that’s a cool idea!
haven’t even tried unison yet hehe.
definitely also needs options for voice allocation, so that you can have e.g. a bassline playing undisturbed on one track, with the other three being cycled for poly keyboard stuff.
Often quite fancied one of those myself!
^
It’s great Daren. Really much better sounding than I could have hoped for tbh, as although I’d thought about getting one for ages I’d never actually heard / seen one IRL…& the online vids etc were fairly crappy. So it was a bit of a gamble, well apart I knew I’d more than get my money back if I decided to sell.
But yeah - it sounds ace & the interface is a dream - you can’t help but tweak away. The minimax filter is also really nice on it … Dunno what the other ASBs were like ( Prophet5/Minimoog) but this is really quite lovely … I’d always fancied an Odyssey …& this is both less & more than one I suppose … But for something relatively tiny that sounds huge I don’t think I could have done much better. Highly recommended.
I just got a Waldorf Blofeld and for the price it’s pretty amazing. I am working on acquiring an Octatrack to sequence it, but for the time being just playing it live is a blast. It’s capable of a lot of different kind of sounds, and the interface is pretty good for a grid with only 6 knobs. (not counting volume and the data knob.) Novamusik has several for $499 right now.
I made the mistake of looking at the prophet 12 today- looks very nice indeed.
I’m quite a DSI fan too. The oscillators sounded great. I think they have a high resolution and I didn’t hear any aliasing or artifacts. I too have a P08 and although I couldn’t do a side-by-side test, the sawtooth, pulse and triangle oscillators sounded similar enough for me not to worry about them being digital on the P12. You have considerably more waveshaping options on the P12 as well as FM, AM and the character section. I got the feeling that they went digital for that part of the synth because they could get a lot more tonal flexibility without sacrificing quality.
I still think a high quality VCO will sound better than a DCO (which the P08 has) or digital oscillators, but you won’t see those on a polysynth anyway.
I tried recreating some of my own P08 patches on the P12 and they sounded very close. The filters are the same curtis design for the low pass and behave the same way. I also absolutely loved the resonant high pass, which pushes the sound into places way beyond the P08.
It might be harder to get the P12 to behave like the Evolver, which has the VS waves and an unusual parallel filter configuration though.
Like yourself, I’m considering selling my P08 to put towards the P12. My feeling is there’s nothing the P08 can do that the P12 cannot with a bit of programming, and that’s only scratching the surface of what the P12 can do on top of that.
Nobody mentioned the JX3P? 6 voice analog 2-osc poly with chord sequencer, and still relatively cheap? Better with a MIDI expansion kit, for sure…but still affordable.
Oh hell yes. G.A.S. Buzzy as!
Now I definitely want a P12! I think in the meantime though one of the vintage suggestions or another MonoMachine (run through A4 filters) will be the go
If I could score and old Kawai K1M for around $50 it would do the biz with the A4’s Filters and effects in tow for my needs.
I’m currently stuck between a Prophet 08 module and a Virus TI. This would be to run alongside and OT and A4 and be used mainly for pads and textures.
I love analogue but don’t want to spite myself by being an analogue snob.
Does anyone own both?
Since it was brought up earlier in this thread, just throwing another vote in for the Alpha Juno. I’ve been getting some cool results sending it sequences from the Mono and using chord memory to trigger 6 voice chords. Putting the SID arp on and programming chords on certain steps leads to some excellent variations. The slow LFOs are also nice for giving more movement over more than 64 steps. Plus, it’s a bass monster. Totally worth grabbing for the prices they go for.
If you’re not tied to analogue, I have a lot of time for the Ultranova. I think it suffers from unattractive presets, but under the hood there are some really powerful modulation and control options. If you play or perform live, or just like jamming, the touch encoders are a great feature - a tap of the finger can switch a whole host of mods around, and they all stack up, so it’s like having a little modular routing system if you set it up right (the only pain is you can’t lock them, though I think you can on the Mininova).
In addition to that there are some really interesting LFO options, such as musical scales, which work really well when synced to the arp and the gator effect (and repeating envelopes) - it’s definitely a playground for rhythmical patches. And there’s a chord mode too, so throw that into a slow latched arp and you’ve instantly got several bars of chord changes automated, which you can then mutate with the touch controls, mod wheel and what have you.
I always try to make time to recommend it when people are looking at polys, because I think it delivers a hell of a lot but, as I said, it’s not really apparent from the presets or most of the demos.