I tested some synths at the local music store today: Korg Minilogue, Roland JD-Xi and Novation Mininova. (I also tried Roli Seaboard GRAND but that’s another story.) I already have a VA synth Korg R3 so I didn’t focus on very much to the last two of the mentioned but I made some quick notes about them (you may skip this part if you’re not interested):
Roland JD-Xi:
-Versatile preferences but for example waveshape changer didn’t always work as should. (Broken unit?)
-Drum keys don’t always seem to follow the MIDI standard at least on the (only) preset I tried. (I’ve played keyboard drums many years so this was a difficult thing to get used to.)
Novation Mininova:
-Nice touch when editing sounds but…
-I didn’t even find the LFO! (Based on later web search it does exist but lfo rate for example might be difficult to set up as I read.)
Korg Minilogue
This synth got my interest since I’ve never experienced such a workflow of syntesizing the basic stuff. (So far I’ve used only R3 and soft synths for “true” synthesizing.) On Minilogue there’s all the important basic knobs under your eyes: 2 oscillators and LFO, filters, delay, EG, VCO…
So, my central message is at least this: if you’re planning on learning to synthesize without any background knowledge, Korg Minilogue is probably the best solution to begin with. (Of course excluding all possible soft synths.) Even though it has smaller keys than normal keyboards, they feel very good, at least compared to those other two synths (and HUGELY improved compared to MicroKORG for example). It was also a very teaching session to try that synth for couple of hours as I played. At first I was surprised that why isn’t there a sine wave -setting for oscillators but you actually get the pure sine wave by “softening” triangle. (Usually you get pure waves, in this case pure triangle with full cutoff and zero resonance. But in order to get the pure sine you set those to mid values; you’re still able to modify waveshape etc!) There are many things that affect each other in synthesizing process but the OLED screen (shown in the picture) provides the real time visual waveshape (oscilloscope) which is really helpful.
Then there is the “but”. Even though the workflow made me learn new things, I handle most of the basic stuff already. (I’ve synthesized sounds for six years at least.) Since I knew almost all the time what I was doing I was able to reach the limitations of the synth. Or so I thought, because I’m not sure if the buttons hid more profound options (especially the mystic “Shift” that I didn’t find any use). Still, it seems that it doesn’t carry many effects etc. (At first I wondered the lack of reverb to figure out soon that reverb is technically a short timed delay.) Although, it could be that it is more common with analogue synths to have modular effects and stuff.
After all, bear also in mind that the sound is purely analogical. It gives the “natural” electronic sound, of course with the expense of preferences, controllability and polyphony. Still polyphony of 4 is quite good for an analogue synth (usually they’re monophonic). Sometimes Minilogue had slight problems to keep in tune when playing with full width and polyphony but I couldn’t always reproduce the problems. So, resetting the programs might solve those issues. Oh yeah, that reminds me: it’s digitally controlled, so that will also prevent many head scratch moments for beginners! Of course the analogue sound (with its all flaws) is the core element of esthetics. Digitally emulated sound might not bother many, like in the sense you get the same visual information by looking a forest or the picture of it, but when you observe real things deeper, they feel deeper. Digital substitutions can’t reach that feel. (Even though they’re more efficient in many other practical manners.)
What comes to more complex synths, I’ve started to learn using a free software synth ZynAddSubXF for Linux. Maybe I post something about it later.
variksenpelotin 