Hi guys,
Bit of context, I have been making hip-hop/triphop/lofi/boombap type beats for ages but find myself into a rut as I’d like to no be limited to sampling anymore but want to bring my own keyboard playing as I find myself singing melodies while drums are playing! So why not actually layering those melodies
There are a million synths out there and not sure where to start. I’d love something in the £500 max range that has a wide array of sounds ranging from a rhodesy type to shimmery as well as solid bass. Decent stereo fx would’ve great also. As I’d like to layer sound, I’d like a wide array of sonorities.
Not looking for something big as it’s mainly for sampling, not so much performing. 31 keys hardware would be ideal.
I checked demos of the minilogue but it sounds too trance electro to my taste. I used to have a microkorg a long time ago but was a bit of a nightmare to program.
What genre of music are you making? It’s hard to make recommendations unless you have an idea of what sounds you want it to make. To my ears, the Minilogue XD sounds very versatile as subtractive synths go, but maybe you’re looking for more of a rompler that can play flute and piano sounds too?
Have you considered the MPC One? Technically not just a synth, although the 16 pads can certainly play any scale across two octaves with velocity sensitivity and polyphonic aftertouch. It’s more of a production center and sampler, but it comes with a bunch of included soft synths and sampled presets that span a range of genres. It’s very popular among hiphop communities too and it fits your budget assuming you buy it second hand. You should check out some sound examples of all the synths it comes with, including Hype, TubeSynth, ARP Odyssey, etc.
The bang for the buck is almost unbearable even if you just end up using it as a sound source for your music.
Minilogue XD is very versatile, in my opinion. Ideal bread & butter synth, good combination of analog and digital (the third osc being a digital one, with load of custom made osc and fx). I made bass music with it, used it for rich pads, made massive drones. And not once trance
I still really enjoy the Blofeld, but opinions are pretty split on that one. I’d say if you can find the keyboard version used for a good deal snatch one up.
Sadly, the keyboard version on Thomann is still almost 900 bucks, which is really a lot for a synth of that age imo
For those genres I would stick with samples and samplers rather than synths, but a solid analogue bass synth sound be nice. A Moog SubPhatty or Minotaur for example. The Typhon would be great for getting eery modulated leads for the trip-hop stuff.
The other question I’d ask is: do you like to do sound design or pick from a wide range of presets? Not to sound like a snob here, but for the most part hiphop synth sounds aren’t very complex. Unlike trance/techno and other forms of EDM where the timbre and evolution of a sound is a core part of the experience, in my experience with hiphop, the synth sounds are more used for simpler things, like a pad here or a lead sound there. Synthesis doesn’t form the core of the track, if that makes sense.
And so in that sense, virtually any synth is capable of producing those bread and butter sounds if you’re actually into sound design. Take the Korg Minilogue XD that you dismissed above for sounding too trance electro, check out this guy making a beat on it.
This is another point in favor of the MPC if you ask me. It comes loaded with already useful presets and other things commonly found in hiphop genres like Mellotron etc. I don’t think you would find much lacking as far as synthesis go with a unit like that in your toolkit.
Micromonsta 2 could be a good fit for your use case. You’d need to buy a separate midi keyboard controller, but it has 12 voices, which can be monotimbral, bitimbral (2x6 voices) or stacked. It has unison, delay, chorus and reverb to widen the sound (especially the reverb is great).
Latest firmware adds the ability to use the buttons as a simple keyboard. Not yet tried it, but it sounds like it would be perfectly adequate for the purpose of recording one-shot samples, and sound design
