-=[THE SYNTH ZONE]=-

I've had Vital downloaded forever but never really dove into because the interface was a bit intimidating/flipping through presets made it worse.

Started going just from the init patch and I really like it going easy on the modulation and macros. The text-to-wavetable ability + making an LFO stereo so you start in the middle of a wavetable and have it modulating in and out going the opposite way in each channel is a lot of fun.

Looks like Elektron are dropping something new very soon...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVX0AThBNPE

https://www.dublab.com/archive/elektron-presents-new-sounds-from-a-new-place-04-19-22

Syntakt's probably pretty fun, but seems like kind of just a cobbling together of existing Elektron parts. Like maybe a slicker Model: Cycles mixed with a RYTM lite? Still using the old RYTM analogue engines too, which really need a overhaul at this point. Curious to see how it lands, but considering their big releases the past few years have been minimally upgraded re-releases of classics, the budget Model stuff, and now this, they're kinda not looking too inspired these days. I know some key (or at least public facing) talent has left these past few years.

Yeah it seems a little underwhelming, particularly given the 1K pricetag. I was hoping it would be a little more fully-featured for what they're asking. I think the budget Model stuff is good--I own a Samples and it's what got me into Elektron gear. Apparently Korg has been working on a "Drumlogue" with a similar feature set to the Syntakt, so maybe that will prove to be an affordable alternative.

New Oberheim for all the Van Halen tribute bands out there to really nail that "Jump" sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eOSXipp-MI

I'm all about tiny budget synths, and those Rolands *look* very nice, but function-wise don't seem very interesting to me, since I don't really make acid techno/pick your choice of uptempo 4/4 dance music.

The new Polyend box (it's a sample-playback groovebox, so not a "synth" technically) looks very fun, but that's gonna be out of my price range for the foreseeable future.

Has anyone tried out Dreadbox Nymphes? It looks like it could be really nice.

ooh, the Eowave Quadrantid Swarm is one I might actually have to get, seems really good for making gnarly techno sequences

this mylarmelodies fellow can pretty much sell me on anything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwLpLXpfnBU

Dawesome Novum is the most interesting granular plugin I've seen (not cheap or free but there's a 90 day demo) - it splits an audio file into six spectral layers that can be turned on or off or individual layers swapped out with layers for other sounds.

Very intriguing, it looks like what I wanted out of NI Form.

gear update!

still going strong with the Minibrute 2s, just incredible bang for the buck. I recently found myself with a bit of extra money, so I decided to add on the 6U Rackbrute and a bunch of modules, here's the rundown:

Eowave Quadrantid Swarm semi modular synth and sequencer - the build is a bit flimsy, it takes up a lot of space in the rack, and it is nearly impossible to get anything in tune (a quantizer might fix this). In a way, it reminds me of a 303 because it doesn't seem to do a bunch of the stuff it was meant to do very well, but it just sounds very good and is a great way to produce noisy atonal techno jams. I probably will move it to a stand alone case eventually if I need more room.

Mutable Instruments Marbles random sampler - I really like the idea of building grooves between several voices based on random sequences that I can then lock down. I've come up with some interesting things here and there, but it can be very difficult to tame it down to something manageable. I need to keep working with this one to find it's sweet spot. Possibly changing up the scales it uses could help.

Make Noise Maths function generator - this is just extremely powerful and helps dial in the exact right sound in all kinds of circumstances, pretty much can be used with everything. There are times when I expect it to do a particular thing and I'm not sure how to get it exactly right, but that just comes down to my own lack of know how. More often than not, it does a ton of work.

Expert Sleepers ES-8 USB i/o interface - this is very handy for sending audio and CV signals back and forth with Ableton, it is pretty much how I run everything. I send clock signals from Ableton to sync the various devices, and then send back the audio to record. It also allows me to sequence modular voices with midi from Ableton and Push, as well as send additional modulation signals. Finally I can send out audio from Ableton to use modules as outboard effects processors. The one issue I've had is that I'm very reliant on an M-Audio interface for general audio i/o including sending audio to my speakers. Windows does not allow you to run multiple audio interfaces at the same time. My workaround has been using Asio4All to basically kludge the 2 interfaces together, but it is very unstable and leads to a lot of crashes. I've more or less got it working most of the time, but will probably add in a CV-to-1/4" converter to send audio back and forth from the M-Audio interface instead of trying to run both simultaneously.

SSF Stereo Dipole filter - I originally wanted to get Mutable Instruments Blades because I love how smooth it is, but I guess Mutable Instruments is going out of business, most of their items are discontinued, so it's pretty much impossible to find for anything close to an affordable price. The Stereo Dipole was the one of the closest I could find in terms of functionality. It sounds utterly amazing. It doesn't have the same smoothness as Blades, and can get a bit screechy at points, but generally just makes everything sound better. I'm pretty much running every sound through this at the moment because it adds so much.

Intellijel Quad VCA - This is a very handy little mixer that also provides some nice overdrive color. Pretty much all patches have some combination of Maths, Stereo Dipole, and Quad VCA, plus LFOs and attenuation from the Minibrute.

Mutable Instruments Plaits macro-oscillator - I was very much on the fence about this. It seems to appear in every last rig you see, probably the most popular module out there. I felt like its sound was maybe becoming too much of a cliche and wasn't sold on the idea of a digital oscillator. I bought it for a few reasons: right now there are enough out there that you can snipe one for a decent price off Ebay or Reverb, it seems like it will be discontinued in the not too distant future and will probably have decent resale value then, it would make a nice contrast to the very analog sounds of the Minibrute and Quadrantid Swarm. Anyway, it sounds really good, and it was silly of me to resist. It has enough flexibility that you can dial in stuff that still has some uniqueness.

Make Noise Mimeophon delay/reverb - this is in the mail, will be a good addition for more effects processing, which has been a very important element of the rig for me.

Other possible future additions - CV-to-1/4" or something else to help manage my interface issues, maybe a Quantizer, a compact LFO source or sequencer, a drum voice. None of these is critical at the moment, but are more nice to have someday.

The final complementary piece of gear that I mentioned upthread is the Roland TR-8S drum machine. It isn't perfect, but it has been getting a lot of use lately because it is so quick to dial up a solid sounding beat. The classic sounds are of course all great. It has a parameter locking function (Roland calls it "motion") that helps fine tune my beats and add some extra movement, although it is not nearly as precise or flexible as what you'd find on Elektron gear. It also has limited capacity for sequencing samples, which I really haven't made full use of yet. It holds far fewer samples than I would have expected, so I need to take some time to really pick out a selection of the best ones I have. I would much rather just dump a bunch of stuff in there, but that isn't going to work. With all the drum samples I have in Ableton, I can realistically create beats on the computer that are just as good, but so far the Roland has just been quicker, easier, and less CPU intensive.

I'm very happy with the move towards a more hardware-centric approach. The bottom line is that I'm getting much more high quality sounds out of the rig than I can get using soft synths, and I can dial in what I want very precisely. I tend to come up with a few sequences and/or patches, then just hit record and jam out on them for about 10 minutes. Then I can edit down the recordings to some useable loops or just use extended segments if they sound good enough. This has enabled me to be more productive and actually get stuff done without feeling frustrated. Having decent sounds readily available just makes it all more fun and less like a chore.

I think this will be the year I add one or two hardware instruments to my Ableton + Pigments set up.

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Sunday, January 16, 2022 11:58 AM (six months ago)

lol "one or two"

The Korg Opsix is on sale at a bunch of places for $330

Yeah, I saw that - tempting, but I think I have enough stuff to keep me busy. Have I mentioned the Peak is great?

Damn the Opsix looks op-sick. Bye 8 I've been in a firmly software mode lately and it's been working for me.

this looks like a great deal, I'd strongly consider if I hadn't just bought a bunch of gear and have zero space left

synth night on Sky TV (uk freeview channel 11) next friday night (12th) with a Tangerine Dream documentary, then I Dream Of Wires, some New Order thing and then 2 hours of something called Rise Of The Synths

narrated by John Carpenter - ooooh

"The film explores the origins and growth of the electronic music genre known as synthwave" - ewwwww

Korg Drumlogue, finally
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqB7zGHFEqs

kind of cool...but kind of underwhelming. At that price point, I feel like the Roland TR8S is a much better deal. The custom osc thing will be cool, but it just isn't as feature-rich as the Roland. I feel like this should be more like 450 bucks or something.

Anybody using a power pack and special cable to power Elektron gear?

I came up on a Model:Cycles and Behringer RD9 new-in-box for $475 yesterday. Dude I bought them from was a little older than me (late 40s) and living out of his car. Had bought a ton of stuff but lost his job/apartment before he could use them. I gave him an extra $50 because I felt bad for taking advantage of his situation. The RD9 is kind of superfluous in my setup and it’s a bummer that it doesn’t take Pattern Change messages over MIDI, but it is cool as hell and sounds and feels like a 909. The Model:Cycles is my first piece of Elektron gear and I can tell why people like them so much. It would be a really nice piece to take off the grid on its own.

Regretting not getting an Opsix while the getting was good :(

Maybe in a year the prices will be down again, after everyone who snapped one up to resell it has done so

xxp

it should also be noted that the TR-8S recently added probability and a set of very customizable FM drums

I've been curious about the Model: Cycles, it seems like a good place to start with Elektron stuff because it isn't quite as crazy expensive as some of their other gear.

I have the Model:Samples! I love it. It doesn't really do anything I can't do in Bitwig, but it's just more fun to use.

I agree that $600 seems steep for the Drumlogue, but I feel like it's mostly cuz of inflation. If it had been released a few years ago it might have been priced more like an Electribe. Even the Volcas are creeping closer to $200

When I first plugged the RD9 in last week I felt a little bit of regret for the purchase..."This is nice but doesn't do anything I can't already do with my current gear...kind of a waste of $$$". After a weekend of playing around with it I now feel like it's the only thing I've ever needed and that I'm the next Jeff Mills. It's so much fun to play hands-on and pushed through a little FX it sounds great. The thing I get with the hands-on version that I don't with software versions or with just running samples of the 909 drum sounds is that it's combination of knobs and the different accent levels allow you to be very expressive and wring a lot of 'movement' and drama out of simple patterns that just programming stuff and letting it run does not.

Honestly I should have saved up another 300 bux and gotten a TR-8S but....

What do we think of the Roland SH-4D? A new groovebox doesn't rank high on my list of gear I'd like to add, but up to now the top contender for me would have been the Syntakt. My first impression of the SH-4D is that it sounds better than the Syntakt but is not as powerful with sequencing and parameter locks.

It looks pretty sweet, wish it was a tiny bit cheaper.

I'm selling some of my synths that I haven't used for awhile (Korg Monologue and Critter & Guitari Pocket Piano) and want to use the proceeds for something new. I've been looking at the Hydrasynth Explorer, but it doesn't seem like anything I can't do with Vital, and maybe I just need to admit I'm a software boy.

Love the Minifreak VST I got for $29, have been tempted by the hardware w/ REAL ANALOG FILTERS but from what I can hear in videos I'm not sure the real filters are adding much character over the plugin

Yeah I didn't end up getting along with the minifreak, vst version is probably all you need unless you like the cool touch keyboard and want to use it as a controller.

Someone get the Buchla easel plugin and let me know how it is

I may have to get the behringer easel

Not sure if this will ever see the light of day.

i have the arturia easel VST, it's fun enough. though madrona labs' aalto is very similar in terms of patching and general philosophy and is better in every respect imo

Ooh, neat. I may have to try this out.

My first encounter with Buchla was stumbling upon YouTube videos of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith playing the easel some years back. At the time, the only options available were impossibly expensive. Luckily that's been changing rapidly. Lately I've been expanding out my eurorack rig to include a couple of the Tiptop Audio Buchla modules, which are very nice and much more affordable. The dual oscillator has quickly become my favorite sound source.

VCV Rack has all the pieces to put together an Easel (for free) too or even an improved one. The Instruo models on there are sweet - love the Cs-L complex filter and 1047 filter from the ARP 2500. Their envelope generator is an ADSR but the Befaco Rampage module is a good alternative.

complex oscillator

Yeah, vcvrack is hours of fun...

i've been trying to recreate some serge panels in vcvrack using the stock modules, i think there are subtleties in the serge designs that are difficult to capture in a chain of generic function generators but you can build up some pretty fun feedback patches anyway.

great software regardless.

Well, I done horse-traded my Modal Cobalt 5s to help pay for a Digitone; it turns out this was a good choice! I bought the Cobalt last year for a goth-rock project with a friend that never materialized. It's a fantastic-sounding synth but incredibly awkward to work with; patching relies on a lot of shift functions that bounce right off my muscle memory. Also the XYZ pad kinda sucks, which is a shame.

Is this your first experience with Elektron gear? What are your thoughts? Any reason for Digitone vs some of the others?

I was already Elektron-pilled by the Model:Samples, which I've had for around 2 years. I think they're great, you have the flexibility of modulation that you have in a DAW, but with the immediacy of hardware. I love the whole "press a key, turn a knob to change just that step" paradigm. Elektron has this reputation for having a steep learning curve, and that may be true for something like the Octatrack (which I personally can't speak to), but I find the workflow very fast and intuitive once you get the basics down. But that might just be the way my brain works, ymmv.

I've been eyeing the Digitone in particular for a few years. I like the fact that I can use it as an 8-voice multitimbral polysynth *or* as a groovebox/sketchpad. I also like the streamlined approach to FM; you're guided toward the sweet spots by default, but you still have the freedom to step outside of them when you want to. The other boxes don't interest me as much, because they're either too expensive or because their feature set just isn't what I'm looking for. I'll admit the new slicing and time-stretch machines on the Digitakt have piqued my curiosity, but I'll stick with Koala Sampler on my phone for now :)

The Syntakt is the one that attracts me the most, and the ease of parameter locking is a big part of it, but something about the sound of Elektron boxes always puts me off a bit, like they are a bit too clean or something.

If I ever win the lottery I will immediately buy an Intellijel Cascadia and an Erica Synths Perkons, both look amazing, but they are also absurdly over-priced

Got to spend a couple of hours playing an OB-X8 tonight and wow, that's a legitimately inspirational machine. All the different Oberheim filter arrangements, set up an arpeggio of noise and the filter just starting to ping, flip through the SEM and OB-X LP/BP/HP options, play with the adorable paddles and manually shift the arpeggio tempo for rolls.

Same acquaintance has a Prophet 10 and if I was going to dump $4k plus on a keyboard I'd 100% go with the OB over the Prophet.

This video's had me thirsty for a Syntakt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx61uxtPzo0

I haven’t touched a Syntakt but it’s definitely the first Elektron machine that seems kinda half-baked to me. Just cobbled together old parts as opposed to something forward thinking. Can understand the appeal as a seemingly all in one machine though.

Whoever was asking about the Digitone above, that is an actual brilliant synth. Kind of a landmark in FM synthesis imo.