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Average rating:
3.9 out of 5
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I'm quite sure that anyone who says "this machine sounds just boring" has not really tried to edit the presets. You can get the weirdest noises out of it if you try. The effect processor is o.k. for its purposes and with a cool performance you can really rock the house.
MC Kaos' little secret: A shareware named "P-Farm". If you own a V50 this prog is a must-have.
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Very sentimental about the V50. Got it used in '94...at first disappointed when I realized that it was not sample-based, but FM (only the percussion is sampled, PCM), It was really the only thing I could afford that had a sequencer and disk-drive though...slowly I learned to use it and utilize its possibilities (before I had only used simple porta-type keyboards)...a whole new world was opened up to me...just the concept of fixing timing (quantization) was something I had never imagined until learning about sequencers...It has all the ingredients of a workstation: the keyboard itself, a 16-note (FM)polyphonic tone generator, an effects processor, sequencer, and disk-drive [it even has a separate 8-note polyphonic rhythm (percussion/drum) machine on-board using its own track, which syncs to the 8-track sequencer ] Perhaps it was the first true workstation (made around '88... even the Korg M1 had no disk-drive). Today it is dated I suppose (unless you are into 80's 4-op FM), but I made a lot of instrumentals on it, and, with friends, put together many songs with vocals and guitar(s), using the V50 to sequence the bass, drums, piano, organ, strings, etc....I will never forget my V50
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I've been a Bass player since I was a freshman in High School (91) and I've just been starting to get interested in Synths since I heard Ozric Tentacles live (Best Band in the History of Time, BTW...). My Father-in-Law just gave me a V50, So I did a crash course in FM Synthisis.. and I was making Jupiter, Moog, B3, and 303 type sounds in about a week.. And plenty of my own Weird Shite(tm). This thing rocks, at least for a beginner.
Explore the sound makeing functions, it will do right by you.
The only thing I miss is dynamic parameter changing... KNOBS BABY... NEED MORE KNOBS!!!!
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The V50 was my first exposure to MIDI in high school. Yes, the single 4op patches are pretty cheesy. But if you layer up to eight of them together in performance mode with effects, you get amazing sounds. The pattern-based rhythm sequencer was interesting, and I was disappointed to find it wasn't a standard feature on other synths. The drum part made the V50 nine-part multitimbral, which was a big bonus for its time. I think the drum machine section had it's own oscilators, though I don't know how many. I was drooling on the Korg M1 at that time, but the M1 was lacking the V50's disk drive, which could be used to store any combination of patch banks and sequences on a single disk. One of the V50's oddest features was it's patch making demo. You press a button and the V50 starts making a custom patch on its own by stepping through all the edit windows, making adjustments, playing a certain note each time to let you hear the difference, and coming back to previous screens when necessary. When it was done, you had a realy cool orch bell patch that was not in the presets. I found a brand new one at a store in Eau Claire in '95 and they still wanted $1800! Hello.....While not the bread and butter workstation it once was, the V50 is stil a valid source of fat basses, leads and effects.
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The V50 is a powerful synth! Pick it up if you find it! Great for analog-type sounds, as well as those cool DX clinky/glassy timbres! Ignore the sequencer and the crap drums, but go for those thick patches you can creat in performance mode. The V50 is quite good!
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