I’ve been eyeing a TG-33 for quite some time now, really adore its gritty and atmospheric sound. Only thing holding me back is the lack of a conventional filter.
For those who have experience with this unit, what’s your take on this? Is it still easy to get nice, smooth, muffled/filtered-sounding stuff out of it? Are the tone and feedback controls good enough to approximate non-resonant filter envelope/sweep sounds?
For context, I make a lot of dub techno type music so being able to make soft stabs and pads with smoothed-out harmonics is important.
I think it’ll do you fine overall. The stabs and pads will be much more of the soft variety - no drastic filter cutoff stabs but an enjoyable machine overall. I perhaps like it even more for the 90’s (semi) rompler aspect (it’s not but you get the idea). It has a lot of just nice sounds in general that have a surprising presence to them. The fm aspect is a bit more hit-or-miss due to lack of editing and the vector aspect really does very little for me (maybe I’m missing out?).
Do you think using the PatchBase editor would solve that issue of hit-and-miss FM or is it a question of the machine’s actual capabilities more than the ease of access to editing?
I have had one for bit. No tone control but using the vector joy stick you can fade in-between sine and saw like waves to simulate a filter effect if you know what I mean. I love the sound but wish there was filter. You could always run it through an outboard filter but if you’re using multi mode this becomes very limiting.
it really does seem like one of a kind. i’ve been trying to find a synth with filters that seems to come close to the TG-33’s sound but i get the impression that’s a tall order.
that’s very good to know. also to be honest i’ve always been dependent on filters/subtractive when it comes to synthesis so it could be an exercise in expanding my palette/technique a bit.
Did you end up getting a tg-33 with patchbase? I’ve been eyeing a similar setup, but not sure how controllable the FM is with the app. I’ve been trying to run a comparison with other early vector(ish) synths like the d-50 and wavestation and these patches from the tg really impressed me
I’m trying to keep things in a rack and avoid another keyboards, so the fact that the tg has a joystick in the module is nice.
I actually didn’t end up getting one, but from the looks of the Patch Base screenshots for the TG-33 editor it looks probably as usable and well-designed as an editor for that synth could be.