I’m getting more dedicated time to do music production again. Having just upgraded to a Digitakt II, I’m giving a lot of thought to the synths I put around it. It’s hard not to lust after a Sub25 and a TEO-5, but that’s not happening right now.
Ive had a Circuit Mono Station for ages now and I nearly sold it having fallen out of love with it. But recently I’ve been having a lot of fun overdriving it into my mixer and automating parameters from the Digitakt. It may just have won back its place as my mono synth of choice (for now!)
So what’s your cheap(ish) or maybe that should be not expensive and incredibly good value synth that you don’t think you’ll ever get rid of? And why?
Some ones I’ve been thinking about are the Meeblips Geode, Fred’s Lab Buzzy or Tooro, and the Roland S-1.
pretty many of my mono/duo synths.
if we assume that cheap means ≤ $/€150…
MAM MB-33 Retro, Electribe EA-1 mk2, Meeblip Geode, Uno Synth (OG), and of course Korg NTS-1.
not sure about Waldorf Rocket — is it still cheap or already inexpensive?
Oh yes always had my eye on the MB-33 but I think I didn’t get it because it didn’t support MIDI CC control. Great little synth for live tweaking though.
I’ve got an NTS-1 but never really loved it. It’s doing a good job of midi controllable FX sat out of the way, but I never feel joy interacting with it and it’s so ugly with the cables coming out in all directions. Not a forever synth for me.
The TB-3 is a great shout. I should definitely look at that. I might need to wait for the prices to settle down again though. Looks like it’s had the Bad Gear effect.
I’ve been doing Acid bass and lead sounds with the CMS but it’s a little too polite.
Novation Mininova… cheap as chips, really performative, has an immediacy where you can get ball park sounds and tweak fast, and, when you dig in is as deep as nearly any other synth you’ll find (deep diving works great with it’s free editor too).
korg poly 800 is fun, the fun part is having to reprogram patches after you turn it off and on again
sounds really good for the price, paid £230. 8 dco’s, only 1 vcf, lots of envelopes. weird one. chorus sounds great, put it in dual dco mode so 4 2dco voices into 1 vcf
Micromonsta 2. They’re a little hard to get ahold of at the moment, but it’s the most synth per dollar and per square inch you can squeeze into a box. I’ve got a lot of other gear, some of it 8x the price and/or size — I still come back to this little guy regularly to lay down a part.
Not sure I’d call it versatile but waldorf rocket is really easy to use, sounds great, filter sounds great, feels cheap but works hard, wide sweet spot, great arp sounds, has a poly mode, monstrum editor for $14 is very powerful and lets you store and recall patches, and I kinda think it’s a benefit sometimes to not get caught up in sound design and just do something.
Downsides are price fluctuates and you don’t know which week it will be cheap and which week the price will double (although it’s top price is generally not very expensive, unlike the consistently popular 2-pole filter unit or the strangely unpopular streichfett), build quality feels like disposable plastic back and wobbly knobs with a metal top panel and if I don’t use a ground loop isolator I tend to get USB or some other noise in the audio path.
If you want versatile, I’m sure a micromonsta is better, but if you want a mostly knob per function synth that is hard to make sound bad and still allows you to dial in a sound with minimal interaction and no menu diving, then I do think this is where the rocket really shines.
Just my opinion here, I do think there are others which fit the bill, but this thing never lets me down and I’ve even used the VCF in as a desktop filter to process audio by keeping a midi note triggered with the oscillator off which allows incoming signal to be effected by the VCF and the analog filter does sound very good (if you’re into that).
Don’t have time to dig up the videos right now but I love how Warren Ellis uses one of those Yamaha synths (I think it’s the Reface DX) on the Nick Cave album and live sessions. Some of the bits on the Ghosteen album, for example, show how these small synths can really punch above their weight.
I don’t have one yet but I’ll probably grab either a Mininova or a Microkorg at some point. Or one of those Yamaha synths.