I was surprised to find the Novation MiniNova has never had it’s own Eletronauts thread, and I think it deserves one!
I’ve had mine boxed up for a couple of years, meaning to sell it, then recently had a friend who wanted to borrow a small and easy to use synth from me. The Mininova sprung to mind so I dug it out, but then downloaded to 1.7 Editor and started playing with it… it’s the first time I’ve approached it like this and it’s an absolute monster VA synth!
The presets really don’t do it justice… stripping it back and building from Init has made me see it in a completely different light.
I feel like it does a ton of what the Peak and Rev2 does, for a fraction of the price.
The mod section is brilliant. The Animate routing, brilliant. The filter and it’s routings, brilliant.
Needless to say, I now don’t want to lend mine out!
Always been fascinated by the UltraNova and MiniNova!
My only experience with the engine has been with the cut-down version in the Circuit. A lot of people seem to dislike the sound but I think it sounds great.
7 types of Filter Drive and 7 types of Distortion! 20 Mod slots!
It’s a great synth engine, unfortunately perhaps the victim of Internet meme-ing or whatever by people who bought a Circuit but didn’t know or understand how to get the most out of it. Maybe by weak presets as well.
I bought the UltraNova in 2012 (probably the year it came out). Was my sort of 2nd or third big synth. Liked it much, but had to move on later. The engine is very digital but in a good way. Some guy advertised it to me as an alternative to Virus (some overlap in features).
Presets were actually good and Daniel Fisher expansion even better. Sound design is quite good there, I even could not understand how some presets were doing 3 sounds at the time.
It was a good controller keyboard. Biggest wish was adding multitimbral mode, but this was exactly the age when such feature was fading away.
MiniNova was tempting, but it was the same engine with reduced features/controls. I was imagining a sort of “Nova” desktop like the previous generation of the Novation synths, but this did not happen
I’ve never heard of Tom (my bad, excuse my ignorance), but he nails it in that description I just read.
This part isn’t far from where I’m at with it;
'I bought it not ever having heard it, because one gig right? The rest of my life was going to be virtual instruments. But then…
It wouldn’t be hard to beat that level of non-expectation. The MiniNova did that, but also proved to me that hardware could compete in the range of sounds possible. Unlike most hardware it is a very broad brush. It doesn’t seek to be anything in particular and manages to approximate all kinds of things. If you were to own one keyboard I’d recommend this or the bigger UltraNova with a clear conscience.’
Search for some early Severed heads albums… Ellard was a true sonic innovator (and his cheeky irreverent sense of humor was in his music from the beginning…)
My first hardware synth.
One feature I’ve never seen anywhere (except eurorack) is live arp patterns via animate buttons. Like in this track it’s just a single four-note chord with random arp. But I could control rhythmic pattern pressing animate buttons and it creates awesome motion.
Sometimes I want to buy Mininova again just because of this feature but I have too many synths
Circuit has a Nova engine too right? Ive been dreaming about picking up RK002 midi cable to make it alternate midi channels per note, making it a 12 voice poly synth. Its still amazing to me how many cool and unique options are in there. Very fun engine.
