Do The Impossible? Fatten up a Mininova?

The Lounge Other Gear
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So, I got a mininova. Most of the presets are unusable but if you dig around the internet, the engine is pretty awesome, and I love the latch/arp and performance pads. The editor is pretty flexible.

HOWEVER, being a budget synth ($400 USD), I have a couple qualms:

  1. The filter knob doesn’t do much. It’s not that musical to my ears. I wish it were a little more ‘virtual analog’. It also doesn’t sound like it really sweeps except in a couple spots.

  2. The patch volumes are widely variable. The ‘pianistic’ patch is particularly bad for this.

That being said there are some things I am loving it for:

  • wurlitzer, b3, and rhodes types sounds, Daniel Fisher (the sweetwater video guy) has some amazing presets he’s created in this vein
  • atmospheric pads like Sountrax, Breakdown
  • string sounds

I am not a ‘wub wub’ dubstep guy so I don’t really enjoy the harsh Trance and Dubstep sounding presets.

When I add my TC hall of fame and flashback, it can sound really quite nice.

An Analog Heat would probably be too much, I am looking for a way to add a more musical filter and some saturation and compression to my mininova. Is there a budget way to do this?

I’m expecting some folks might just say get rid of your mininova and replace it with a Virus or Nord, but if for $200 USD I can upgrade my signal path, I would prefer doing that.

-Anthony

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Imm selling my ultra nova because its very digital and does not excite.It definitely needs some fattening up.Last year i got good results recording into MPC1000 and adding the master eq and compression.Which really helps with all this line of MPC s.In fact its amazing what it does.Ive said many times before it really uniquely compounds the sound.

But alas…im not feeling the newer nova’s.Altho it does have its place.Its a pretty tight precision tool.

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try to find a used MF-101?

Classic Moog LPF, with filter drive, and with enough drive, you do get some square wave style compression.

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4

Do yourself a favor and get a heat. So good piece of gear.

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Aren’t there a ton of filter and distortion models built in? I’d try stepping through all the combinations of those before you spend a single dime …

Edit: note that each filter has dedicated pre-filter distortion - then you have distortion available as fx post filter too.

Also check your Filter Q normalisation parameter as this may be contributing to the perceived lack of sweeping effects etc.

From the manual:
This parameter alters the bandwidth of the peak created by the resonance control F1Res. The value of F1Res has to be set to something other than zero for this parameter to have any effect. This feature enables the Filter section to emulate many of the filter responses found on various classic analogue and digital synths.

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THANK YOU for doing my homework for me @Housecliche

i will give those a shot. i guess there’s really just a lot more going on in the editor.

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A cheaper alternative to a Heat is a Waldorf 2 Pole, if you don’t mind mono only.

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No worries - also check the filter routings - you have various serial and parallel options :+1:t3:

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It’s not the rolls royce of synths by any stretch (I’ve spent a bit of time playing the Minimoog and Prophet Rev2, its clear that these are incredible machines), but my god the mininova can do some pretty amazing pads.

In particular, I purchased Tim Mantle’s Mininova patches for about $14 USD (11 pounds):

http://www.timmantle.com/reviews-ultranova.html

They are quite good! A lot of great stuff in the ‘vaporwave’ type of sound, really an amazing value.

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11

connect it via an old cassette deck & overdrive the inputs.

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good thing i kept my tascam portastudio

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You’re using the editor therefor I suggest using the myriad of computer plugins available for the task.
The Soundtoys are a great start

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im not bringing the laptop live tho. but in recording i’ll probably use a rack with ableton’s saturator and the XLN retrocolor rc-20, possibly NI driver depending on what im doing

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you might want something crappier than a Tascam :slight_smile:

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+1 for these patches. Fantastic pads

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AKAI 1710W Reel-to-Reel Player is a great buy. Tubes and tape. Revox clone, if i remember correctly.

i still use a mint one.

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And you can get one for < 200$?

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my last one was $100 and the one before that $50- not sure of the current prices

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Not in front of mine ATM but pretty sure the knob is only for filter one, so depending on routing it may not do much in some patches.
With oscillator drift and other tricks up its sleeve, I’m pretty happy with the fatness of mine. :slight_smile:

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