Today I want to kick off a little series of news posts which I have (somewhat jokingly) grouped under the category "Top Gear", in which I will share some thoughts on the gear I used to produce my music.First up is the Roland MC-505 Groovebox. Apart from the keyboard I got at age 10 when I started learning to play it, this was my first electronic music device. I bought it secondhand in the summer of 2002. Even though it had some repairs along the way, it is still functional today! Some people might wonder what a groovebox is, since this kind of instrument is not that popular anymore. It used to be back then though. A groovebox allowed one to have a sequencer play up to (in this case) 8 different loops and an additional drum track at the same time. So you could play or program a part, and have it played back while producing other bits. The device also had onboard effects and quite a few nice presets. However the fun was in creating new sounds. This versatility came with a price though: at any given time one could only use 1 reverb, 1 delay and 1 additional effect. Musicians know how limited this is. And there is no sampling involved, so one can only use the machine's sound generators.I had such a great time playing around with this device when I started out making electronic music. Tape 1.0 was made entirely with it and recorded straight to tape, since I had no hardware to record it digitally or put it on a disc in any way back then. So if you are under the impression that Tape 1.0's music is really basic, well: it is, and with good reason!Even though I purchased samplers, synthesizers, drum computers, effect devices, a multitrack recorder etc in the years afterwards, every single disc I made features quite a few sounds of the Roland MC-505. It had quite a good sound generator, and it's just so much fun playing around with newly made melodies and manimpulating the effects, filters or oscillators and seeing what results it produced. Great piece of equipment, I really loved it!