Wanna hear your Synth9 experiences/thoughts/what have yous

[fldrvr]

Let's hear 'em. Good? Bad? Usable? Plays well with others? Hits on your girlfriend?

[echorec]

I've owned the C9 & the Mel9, but I had absolutely no interest in the Synth9. I think it sounds like absolute shit. Nothing I've heard from it mirrors the synths it's meant to emulate. The Prophet sound they went with is absolutely disgusting and downright offensive. For $200, I'd tell someone to get a Source Audio Stingray or the Orbital. A nice filter would give you much nicer synth-like sounds.

It could probably be useful in a chain with modulation and delay, but why buy something just to cover it up?

[ck3]

I currently have a Mel9 and Synth9 on hand, the latter of which was purchased shortly after release. Both are in storage for the time being and occasionally find their way to my board. The Mantic Flex XS is my current synth pedal of choice.

I would agree that most modes of the Synth9 can benefit from something extra, e.g., mine is often cascaded into the Mel9 for extra real-time layering or fed a combo of octave fuzz and bitcrushing for NIN-style sludgery. The quality of onboard sounds varies, though its response to playing nuances and the ability to blend dry and synth signals are pluses. The polyphonic Microsynth-ish textures are also nifty, though about the same quality as what the Digitech Bass Synth Wah produces.

There is also the issue of a widely known design flaw that results in 9 series pedals intermittently not receiving enough voltage to properly boot. This results in them not producing sound until they are power cycled at least one or more additional times. Lastly, a buffer/compressor will still be in the signal chain when 9 series pedals are bypassed, which can actually serve as a decent crunchy boost for muff style fuzzes, but may be a turnoff for true bypass purists or anyone who plans to place the pedal before germanium dirt or certain fuzzes.

In retrospect, I would have probably felt better about the price to performance ratio if the unit had been purchased used or on sale.

[gila_crisis]

I never tried these but I find the 9-series to be the less appealing effects EHX putted out. At least for me.
I was kind of thrilled when the Synth9 came out, but after looking at some demo videos and also having knowledge about synthesizers and their architecture, I was missing a lot more controllability over the sound-shaping possibilities the pedal could offer. Having only 2 control knobs for a synth emulation device it's quite limiting.
My 2 cents.

[fldrvr]

Thanks for your comments! Any others?

[moid]

I have a Mel 9, if that counts. I love the flute and cello voices far too much... the last two tracks my son and I recorded are now completely slathered in flute and cello... this pedal might make everything you write become prog rock! The orchestra sound is also pretty good, the choir I haven't found much use for yet, nor the clarinet or saxophone or brass, the cello and the strings are the same effect with an octave between them. You definitely have to adapt your playing to play with it though. Playing guitar chords on instruments that don't play chords naturally makes odd sounds... it tracks well, but chords on flutes sound weird. It even works on the three highest strings of my bass, and almost all of the E bass string if the bass goes into a volume boost pedal first (tracking is better if you boost the clean signal going in for guitar too - at least on my guitars anyway). When you play cello, you have to be really careful not to brush other strings or bend the strings - the pedal interprets that as a weird bend effect that drunkenly slurs from one note to the other and does not sound good... unless you want that effect in which case it's pretty cool - if you've ever enjoyed a Mid FI Pitch Pirate you'll like this sound. It even tracks a dirty fuzzy signal fairly well (OK I did try to abuse the hell out of it by running through two seppuku FX octave drone fuzz clones set to maximum destruction first to see what happens and when you do that the pedal gets very confused and glitchy, but not in a very useful way - it stutters and drops out or grabs the wrong note and bends into another one... I found it too random to be useful (but if you want to make random sounds it could be a good effect). I really like being able to get two outputs, one for dry and one for wet signal - that's a useful feature because it allows me to adjust the mix in the DAW afterwards. I like the pedal, but it is expensive (to me anyway - it's the most expensive pedal I've ever bought).