Yeah this writeup and his patches made me consider making an offer on one locally listed for 1150€… that’s like launch price!!
I really just wish it had something closer to the prophet 6 design. The pro3 design really doesn’t do it for me… the 6s have this classic “design piece” look I love 
that is a strange gripe he has with “having” to use the mod matrix to get a sound he wants. i’d argue that a pure saw through the filter sounds better than 95% of synths on the market, but having the ability to go p12 level deep in this thing with full vcos, exp/lin fm, and that incredible filter is mind blowing.
what do you want? (not you, jexus) a knob for every single mod source in the matrix, or less sound design options? maybe this type of user attitude is the reason manufacturers rarely take creative risks. i was wondering why we keep getting more of the same every year
i agree with him that the textures you can make with this thing are impossible to get elsewhere. and they are amazing. but i would strongly disagree that the rev 2’s modulation is deeper. thats crazy talk. osc2 as mod source, voice spread mod source, dc offset, filter out, audio out, the new thing they added in the latest fw since i sold mine. plus modulating mod slots (i forget if you can do that with rev2), but this is prophet 12 style depth with 2 less “operators” and much better quality components. the morphing sine wave alone adds so much versatility, esp with linear fm. filter fm rather than the useless “audio mod” of the rev2. audio rate lfos, master overdrve, filter drive, much better fx. i dont see why people compare it to the rev2. the only thing the rev2 has over the t5 is voice count and lfo amount. and i dont see anyone comparing the rev2 to the prophet 5, so that doesnt make sense to me
Stahp… you make me want one even more!
i know your style pretty well i think and i am a big fan of your instagram. i think you’ll love it. i remember the album you put out around the time that you had the analog four( i think ) and the types of timbres you tend to work with makes me think that this would 100% be your style. i believe it has enough of the rich thick analog tone of something like the vermona sort of, with the ability to sound ultra modern and unique. you can make it “lofi” very easily by modulating the filter with osc2 and driving it a little, but you can also modulate osc1 freq with osc2, then hard sync it so it retains it’s pitch, then modulate the shape of osc2 with itself or one of the audio rate lfos, or with noise or whatever. its a different kind of lofi though. more complex and delicate. not blown out. it degrades very subtly and there are so many things you can do to enhance and animate the texture
you can recursively modulate the already very snappy envelopes which now loop for that Rival Consoles sound, slew the lfos, map velocity to the envelopes with the velocity button engaged for more precise and flexible control of the transient response. you can get so woozy and syrupy with it. and you can get the nice wooden fm tones of a digital fm by just using the sine wave, but then make it blossom out into these brassy billowing pulse waves/saws/whatever that warble and dip. the flanger at low rates is like a Shallow Water pedal. the distortion is good for eq, the leslie rotary effect is very useful. and the high pass filter effect is actually pretty good for a digital add-on. i used that one a lot
i feel like with all of the unique and pleasant timbral combinations you get by experimenting with morphing waveshapes plus fm plus hard sync, it’s the closest you can get to an analog poly version of a wavetable synth outside of like the Waldorf M. it’s almost as endlessly rewarding as that synth too, as far as the constant new creative musical character you can squeeze out of it
Yeah I liked the A4 quite a lot. I just got tired of the old Elektron menus and static sequencer… honestly, I’ve been lusting over a take 5 for a very long time, I might just bite the bullet… some day 
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Thanks for the kind words btw. And thanks for the good write up! 
The only real things the rev2 has on the Take5 are splits/layers, a 2 pole filter, and more LFOs/envelopes. Some of that is really cool, no doubt (and why I haven’t been able to part with mine yet). The 5 has more effect slots (even if two are always set to reverb and distortion), types, and the vintage knob for when you feel lazy (that will tweak envelopes I think - slop won’t). PWM is sort of meh on the take5, but there and usable.
I do think the rev2 has a nicer keybed. They are both nominally the same model of fatar but it ain’t quite the same. Still a very nice keybed in the 5, though.
I actually just had to replace the main board of my take5; rev 1.1’s apparently suffered from the “powered usb hub might brick your synth” issue. The newer rev 1.2 replacement has what looks like a resistor next to the USB port that wasn’t there before. As a “bonus” all my presets are gone, but now I get to make new ones!
The substantially higher polyphony on the Rev2, that is either 8 or 16 voices, is not a minor detail. If you want the Rev2 to sound closer to an OB-X8 or a P10, more voices will definitely get you there.
doesn’t rev2 have a gated sequencer also? that lets you do sort of per voice modeling type tricks and do something things often only possible in paraphonic synths.
yes, rev 2 has a much better sequencer.
Thanks for the link. I can see what you mean about the GAS resulting from the review, even if the review is “mixed” (not all great, but overall very positive). Here’s one sentence that caught my attention: “The TAKE-5 is the first Sequential synth that sounds truly analogue, like a 1980s synth, which makes it the most vintage-sounding affordable synth Sequential has come up with in its modern history.” I really wanted the TAKE-5 when it came out, and it is probably second on the list of things I want (first being the Osmose). I also wonder how much it would overlap with my MatrixBrute. Anyone else have both the MatrixBrute and TAKE-5?
I downloaded the Jexus patches. Some great stuff in there. The only real negative thing for me, which might not bother others, is that he purposely creates the patches at very low volume and boosts them in the mix for headroom. So basically, they are all really low volume even when the volume knob on the T5 is all the way up and they are about 50% of the volume of the default patches or the patches I’ve bought from other sound sets. Not a big deal, but it does mean you’ll have to either accept that or fiddle with the oscillator levels on every patch and re-save if that’s not to your liking. Oh, and I wish he would have given the patches names instead of just generic numbered labels. It makes it easier to recall specific patches for using in projects.
Edit: Jexus just sent around an update with patches at normal volume for anyone considering.
The other thing is not a problem with the patches, but is one of the few gripes I have about the Take 5. I really wish there was a lot more storage space. I’m very grateful they doubled the user patch storage, but I wish there was more. I’ve bought a couple other really good patch sets, but it means that I have to be picky about what I’m going to keep on the T5, as I need to leave space for my own stuff. 200 patches in this set alone would nearly fill you up.
In this respect, the Sound Tower library manager/editor really is useful for me (and it’s been updated to match the T5 update), but it’s also a bit buggy. I don’t know how much of the issues I’m having is just the nature of the sysex protocol though. For instance, sometimes when you change patches on the editor it still plays the sound from the previous patch even though it displays the new patch info or takes a while to catch up. You have to be really mindful of what you are doing or you will copy over the wrong patch or fail to check a patch.
Even so, the Sound Tower program is very much worth it for me to be able to “curate” the library of sounds on my T5, and I think it’s great for seeing what is going on. I really do need to spend some time studying some of these patches. The other thing is that I have yet to try the Patch Morpher/Generator features, but that looks like it could be really amazing. Never enough time in the day.
Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, with the update and this big injection of new patches, I’m back in full-blown honeymoon phase with the T5. I’ve even been combing old documentaries/TV show lately to get sound design ideas.
It does, and you can even have one for each layer but it is unpleasant to program so I waffle over the degree to which I’d call a strength. Programming the mod lanes from the panel sucks.
But, a sequencer per part is better than nothing.
Huge discovery (for me). I thought the Factory Patch slots were completely locked, but I just realized that with the SoundTower editor I can swap them out for other patches! You won’t be able to save any tweaks to those patches on the T5 itself, but you can replace the sounds you don’t like with patches from sound sets, which is awesome.
That’s great because there are quite a few factory patches that aren’t really my style, so it would be much better to replace those with more useable stuff and free up the user slots. Plus, you can get the factory sounds from Sequential’s website and reinstall if need be.
OK, so for anyone considering the editor. I figured out it’s not so much buggy so much as very particular about order of operations. Like when you swap a patch, you have to make sure you’ve got the patch you are replacing highlighted when you hit send rather than the new patch. If you do it the other way, it looks like it sent (even updates on screen) but it didn’t really. Sort of annoying, but once you know what to do, it works every time. I lost a bunch of work though before I sorted this out so tread carefully.
On the positive side, I weeded out all the factory patches I don’t like and managed to replace them with really quality stuff, so there is no more filler, and I have a good amount of space freed up in the user area. It was a lot of work, but now the T5 is primed and ready to go. Also, there is a lot less filler in the new factory patches, they stepped up their game I think (although the new stuff is a bit more niche).
Picked one of these up yesterday, first thoughts:
the pots are stiff, I hope they loosen up. Tried the spinning trick but no difference yet
bottom row of the display is very hard to read when the unit is sitting flat on a desk because of the bevel around the display. Luckily not much info is displayed here, just fx and arp type. Display is also obscured when tweaking the select and value knobs, which is a bit irritating. Makes for a cramped experience when using the mod matrix.
very fast and easy to set mod assignments. Conversely, when things get messy it’s not so fun to dig through the matrix to figure out what is doing what.
no value on the display is mostly fine but annoying on touchy parameters like LFO amount. There’s also no visual feedback for the LFOs at all - gotta go old school and assign to pitch in order to hear exactly what stuff like Slew is doing
the ‘program’ menu is currently just a dumping ground for parameters that didn’t fit on the synth’s faceplate. there are 20+ params in a list in random order, some of which I find myself using often. Coming from Elektron machines this feels like a very clunky UI compromise, and makes me wonder if a menu-driven interface is more my speed these days.
Lofi is cool as a cassette sim but it’s a shame there’s no way to do SRR/ bit reduction, especially pre-filter.
Having said all that, the sound is absolutely spectacular. Just started from init and quickly got lost in a patch with looping filter env and aftertouch set to BBD feedback. Assuming I can get over the UI annoyances then having this lush, syrupy goodness on tap is something I could definitely get used to.
Sure, you could complain about little thinks if it was 4k eur. This sinth is a gift.
No criticism for any synths under 4k- got it.
Yeah, I think we should drop that threshold to 2k, or even 1.5k.
Just a guess, maybe Jexus likes the sound better with the oscillator levels like that. I like his Take5 sounds better than some others so he may have a point there. Plenty of synths have a more pleasant sound with 50% levels. I keep it like that on the Minilogue xd.
Or are the levels you compare them to already at 50% and Jexus’s (sounds nice) at 25% (which would be very low indeed)?
jeah, but stiff knobs? ok , i got it