An imaginary synth comprised of all the worst features of synth manufacturers

The Lounge General Discussion
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Interesting idea / pointless waste of time (delete as applicable) for a Wednesday. What if there was a device that comprised all the worst aspects and characteristics of well-known synth and instrument manufacturers?

Key features of my synth:

  • Literally 10s of patches (Yamaha stage pianos)
  • Attractive plasticky finish with needless sharp angles (Korg)
  • Squint-requiring screen that’s basically not fit for purpuse (Roland ad infinitum)
  • Back-lit Skittles (© Bad Gear) rather than proper keys/buttons (Roland SH4D)
  • Fetching red finish and, unrelatedly, way over-priced (Nord)
  • Hipster, toyish form factor (Teenage Engineering)
  • No editor software (Roland)
  • Baffling arpeggiator interface (Arturia Micro/Mini-freak - could be just me)
  • Drum sounds you’ve got in 6 other boxes already (Roland)
  • Turning an encoder wipes your entire sound without warning (Blofeld)
  • Did someone say hieroglyphics!? (Roland Aira/Boutique)

In shops soon!

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You said it in your post.

SH4-D

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DX-7-like programming interface
D-Beam

:rofl:

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The closest to an Alpha Juno Boutique we got, but so dumb. Luckily I have the real thing bragging with owning a synth no one wants

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These are a plus point in my view. I love Nord Red!

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Everyone wants the What The…? patch tho’.

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Cryptic screen less interface that requires reference to a manual… that’s a PDF

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Every surface covered in that melty rubber.

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I mean, it’s an interesting machine with a lot of capability at a great price. It’s just let down by the baffling keyboard interface and some run-of-the-mill Roland weirdness when it comes to menu workflows.

Nice. I would also accept the original Wavestation interface.

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One single ‘Alpha Knob’ to control everything. All parameters are just a few hundred clicks away. (Roland)

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  • Speaking of the 𝜶Juno: fucking soft touch buttons all over the machine.
  • an UI that will inevitably lead you to lose sounds. e.g. because load button is also store and shift is also enter (MFB-style), which goes great with the next one:
  • inability to dump and restore individual patches (SH-04d), or at the very least hardcoding the patch number into individual dumps, so that a patch can only be restored to its original location (Genoqs Nemo did this with sequences)

At least it’s not a HS-80, which gives you the same sound but is twice the size.

At least 200 pages, but without an embedded ToC, no clickable links, and with a boutique font that is not embedded. Even better: a badly formatted Word document.

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At first , I thought it was another Tonverk thread.

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Also…

  • No MIDI DIN ports, USB only, plus…

  • Proprietary drivers for MIDI over USB that are a buggy nightmare to install and won’t work at all on Apple’s latest OS as they use legacy extensions.

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Well, I love my Alpha Juno for its sound. There are also programmers, if one wants better usability.
And then there are contemporary synths with worse interfaces and no solutions.

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So here are my two worst features:

  • Long press
  • Multiple (more than one) press

(Awfully common in Eurorack.)

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Also the manual has each language in sequence, so page 1 is German, page 2 French etc, and it’s in 12 languages. And hasn’t ever been updated though the firmware has become much worse via updates over time.

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D-Beam is cool, maybe just not in your particular use case(s).

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Yeah, the sound is nice, I used the Alpha Juno 1, 2, and the MKS-50 a lot back in the day, with a Peavey PC-16 as controller, later with a BCR200. But the interface with the ⍺Dial was annoying for me even back then.

These days, good sounds can be had with a good interface for cheap. I mean, it all depends how much time one has for making music, I put up with a lot of bad interfaces in the past. These days, not so much.

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Yeah, actually I don’t have any patience today :stuck_out_tongue:

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With Roland’s TR-8S edit interface to program, one encoder, multi-levels to access everything, on a little rectangle of green LCD screen.

1 Like