This week I was struck by the spirit to piece together a vocal rig. To facilitate this process, I grabbed a bunch of processors, stacked them up on my workbench and plugged them in 1 by 1 to the Fuhrman power conditioner. Wiring the modules into my mixer, everything seemed fine until I got to the Lexicon MPX-100. Based on the compressor’s LEDs, the MPX-100 seemed to be sending a signal through to the compressor, but I wasn’t hearing anything. Cranking the gain, it became apparent the unit could pass either no sound, or very distorted sound.
At about this point I noticed the Lexicon MPX-100 FX unit – a great unit that lasted like 25 years as the vocal effects processor from the early PTI days – was running a bit… hot. It It turns out the 9v AC drawing MPX-100 was plugged into a 24V AC supply I was using to power a Warm Audio TB12 preamp. Oops!
Now I am not a hardware engineer but seeing as the MPX-100 was hot, smelled like burning components, and was not passing audio, I feel safe to say the unit is smoked. And unlike my Yamaha SPX90 which absolutely warranted servicing to fix its own component heat death issues, a MPX-100 is just too cheap to really justify servicing.
Caveat: I may crack the MPX open and try my hand at some soldering, but who are we kidding? I haven’t released a song in half a decade and now I am going to solder?
This seems like the right time to refer you to the title of this post – “We are living in a golden age of 19 inch digital rack processors”. And I know what you are thinking! You are thinking that there are 2 things music producers are crazy about in the year 2025: working in the box, and paradoxically, using analog gear. And that neither of those have anything to do with outboard digital processors!
And while that is all true, I am here to teach the third path. Digital outboard gear. Nobody wants it. These units languish worldwide in the racks of yesterdays cover bands, and would-be guitar heroes world wide. Sure they lack the hip coolness of analog gear. And of course they are not as easy as working with a VST plugin in your DAW. But you know what? They are cheap, and available. They also have knobs, or at least buttons, which you can push with your own hands, in meatspace.
The last time I took a run at building a Doom Instrument, I realized I needed quite a few channels of sidechainable compression that I did not have. So what did I do? I spent like 20 minutes lamenting the fact that I don’t have a single awesome compressor like an API 2500 or a Distressor. You know what I did next? I logged onto reverb.com and spent like $130 to purchase 2 Alesis 3630‘s.
The Alesis 3630 is a legendary compressor. It is what Daft Punk used on the early records for their sidechain compression! A compressor good enough for Daft Punk is certainly good enough for me. So for the low price of like $135 bucks shipped, I was able to acquire 4 mono channels or 2 stereo pairs of fully side-chainable compression. You can too. Right now on Reverb.com there are 8 3630’s listed for $60 or less.
Some other units I think are underpriced at the moment:
Tascam TA-1VP – great vocal rig. Get yourself low latency live autotune in hardware format and never need to worry about running autotune on a computer again if you do not want to. Has a double mode that allows you to send the vocal signal out twice which is actually a very useful bit of routing.
TC Electronic M-One XL – you can still find the non XLR version for under $100 if you keep your eyes open, and the XL version for under $150. The M-One XL is a popular unit in the FOH rack of venues across America. One of the coldest features on the M1 is that it lets you use a different engine setting on the left and right channel, so effectively, you can have 2 channels of different effects coming out of the unit at once.
Alesis Midiverb III – Another classic early digital effects box. I think its totally worth a pickup for under $100 as a utility FX module, and because Alesis is a cornerstone of the early digital sound.
So back to the MPX-100 – this unit was going to serve as the dedicated delay for my vocal rig. Now if you know me, you know I suck and pretty much refuse to perform a live vocal if I can’t have a WANGING delay. A replacement had to be found. Lucky for me, I was able to log onto ebay.com and purchase the spiritual successor to the MPX-100, the MPX-200 for $75 bucks. This is life in the golden era of cheap and available digital processors from the 80’s, but mostly the 90s and 2000s.
Hope everyone is doing well and finding their own inspirations!
And please don’t fret that the Alesis 3630 is an analog compressor, that is not the point!