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Comment by Tsiklon | Hacker News Reader

This is a wonderful little toy. As an aside is it difficult to pick up and use a 303 with no prior synth experience?

If you're transcribing written music then it's fairly straight forward - you program the pitches in one round, press a button and input the note length values. If however you want to jam around like you might with any other seqencer driven synth I find it's too much to keep in your head so a pencil and paper with a 303 sequencer grid on it is pretty essential.

The Behringer lets you connect to an app via USB so you can program it that way too.

The sound engine is easy to use and the knobs encourage experimentation - the interaction of the filter, the envelope and the accent is where the fun is. And of course the slide!

I think the issue will be more the cost, they go for about 2500 to 3000 euros

But yes arguably synth experience won't even help, the 303 sequencer is very weird and unlike any other sequencer

Behringer does really nice clones of these old synths, much more affordable (~120 EUR for this one): https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0DTD

Yeah, I have a TD-3. It's by no means trivial to use for a novice, but there are some nice guides such as the one linked below. You have to get used to holding the internal state of the sequencer in your head during programming, as there is no display showing which step you are on etc.

And the time mode must be programmed separately, which on several occasions has left me scratching my head at why the thing makes no sound at all.

https://airainfo.org/files/TD-3-Programming.pdf

A new TB-03 from Roland, which is a digital clone but quite nice sounding, is only $400.

Sounds really unlike the real thing

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