So I bought my A4 mkII nearly a year ago and while I’ve been using it consistently, it’s only been for a limited set of sounds. I could never get rich pads out of it (that’s still an issue actually) and I find the internal effects to sound a bit bright and almost digital (EDIT: I guess they are digital!)).
Well, this is going to sound stupid and obvious… but at least for dubbier type music (which is mostly what I do) my solution has been to run the A4 (and most of my other kit) through my Mackie analog mixer but with delay / reverb pedals added to the sends/returns, so I control the amount of fx on diff devices… The Boss Space Echo RE-20 is particularly great for this (if you do a different style of music, obviously substitute your favorite fx chain here). When used judiciously you can get massive dub tones out of the A4, and the diff amts on the send/returns really tie the sounds of my different synths together.
Here’s a track I made last night with the new routing.
The full audio routing includes:
- Digitakt into Mackie mixer (sends set to zero)
- Analog Four MkII, Dreadbox Nyx (which also has its own massive reverb effect), Moog Minitaur into Mackie mixer (sends at various levels)
- tweaking parameters live on the Space Echo to get things like feedback washes, dramatic occasional echoes etc
- control room out of Mackie mixer into Octatrack MKII A/B input
- addl samples from Octatrack, master track used as master compressor for the whole mix
Again, this isn’t rocket science and those who spend a lot of time in the studio are probably rolling their eyes as I write this. But yeah A4 really needs outboard effects to shine IMHO, and if you’re using other synths the sound gets tied together much much better if you use an old school mixer with aux sends / returns for the fx.
Still would love to figure out rich pads on the A4 though. Next project might be to try the 4 separate stereo outs on the A4 mkII to get even more control (though if I understand correctly, I lose the A4 internal effects with this method, no?)