Have I gained a reputation around here?
Things I don't like:
The knobs make it hard to program in low-light settings. It's a little like trying to read the writing on an Oreo. I'm probably going to get some glow-in-the-dark paint or some white-out and paint those markers. Or I might replace the knobs... We'll see...
They don't give you much control over the delay. It doesn't look like there's a way to adjust the level of the delay, and there's no way to sync it to anything else.
The modulation routing options seem kind of lacking. The LFO can only control one parameter at a time. The EG doesn't have any option to loop itself (i.e. after it's finished it retriggers itself). There are lot of little things like that, they aren't terribly bothersome but they irk me a little when I find them? I do this with every synth I buy, though. I go through and figure out what I can/can't do. One thing that bothers me is that there's a switch for velocity, but to change the portamento you have to dive into a sub-menu? The portamento has some cool syncing features, so, I don't know how much I want to fault them for that...
The oscillators seem to go out of tune a little easily. I've found myself retuning the oscillators a lot when I've been playing (like maybe once or twice an hour). But that makes sense because it's analog, it's just mildly irksome when you're trying to program a setting and you're getting a weird tuning artifact that's messing with your settings.
The oscillators are also a little... thin? They're not very harmonically rich. But it's not something I notice very much. If I HAD to use the poly mode the entire time it would bother me a lot, but I've found myself using the duo/unison modes a lot and it's REALLY rich in texture.
There's no option to have it load the panel settings on startup. It's really easy to load the panel settings after you've booted it up, but I wish it did that automatically.
Things I like:
There is a TON of control right there. If you want to change something just grab a knob and turn.
While there aren't a ton of modulation routing options, there still are a lot of really good things for modulation. The motion control is really fun, the cross-mod, sync, and ring-mod options are GREAT. It's not hard to find a really complex sound with this, but I haven't been able to make anything really gross/ugly (in the way some fuzzes get gross and ugly). But that's part of the character of this synth (more on that later).
If you're syncing this with volcas it has a really nice feature: clock division. You can either have the sequencer/LFO run through at the same speed as the volca it's syncing with, or you can run it at half the speed of the volca. I wish it had more options than that, but even just that's REALLY nice!
The keys feel really nice. I don't like weighted keys very much. They're a little silly if you ask me. But this feels good to play, and the velocity has a lot of personalization if you want to dig into the sub-menus. Though, unless I'm making some kind of noise setting, I really don't have any use for velocity control.
There is a lot of sonic ground to explore in this thing. It's why I've been kind of slow to review this thing. Every time I sit down with it I've lost at least an hour of time. I get sucked in exploring what it can do, and seeing how everything effects each other.
Overall:
A synthesizer like this is an instrument of its own. If you're trying to scratch that modular itch by getting one of these, it's going to be a horrible cock-tease. It gives you a lot of modulation options, but nowhere near as extensive as any kind of modular setup. But that' the shortfall of any synth that's not a modular one. This is something I've been reminding myself of when any of those complaints I listed bother me.
Each synth I've played has a kind of attitude, finding the right one for you depends on a lot of things: type of interface, options, sound, etc. And all of those things combined give each one a kind of unique feel? So far my favorite synth to sit and fiddle/play with was an old Roland thing.
I don't quite have a handle on this synth's personality yet, but I do get what people mean by that "Detroit" sound after playing with it. This isn't a dirty/grimy synth, this has lots of clean sounds in it that kind of remind me of the 80's you saw in the movies. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep it yet, I'm not sure if I get along with it. That said, it is REALLY fun to play and is very VERY flexible.
