Bugs, lack of support and a supposedly not particularly great approach to customer care are the main things giving me pause really.
I think the multi-mode thing is probably as @bwo posted above. Madness that you can’t exclude parts from the CV modulation but I can kind of imagine that leading to quite fun surprises if you plan with it in mind.
The other thing which didn’t occur to me until later was that its 4-op but only has sine waves, no TX81Z waveforms nor anything else. That feels a bit limiting reallly, though I think feedback is possible through the matrix and obviously you can layer the results with the LFOs running in oscillator mode so it might not be as bad as all that. The LFOs apparently have 64 shapes but I’m not sure if some of those are LFO mode only.
I hope this synth gets the love it needs. Sounddemos and specs looking good. Could be my main synth, im into fm.
But I really don’t want to beta test extensive instruments any more, so i look in 2 years again how its going.
I use the Alpha Base which has also as Voice 11 a simple FM Synth. But I would not buy a separate FM Synth like the Mod FM D because it is too limited in its useable voice sound capabilities. For my opinion. Perhaps I am wrong.
I’d be surprised honestly if there were any bugs that could handle this thing due to its size and complexity, but I have heard that in Australia there are beetles the size of a man’s head so in theory it seems possible.
Thanks for mentioning that. Some of those sounds are really good! I haven’t heard this side of it yet!
I’m thinking I might get the Eurorack version or the Digitone II. I can’t decide. The Jomox sounds really organic. I love it. Sounds better than the new TwistFM synth (even though that has an analog filter too). The strength in the Digitone II is sequencing all the p-locks for constant sound variation. I’m wondering if combined with something like an Eurorack sequencer, you can achieve the same. I know workflow being different will most likely make it feel different.
FYI so I did end up selling it. I very much liked the sounds I was getting from it, but there were some issues that bothered me.
Firstly, it is one of the least intuitive synths I’ve used. I often had to figure out what knobs correlated to which parameters because it doesn’t seem like there is much logic to the design.
I found that I preferred using it in multi-mode, but this was very poorly designed. The Mod FM can only be assigned one midi channel to receive CC changes, etc. so only one of the eight sounds can have them modulated by an external sequencer.
When in multi-mode, there’s no way to choose which sounds are routed to the FX; they are either applied to all sounds or none. A workaround would have been possible if using an individual output removed the sound from the master (which is the only place where the FX can be heard), but this isn’t the case.
There’s no CC value for the decay of the VCA envelope. This makes creating a hi-hat sound and modulating the decay for open hi-hat sounds not possible. This was a major bummer.
Finally, there’s a glitch that makes presets not load properly without reloading several times. I’d create drum kits where the kick I programmed wouldn’t sound right sometimes until I switched back and forth between presets a few times. This was pretty annoying.
I reached out to Jürgen with a few emails, but haven’t received any replies. Besides my complaints, this thing can makes some awesome percussion sounds. I was really liking the kicks and snares I was getting out of this more than the Alphabase. Ultimately, I had to sell though because my spending has been out of control.
Unfortunately that’s the case with every Jomox device that uses some kind of software. I don’t know why they never managed to get better at that. Their products sound really great but they aren’t fun to use imo.
That’s too bad. If Juergen could just get all midi channels to recieve CC values, I’d be into this in a heartbeat. My second request would also be adding a CC value to VCA decay.
When you say it can make better drum sounds than the AlphaBase, that has me very intrigued. Could you make more extreme sounds with the Mod FM? I quite like the Digitone, but I think the Mod FM sounds better.
When I briefly owned an Alphabase (when it first came out) I wasn’t satisfied with the snare sounds from the Mbrane or percussion sounds created with the FM. The Mod FM is better at creating interesting punchy percussion sounds than the FM on the Alphabase due to the analog VCA and filters.
There is a small range of sweet spot for the decay on the Mod FM for percussion though imo.
I see so little talk about this synth on the net, no new demos, nothing to be found
Available demos sound great tho, more unique and interesting than even TwistFM imo
Anyone has one or planing to get it? Im really close to buying it!
