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Well, I just got my SY-22 two days ago, so these are first impressions. I'm an ambient musician, and this is my first ROMpler.
SOUNDS: The presets are mostly your standard complement of acoustic instruments and synth leads. Although they generally sound decent, this is NOT why I bought this synth. If I wanted a friggin' trombone I'd buy a friggin' trombone. Wankers.
No, I bought this thing for the vectors. The idea is simple: each patch is made up of four Elements. Each element has its own envelope, pitch, volume, velocity/aftertouch settings, etc. Using the joystick, you can crossfade between the four elements to create complex sounds. Coolest of all, you can RECORD the joystick movements as a Vector Sequence, which then becomes part of the patch.
While playing, you can punch the Vector Play button to twiddle the joystick in realtime, or turn Vector Play off to use the prerecorded Vector Sequence.
This is great for shimmering harmonic drones and the like. Of course, the Elements you have to choose from are limited to what's in ROM, which includes lots of organs, geetars, and, yes, trombones. But there are also several banks of sound effects, synth waveforms, and textural stuff.
There are NO filters, so manipulating the samples is limited to pitch-shifting and LFO stuff. But you can get pretty interesting results with this.
EFFECTS: There are about a dozen built-in preset effects. The only parameter you can adjust is the level. They're hardly studio quality, but the delays and reverbs are nice for giving a little depth to a sound.
INTERFACE: Why, God, WHY didn't they spend an extra 50 cents to put a goddamn data slider on this thing? Paging through edit screens is annoying to begin with; adjusting values with +/- buttons is doubly annoying. With that said, I sussed this thing out in a couple of hours without a manual. So I guess I'd describe it as "easy to use, but tedious".
OVERALL: I think I like it. I got a nice deal on it though; I might not be so happy had I paid more. But I think it will be a nice addition to my studio. Definitely worth checking out if you're looking for ambient textures.
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