NINA, motorized analog synth from Melbourne Instruments

It sounds pretty nice, but doesn’t really stand out as an amazing or unique synth. I also think those neon red keys are an eye sore.

I think the price tag will really be the deciding factor. If it’s affordable, why not try out a nice sounding desktop poly synth from a small company? If it’s expensive, why bother?

I know what you mean. I don’t really know why the led ring hasn’t caught on - it’s very easy to see what’s what when changing presets. I guess it’s more expensive than not doing it, but it’s just as good as a little screen above each control, which some synths are doing now.

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I see a lot of folks worrying about the price but drone motors really aren’t that expensive :slight_smile:

Part of the reason they’re able to bring this to market now is the commercial viability of it.

I don’t expect it to be ‘cheap’, but it’s a 12 voice poly synth with analog circuitry and a lot of cool features (even ignoring the dope knobs) made by a small company so I’d expect it to be in the £1500 - £2000 range.

It’s a ladder filter wrapped around 3 interestingly thought out oscillators it can’t really not sound good.

Not sure if you watched the video but he makes the point that they have analog pot feel. That really matters, especially for important controls like Cutoff. It’s not just a motor, it’s a simulated pot.

I love my Digi boxes but I hate working with filters live on those endless encoders. Even elektron put dedicated knobs on the Analog Heat where they can because they know they’re better.

Edit: This comment could age really well or really badly…

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Under 2k USD would be a win here imo, hope you’re right about the price!

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Me too :laughing:

I agree with this completely.

I don’t need the NINA, but knobs persistently corresponding to actual settings across patch changes and morphing is something I truly appreciate. I mentioned this in response to @Jukka at the Iridium Keyboard thread, whose screen-based UI does a pretty clever job of providing persistent feedback of what you want to be seeing at that moment.

LED rings around every knob would do it, but I guess there’s just not enough demand. The one synth I use that does have LED rings (Hydrasynth) somehow doesn’t even need them because it shows you so much of that info on the screens. Also, the knobs seem to always block the view of the LED ring anyway. Someone should invent a cheap knob that embeds a light ring around the top of the button’s perimeter.

Or how about some kind of electrostatic knob that you can touch (not alter) so that the screen immediately shows you that entire module’s buttons’ settings without having to catch the setting. Sequential has the “show” button, which is fine as far as it goes, but doesn’t speed up the flow nearly as much as the NINA will.

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But like my Analog Heat example above it still has dedicated knobs for the all important filter - because knobs are better than encoders.

Motoriosed knobs are a best of both worlds, and a luxury the high end fader people have enjoyed for decades.

If I understand what you mean this is how the Push 2 knobs work

Norand did a pretty good job with their backlit knobs. Admittedly, you don’t get a very accurate picture of the values, but it’s nonetheless quite helpful to see more or less where you are, esp. with modulated parameters, this for all the parameters at once!

not sure it’s been mentioned/asked already but i’m wondering what’s going to happen to those parameters being modulated by an LFO? will the encoders move accordingly? :thinking:
what about the noise coming from the motors?

Do you mean audio noise, or electronic ( interference ) noise ?

Audio noise, it’s been said in several videos that there is none.

Electronic noise, well that’s a good question, but there should be damn near none if they did their engineering right.

Wouldn’t make sense to me if the knobs would move by applying an LFO to that parameter. Even when plugins do show LFO modulations on the knob, the knob itself always still have a fixed position.

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hopefully so

yeah…don’t know why i thought about that… wouldn’t make sense but then again: supposing i’m modulating a parameter then stop its modulation, what is going to happen to the encoder? will it jump to the last value or? (i don’t know, maybe i’m asking for something that might not be too relevant…could be the heat though :laughing: )

That’s not how modulation works in general. the LFO modulation is an offset to the destination parameter’s setting. So when modulation stops, it’s just the value the encoder / pod was at the whole time. This is how it works in all (usual) synthesizers :wink:

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yep, of course :smiley: i was thinking more in terms of some kind of added feature, where one could decide whether the encoder could actually snap to the LFO’s latest value, maybe for sound design or even for live performance…just kinda thinking aloud here

What you really want is an LED light ring on the top surface of each knob, plus a vertical hologram animation of the applied modulation. But then you’d get mesmerized by the light display and forget your next program change.

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So someone has done exactly this, with a full color display on the control surface, as a DIY project. This is an even better implementation of the idea of the knobs on the NINA. Very nifty.

This has a lot of complexity, and would be more expensive compared to what is on the NINA, but costs could be brought down if this was manufactured as a sub assembly.

If you watch this video you will understand how the haptics of a knob like this could work.

Here’s a video that shows how this works, and how it was built, and how you could potentially build one yourself.

This is venturing toward off-topic, so if anyone wants to go on with the discussion of this, we can start a thread.

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That would be a cool option to toggle. Regardless of attenuation you could still visualise the modulation on the knob, I’d like it!

Edit: although audio-rate modulation might get a bit dangerous :joy:

Saw this demod while back and instantly wondered who’d be first to work it into an instrument! Haptics!

Must give an honourable mention to the Novation circuits’ colour/intensity approach above the knobs (at least on OG)

A rough but effective approach - and at the other end of the price range

Not sure if this is new detail but I hadn’t seen it before!

An XLR combi jack input?? Well I’ll be damned

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