Digitech RDS 8000

[studio seventeen productions <ambient@adnc.com>]

I, too own one of these.  And as Pete said, it's a great box.  I've had 
mine
for about 6 years. I needed a long delay, and at the time the Oberheim and
the Jamman didn't exist (not to mention I couldn't have afforded them
anyway),,,so the Digitech was the only choice.

It has some real advantages, being all knobs and real-time tweakable.  It
does great thick flangers and wild choruses, I should mention.  But it 
takes
a while to learn how to get the best sounds, and looping with it can be
really tricky.  First of all, you have to select your loop duration FIRST,
and then pray that you are playing what you want to be playing when that
sucker comes around again.  You can open and close the loop to add more
material, and reduce feedback to let older parts fade away.

This was my main looping device for many years, and when I listen back to
the tapes of my band Bindlestiff I am amazed that I could sound this way
with only 8 seconds.  I ran the RDS8000 mix out into an ancient Digitech
DSP128 (now long since gone).  

Now for the other side of the coin.  It has no MIDI.  You'll have to buy 
two
footswitches to start and lock/unlock the loop.  And, it's not easy to get
that loop right when you don't have a START HERE/STOP HERE footpedal as you
do with the JamMan and the Oberheim.
And (and this is sad in a way) but I've owned an Oberheim for about two
years now (?) and although the RDS8000 is still in my rack, I very rarely
use it because the Oberheim is SO much more intuitive and eaasy to use. And
now that I finally got my upgrade chips (about two weeks ago) it works like
a DREAM.   (BTW:  GREAT WORK KIM AND MATHIAS!).

But if you can't afford an Obie, it's a GREAT box, reasonable quiet, and
loads of fun.  It can do some horrific detuning, and you can also alter the
pitch of your loops, say by recording a 2 second loop and then turning the
time down to 8 seconds (thus lowering the pitch).  I used to create
"vari-pitch" loops which were great fun but often quite annoying to listen 
to.

And, if it's cheap, you get a bitchin flanger, chorus,
slapback....infinitely tweakable.  It requires patience to operate.  There
are no presets.   

I've never regretted buying it though.  Some of the most amazing looping
I've ever done was done with the 8000 and the incredibly primitive DSP128
(or so it seems to me now in my old age :-)

it's nice to be back!

cheers,

dave at studio seventeen


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