Monomachine Love Thread

in my opinion…I think this is your opinion :wink:

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Digitone can do a lot of things, but it is not close to the Monomachine unfortunately. Monomachine is more like chess than checkers… you always need to be thinking ahead if you are planning out your sounds. I think it was way ahead of its time and is still leaps and bounds above the vast majority of synths on the market in terms of sound creation and ability to mangle those sounds within a track. But I am a bit partial…

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it was, and it still is… it can do so much in one box that it’s overwhelming at first, it turns a lot of people off on initial introduction, unless they get bit by the intrigue bug that drags you down the rabbit hole of possibility, the initial reaction is like ‘oh wow, complicated video game sounds, whooptidoo’. The thing is though they call it a mono synth, 6 ‘mono’ synths, but when they say ‘mono’ it’s kind of deceptive…‘one’ voice that has no less than 3 sub octaves, 3 higher octaves…or ‘one’ voice that’s a 4 note chord that can have any of the 4 notes altered by parameter locks on any given step…that’s not just ‘one’ voice anymore, technically a 4 note chord over 6 tracks could be up to 24 voices, on different notes/registers. If someone was crazy enough you could map out the notes of 3 or 4 part counterpoint and change the chord notes per-step to match the voice lines. that aint mono at all, the capability starts to bloom into the ether when you realize what it *could do with it…cause nothing else comes close to that capability, at the cost of the learning curve

the monomachine also has the parameters open in a way that you can easily make it sound awful without even trying if you want, very easy to crash and burn, especially with the FM machines, they are less constrained with the ratio options than Digitone, harder to line up good combinations, or know where to even start looking. The modern devices put bumpers on most things, easy to make it sound great but you have to get creative to make it sound bad

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I only have the OT and the MnM and I find the neighbor/thru track architecture the real key to possibility. Not to simplify things too much, but without those features things just wouldn’t be the same.

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The Monomachine maxes out at 4:1 ratio and you have very little control over the operator envelopes. The digitone is leaps and bounds more complex than the Monomachine in this regard. Saying this as someone who loves his mono and dn btw.

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I’ve been getting into sines a lot lately and - mostly using modular but then i thought, well, what can i do with the MnM…So i did a bunch of experiments and although the gain staging is difficul the results are encouraging.

The linked video i made today uses two improvs i made with sine and SID (tri) machines - spiced up with a couple of pedals (space, carbon copy & red panda bit crusher) - a couple of noise samples synced to the video glitches are from elsewhere. I’m thinking next step is some compositions cross sequenced with a pyramid to get my polymeter on.

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This is so good.

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this is an interesting topic - back when it was current, many rejected the MnM because of how it sounds, and i agree that the ‘sound’ is difficult but it is endlessly rewarding.

The issue defines much classic gear though - and I feel gear that always sounds good is bound for classic status and the oddities like MnM will remain just that - which is a domain i enjoy

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And that is just one type of synthesis on the MnM… The DN is great, but is super limited vs the MnM as a whole, in my opinion. If only the DN had an arranger…

Fair enough point. Though the expanded range on the dn allows it to cop a lot of the sounds that some of the other machine types make. Swaves and some of the digipro. The real sleepers would be the fx and vo machines and. I guess the some of the sid waves. Glad I don’t have to choose :slight_smile:

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Agreed! Same here. I do think about selling the DN on occasion, but never the Monomachines…

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Hi guys, is there a way to copy say the whole of Bank A ?

You could SYSEX SEND a bank of patterns with their associated kits to a computer, and then SYSEX RECEIVE into new SPECific positions. See the manual pages 95 to 99.

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tysm!

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Hey guys!

Is there any way to modulate (P’lock) the Delay-time without having pitch changes in the delay? Could find anything regarding this in the manual or in the internet so far…

Greetings!

This is exceptional. Absolutely love it.

lovely! one of the best monomachine tracks ive had the pleasure of hearing. Thank you !

marvellous–my MnM is home to a few of your patches —for good reason

Anyone? :slight_smile: