Things are mad hectic for me at the moment with moving house so I haven’t spent as much time with the Motas-6 as I’d like by a long shot, but I can say that it definitely hasn’t disappointed so far. The day it arrived I spent a few hours doing nothing but getting insanely different tones from the filters, I’d seen @Petajaja mention the MS-20 type screams before but I was surprised to find some settings that reminded me of Dreadbox stuff too - you can get really cool vocal sounding harmonics out of the resonance with certain routings/gain/feedback.
The main thing I was slightly concerned about was how the raw character would lend itself to more bread and butter patches since most of the demos naturally focus on the crazier side of things. This will be my only analog mono for the moment so it’ll get used for basic stuff a fair bit too. I found it a little well behaved, maybe even slightly vanilla just from an init patch but I guess it’s better to start out that way and give you the tools to break out from it than start out sounding full of character and not be able to dial it back. I started on setting up a kind of custom ‘analog init’ patch with bits of instability programmed in (sort of DIY ‘slop’ I guess) and it works wonders for that kind of thing, there’s clearly bags of character in here even if it’s not on the absolute surface.
When I actually read the manual this thing will definitely become dangerous. The UI is a little unusual but the fact I haven’t really had to look much up yet shows how well designed it is, especially considering the complexity the synth has. Although figuring out how to get to an init patch had me scratching my head right out of the box
Some observations/questions about the hardware:
My silver one has a fair bit of fading and what looks like wear on the labels - is this likely to be wear or just the nature of the screenprinting when done directly onto metal?
The resistance of the knobs varies quite a bit, not a huge deal but noticeable nonetheless. Maybe it’s had a fair amount of use in its life already… Seems likely given the filter cutoff is particularly loose.
My encoder knob is a bit scratchy, going to very scratchy when pushing it down and turning it. Entering values with it feels a bit jumpier than I’d like as well, perhaps the two things are related?
Anyway, I’m super happy to finally have a hold of this and really looking forward to future explorations when time allows.