you now have a true trail-blazer and future classic drum machine- i.e., DSI Tempest.

<span style=“color: rgb(37, 38, 30); font-family: “lucida grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 14.3px; background-color: rgb(252, 252, 255);”>KP3, MPC 500, Waldorf Blofeld, Octatrack, Korg R3…lots of regrets, although all of those gears were important for my sound explorations and beatmaking learnin’

Wavedrum Oriental. Could not gel with it.

Everyone’s free to comment of course, but lets not turn this into a flame war. I’ve considered Tempest when it came out and heard exactly what @Trevbo said. There were a lot of moderately serious issues in the beginning and for quite a while after. If DSI ultimately fixed most of them that’s good. It would be interesting to see a comprehensive list of all those fixes and improvements. Some YouTuber did that for AnalogFour at the release of Mk II. He listed all the things Elekrtron added since the release and said you have to pretty much ignore the old reviews now.

This thread is about devices that people bought, used for some time and then sold. It’s their direct experience. One thing I would ask, though, is to be specific about why you have regretted buying something. It would also help if you described why you chose the device in the first place.

What I’m trying to gauge is what leads people to disappointment and factor that into my own decisions.

Tempest is one of the best drum machines ever made period. It's common knowledge that nothing is released without it's share of bugs. If you've been patient you now have a true trail-blazer and future classic drum machine- i.e., DSI Tempest.

Sorry that was my experience, we had projects to finish and we just couldn’t wait two years for certain issues to be fixed. Anyone who bought one at the beginning will know about the sync issues.

long preorders. only did it one time. never again. the build up of expectations, the waiting, the delays.

I got very deep into eurorack, sort of peaked and then sold it all on. I loved, it, almost obsessively and used it and recorded hours of jams on it for about a year. I felt like I went down a rabbithole and learn’t a lot of stuff, but I have to admit that the gear took over the ideas I think. And that’s why I regret it. I was getting gigs booked, because I had a huge modular rack to perform with, more the theatre and mad scientist of it all I guess. With eurorack, you can play a game of selling and upgrading all the time, but after a while I kept making similar sounding stuff no matter what modules I was using. The main sound I learn’t and took away, came from the actual post processing fx and tape loops, and I actually now get the sound I want using other stuff, like DAW, Op1 ipad apps etc. so there wasn’t the need and expense for it. The modular actually held it’s resale value, but the time and energy put in was much more costly. I can now transfer that knowledge to free alternatives though such as VCV rack.

^ayy the preorder game. i dont pre order anything anymore.

Novation nova