Generally speaking, you'll find yourself sticking to a few patches and then cloning them accross the banks 'cause you can't save knob settings independantly, lame.

If you're into sound designing, or you want to lean what makes a sound "tick" the modular is the g' damn holly grail of synths.

If you want to spend more time making actual music than tweaking patches, your probably better off with something else, like a virus. The nord is for musicians who can program.

One other thing, get the expansion board. Some fo the better patches chew through the 4 DSPs like a rotweiler through a beef steak.

the nord mod. sounds incredible to everyone that listen to it and used every kind of machine; it has some warm and lush aspects and immediately can turn to digial cold industrial edge things... abuse of these things

this synth screams GREAT sounds, it screams all WARP,REPHLEX stuff, it screams AFX, AUTECHRE, SQUAREPUSHER, NIN, and thousands more great innovators, but this is not so important;

this synth has an incredible personal character, instead of the fact it can emulates all oberheim, sequencial etc etc stuff; it sounds like a nord, and even if you stay a month to program it, it will sound still like a nord; extreme personal character;

i noticed that the sounds, also basic ones from nord lead synths, are so good and useful, also without effects, that you can for sure use them in your projects;

a bit strange to work with a pc editor instead of a coimpletely hardware editor, but think that now every synth has a pc editor, access, waldorfs, etc etc, so you have to be patience for the first period and then xperiment and find your way;

and remember that on the net you can find thousands of patches, so you'll spend such a long time only to listen to sounds made by other people, and maybe change them and use.

it's the past and the future of synth, really recommanded

100 on 5

marco

When it comes to diving into the depths of a synth's architecture and wringin-out its algorhythms, as beautiful as the Micro is, Metasynth has had a far more dramatic impact on my life as a musician. While Micro still holds much promise to me, mostly as an educational forum for understanding synthesis and as a badass sound machine, Metasynth is an entirely different breed o' otter, taking us sound explorers into a broad textual terrain, and introducing us to the subtletees of the physics of sound. These two wunderboxes together are absolute magic.

One great aspect of the Redbox (as me and my friends call the Micro) is that it is beautiful for playing out. It certainly shines in its ability to lend a phat bottom (it would make even Barry White jealous) and you can carry 99 sounds in one pocket! In combo with a laptop and something like EZBus, it could really be somethin (eg, now you have tempo control, can mutate step functions in real time). How do y'all do tempo control? Midi clock? Careful preprogramming to fit song list?

We are all lucky to have a Mod or Leetle Red Box.

This must be one of the greatest synths of the last 2 or 3 years. Can't wait to hear the follow up of the Modular.

By the way - It does the Nord Lead 3 too - even the MicroModular does it (with lesser polyphony that is...)