Roland SH-4D
11 OSC Models, 60 poly, 5 part multitimbral, amazing sounds and fx
Also another battery powered groove box so sequence stand alone!
Cant be beat for the price if you want t be able to sequence with more than 1 track on the Digitakt!
There are cases where you prefer a monophonic synth to a poly.
Most obvious case is if you want something for the bass only: polyphony is usually useless (same as a bassist rarely play chords).
Another case is for rich and/or highly modulated sounds. Think of Eurorack for instance, where modulation is everything: every oscillator or modulation you add to the synth gets most likely repeated for each voice, adding to the cost. Plus it might not be relevant musically, as it can quickly become a mess, whereas a single highly modulated sound might still be perfectly OK.
A last thing is that it is IMO way easier to learn synthesis on one voice.
There are cases where a mono shines where the poly doesn’t…
Still, it’s true that while a poly can generally play in monophonic mode, a mono will rarely play chords (some do, in paraphonic mode).
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A couple of days ago I bought a PreenFM 3. It’s travelling to my home 
I think it should fit well with the Digitakt.
I didn’t realize it, but this is so true! It’s kinda difficult to program quality poly sounds. High pass, long attack, lots of reverb- beginner pads.
0 sustain, short decay- beginner plucky sounds.
Outside of that. Poly synthesis is more often overkill
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I would take something that is easy to program, with most on the controls on the front, to concentrate on learning synthesis.
In this regard, a second hand SH-01a or a JU-06a are good choices.
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Thanks for this. You’d take this over the Cobalt/Argon 8? Similar price and, from what I can tell, sound world.
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Thanks, everyone. Apparently I’ve run out of “likes” for the next 4 hours (not sure what the rationale of limiting gratitude is) but I’ve tried to like all replies as a basic means of thanks.
Particularly enjoying the mono vs. poly posts. Before this thread, to me, mono vs. poly was sort of like unicycle vs. car. Unless I’m aiming for the circus, those extra three wheels are going to give me so much more potential. But I get it now!
The Digitone might be hard to ignore. Appreciate what some have said re: it being hard to move it away from its very FM sound, and all that that entails, and not being great for pads etc., but when you can pick one up for ~£550 second hand, that’s a lot of sonic loveliness for a very good price.
But the deciding phase continues - not there yet! Got to look into all these mentioned synths. Particularly the Blofeld - that seems a straight up alternative to the Argon/Cobalt I was originally looking at - and the Hydra, which seems almost universally revered (except for this guy).
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It is really a matter of personal preference. If you dig a little, you can find love letters to each of those as well as angry screeds denouncing each of them.
Blofeld has been on the market for a long time, so it is fairly easy to find used examples in excellent shape for cheap, particularly if you are patient.
One major disadvantage of the Blofeld is that it’s UI is excellent from a late '90s / early '00s perspective, but Hydra is a true 2020s UI. It lacks the multitimbrality of the Blofeld, but if I was just jumping into synthesis the Hydra would be at the top of my list.
You can’t really go wrong with any of the three, but each will have UI and sonic differences that may matter to you.
I’ve got a Virus and a Blofeld, and the Virus tends to be my go-to polysynth unless I want to do something that is only possible with the Blofeld or that the Blo excels at. A Hydrasynth Desktop is high on my list of synths to buy when I’m done selling my Eurorack. 
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One thing I’d add to the interesting posts about that above is that even outside the bass registers mono synths are often adding timbral complexity to the extent that harmonic (or even sometimes melodic) complexity can be overkill for the ear or the mix.
The expressive complexity of the pitch-bend + mod wheel+ legato play style (like Lisa Bella Donna, Daniel Fisher from sweetwater, or that bass station 2 guy on Instagram ( therealfree) is really something to wrap one’s head around coming from a keys background…
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The Digitone can sound very analog in my experience, check out my reply to a similar post below. I also don’t agree it’s not good for pads, some of those soundbanks I mention have amazing pads (especially “DigiTales”)!
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I had Blofeld, Virus TI, I prefered MM2 (I much prefer filters, UI, size). Now my favorite is Hydrasynth.
I had Digitone, really liked it, I’d also recommend it, but I prefer MM2 and HS for poly stuff. I sold Digitone for Syntakt. ST have 12 tracks, and you can play it polyphonically with a RK002 midi cable.
Really good companion for Digitakt. On a budget, Model Cycle can be interesting too.
@mitya33, still not clear if you want polyphony, multitimbrality, both…
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But what about a Polyphonic P5 (Prophet 5) that only has a Mono Out? 
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The title of that video is super misleading (presumably for the youtube algorithm). That reviewer actually REALLY liked the Hydrasynth Explorer. At roughly 18:05-18:20 he calls it the “Best Beginner Polysynth” and “Best Price to Fun Ratio” of 2022.
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For the OP, if you pursue the Blofeld for its multi-timbrality be prepared for StressFest 2023. Set up a punching bag by your workstation, because you’ll want to hit something until you get used to it.
(I never got used to it)
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Hi there! I think the Digitone would be a very good first choice: you might want to add more synths later, but for now it will give you not one but four extra layers. Which is a big value for a starting setup. It’ll give you a track for baselines, a track for lead, and another which still has 6 voices for poly pads. Etc. Since you only have a DT, it will make it lots easier to create full tracks.
It does have its distinct tones (which can be both beautiful or nasty), but you can just decide from YouTube videos well enough if that sort of pleases you or not.
There’s also the Digitone version with Keys. Which supposedly has very quality keys. Sómetimes it’s hardly more money secondhand, if you are lucky to find someone selling it.
PS Also, I think it’s good to trust your gut a bit. If you approach music from a place of playing keys, it might be the right bet to get a keyboard synth instead of a desktop version without keys. For a lot of people there’s still a difference between a synth with built in keyboard vs using a separate midi keyboard (I’m not a keys player so approach everything from a programming steps perspective, so I only have desktop synths with no keys.)
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DT+DN is the way, they were built for each other, and you’ve still got another four midi tracks for whatever else you feel the need to plug in!
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The Geometry packs for Digitone are sick. I appreciate the way that subtle analog imperfections are emulated so well.
I didn’t want to recommend the Digitone out of hand, but now that I see the OP is considering one, I will say that it ticks all the boxes (and some extra ones) as a poly-synth companion to the DT.
With basically identical sequencing and other workflows, the learning curve would be mostly about the FM sound generation.
On thing I enjoy about using more than one Digi box, especially in live settings, is being able to go back and forth between each as a “focus”. So, I might have a Digitakt-centric song, enhanced by some Digitone FM parts, then morph to a more Digitone-centric song, enhanced by some samples from the Digitakt. Designing my longer-form performances around this back-and-forth focus shift frees me up so that I don’t have to be so restrictive about insuring certain sounds carry over from pattern to pattern on just one box. Having that back and forth makes transitions more seamless and continuous, more like a DJ set, but with the Digi instruments as “decks”.
This may be WAY outside of the realm of what the OP wants to do, but for me, being able to do this back and forth between devices with a (mostly) identical workflow on them is a real brain saver when you’re in the thick of it. YMMV
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My first hardware synth was Minilogue. I enjoyed it for many years and it taught me well.
It doesnt have even a half of the features that most synthesizers that were recommended in this topic, but what it does have, is beautiful simplicity, that lets you focus on what you are doing.
You like how Modal sounds, so why not? They sound great, have awesome keybeds, and are just as hands on. Or are you searching for largest amount of features instead?
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@mitya33 Take a look at the Fred’s Lab Töörö :
“The Töörö is a polyphonic and multitimbral synthesizer module with 6 voices, 4 parts , per voice analog filters and a stereo signal path.”
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… and Gorilla Glue it side by side to the Digitakt. You can thank me later.
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