I have had mine since new. It has versatility and creativity almost the equal of a major modular analog setup. It is built like a tank, with heavy-duty control knobs on each pot. It lacks a patchbay, but has switchable routing which reaches a good degree of flexibility.
Nick@Sonic Says- I just got one of these and it's bloomin' marvelous! It does take a little while to get your head around this synth as it's layout is a little unorthodox. You can only detune the osc's by small amounts with the tune knobs but combined with the Chord memory you can set the intervals as radically as the 44 keys will allow.
The filter is not as 'musical' as say the Moog stuff but it's phat enuff. Theres some pretty wild sync and xmod FX - I don't know what they do exactly but they can really f*** the sound up nicely.
The 2 LFO's can lead to some fairly complex sounds. I would Disagree about the arppegiator cause it's OK. If you don't have a midi-cv box you can send it a rimshot or something and it'll trigger (with a little tweakin') in time nicely.
It's one of those synths that you reach for when you have a sound in mind cause it's very flexable so you'll get pretty close to what ya want.
Buy one if you can find it - you won't regret it.
Then get a midi-cv box too!
Hakan adds:
The arpeggiator can be *really* cool, firstly, if you trigger it (as you said) from something that not necessarily triggers each 16:th note.
But even with "every 16:th trigs" it's a really cool effect to do like this:
1. Turn on the arpeggiator in 1 octave "UP" mode, turn the latch on, jam down a 3 note, 5 note or 7 note chord. (Must not be divisible by 4!)
2. Set it to POLY mode.
3. Now fiddle with the oscillators, set different waveforms, different octaves, different levels e.t.c... way way way cool. My fav is to let one oscillator be on the lowest octave, but be given such wide PWM by LFO2 that it sometimes *disappears* out of the mix of oscillators! 4 notes suddenly becomes 3, oh it's so very kewl! :-)
Turn down the filter EG to nada, and put a *really* slow filter modulation from LFO1, add a 909 bass/snare, and you have a techno hit, instantly :-)
The filter (yes only one) is a typical Korg filter from that era...more up-front than the Prophet 5, less agressive than the Oberheim.
The arpeggiator is an absolute DREAM.
It is screwed to the wall in my studio, above my keyboard rack. It is run by a MIDI-CV converter.
Irreplaceable.
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