Elektron Monomachine - My baby. It's my favorite instrument. It's so intuitive and i can work really fast with it. It's great to come up with new ideas and sounds. It's small enough to have it on the lap on a couch with headphones. What I miss is that i cannot load different drum sounds.
Elektron Machinedrum - Such a deep machine. Like the monomachine it is very intuitive and fast to work with. I come up with the strangest stuff. I can load samples and resample with the RAM. I have it for a couple of years now, and I still haven't used all the functions. What I don't like about it is the limitation of the sequencer to 32 steps.
Nord Lead 3 Rack - Great sounding synth, especaly for pads. You have a knob or button for each function, so it is very hands on. I sequence it from the monomachine without any problem. A downside is, that it doesn't have any FX like a virus for exampl. But I get around this by routing the audio into the monomachine or machinedrum and use their FX.
Jomox XBase 09 - Basicaly a 909 clone. I bought it used for cheap. I just love its sound. Sometimes it's difficult to hold back, so it doesn't dominate the mix. I love to route it into the machine drum for FX and complex modulations. It is also very easy to handle, you have a knob for everything, very hands on. It acts a bit strange from time to time. Like it loses saved patterns or sounds, or a funtion doesn't work temporarly. But it is a quite old machine and I'm happy to use it as it is.
Sherman Filterbank 2 - I haven't had the time to go deep into this. I did some surface scratching. Routing drums into it is so much fun. It has al kinds of inptus to trigger envelopes and stuff. I have to pay attention that I don't overdo it. It can easly happen that no matter what audio you send into it, it comes out as distorted noise. I'm not yet used to it.
MPC 1000 - Bought this not long ago so I'm not that deep into it yet. My plan is to sample sounds from my synths, like when I route the Jomox into machinedrum into filter bank. I sample the sound into the MPC, cut it up, sequence it. Then I have the other machines free for new sounds. As I said I haven't spend much time with it, so I can't talk about downsides or wishes for this.
Patchbay - This one is very important to me. I have all intputs and outputs of the hardware mentioned above connected to the patch bay. This way I can easly route sound from one synth to another. I can create crazy FX chains and in the end sample it with the MPC.
The basic idea of my setup is to have everything as hands on as possible. I prefer easy and fast to use synths. They might not sounds the best and have limitations, but for me it's all about the fun. Operating a synth with a mouse is one of the most horrible things I have done in my life. It sucks all motivation right out of me. Propellerheads Reason with a dedicated controller is nice, but I really want more. Also I don't really use any EQ or compression. Only for musical FX. My stuff doesn't sound very polished and fat, but I have lots of fun.
Here are some songs I did some time ago with this setup:
http://soundcloud.com/sauna-sound/spring-10
http://soundcloud.com/sauna-sound/scan
http://soundcloud.com/sauna-sound/02-daemmerung
http://soundcloud.com/sauna-sound/04-altstadt
http://soundcloud.com/sauna-sound/nede
