Synth Recommendations

I'm fond of the Greenoak crystal. Are there a lot of free Audio Unit synths around for Mac? I can't find many.

I found a Korg Polysix in the neighbour's garbage a couple of years ago. The memory battery had sprung a leak and begun to erode the circuits around it just a bit (that happens apparently). I had it inspected and fixed up for about $50 and sold it at a tidy profit. It's a really nice synth - very synthy sounding - but I was moving towards soft gear at that point. I'd recommend it if you come across one.

Slothrop said:

...there are real analogue polys still being made, such as the above mentioned Dave Smith Poly Evolver and the Alesis Andromeda.

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True, I'd forgotton about those. Both of them are examples of the pitfalls of building analog polysynths, though. The Evolver is only 4 part polyphonic, which is fine for triad chords but not enough for piano-style playing. And the Andromeda is insanely expensive. And ugly.

WOEBOT said:

probably the biggest reason to pick up a synth for me is to just learn to play the piano....except that i hate the sound pianos make.

quite taken by your suggestion of the WASP.

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Wasps are brilliant synths, no question. If you want to create an avalanche of ear-bleeding noise, traumatise your family and make your neighbours think you're some kind of satanist, there's nothing better But for a piano substitute, you may need to look elsewhere...

WOEBOT said:

one thing about the whole synth thing is this. on the one hand there is this (quite laudable i suppose) culture of wanting to reproduce classic analog sounds. i suppose i have a bit of a problem with this. BUT, from a modernist/truth-to-its-own-materiality-perspective you've gotta love a machine which sounds not like something else, but like itself.

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Except, as always, the retro idea of what constitutes 'classic sounds' is so reductive. Synth players in the 70s got an huge variety of sounds from a very limited range of instruments. The machines were expensive compared to now, and they had no presets, so I suppose people just shut themselves away and learned to impose thier personalities on them, like guitar players do. Now, as leamas says, you tend to get software reproductions of analogue synths with very similar sounding presets - fat basses, whooshy pads, etc - because that's what people want, and the temptation is to stay out of the guts of he machine and just play the presets.

leamas said:

For me one of the dissapointing aspects of soft synth development is the lack of progressive/futurist designs given the flexibility of software. The market is full of recreations, many of them quite poor. It would be cool to see some of the developers focussing on serious, decent-sounding, granular synths, wavetable synths and most of all physical modelling synths. Physical modelling is the future, does anyone know of anyone who's doing this well?

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Well, there's plenty of amazing packages for the PC if you're prepared to get more technical, like Reaktor and Max/MSP - but yes, it's fair to say that no-one has really broken ground in creating new types of synthesis that work in the same, intutitive manner as classical subtractive synths do. But ultimately you can't blame manufacturers for giving people what they want, which is cheap digital recreations of old analog synths. It seems like every time someone has a go at departing from this, the product flops. I guess that eventually fashions will change, but when, who knows?

I picked up a Roland SH101 monosynth in the wanted ads of the local paper for £20 when I was 17, good for messing around on but I didn't have anything in the way of a sequencer for it. (Pre-MIDI) It suddenly stopped working after about a year, so it's in my parents loft now, I keep meaning to get it repaired, but I tend to just muck about with soft-synths 'cause you can do some really awesome things with DAWs now. It kept going out of tune and you could never get the exact same sound twice. (I know because I'd record it on a four track then the nest day the same settings would sound slightly different.)

I've always been a huge fan of the Korg MS2000 - you can pick one up fairly cheaply now. It's a digital synth that acts and looks like an analogue one, and is great fun to play with. It will definitely take your attention away from the computer screen.

http://www.korg.com/gear/info.asp?a_prod_no=MS2000B

nomos said:

I'm fond of the Greenoak crystal. Are there a lot of free Audio Unit synths around for Mac? I can't find many.

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Automat
Triple Cheese and Zoyd
Remedy
Apulsoft (various freebies, including Da Hornet)

Interesting thoughts.....

GFC-if you think an Alesis Andromeda is insanely expensive... I don't know what you expect to pay for something that powerful, (16 voice poly, 16 part multitimbral and as deep as a Matrix 12!) - you can pick one up for under a grand, which is about what you'd've paid for a Juno 6 in the mid-80s, when you could buy a new car for less.
A Polyevolver is more expensive and only 4 voice poly :-(
The Andromeda is ugly though, I agree.

Matt, if you want something with the feel of a piano but different sounds, I wouldn't buy the synth you emailed me about. From what you just said it sounds like you want something that responds to how hard you hit the keys!
By the way, a Wasp is great for Daniel Miller sounds but it doesn't even have a moving keyboard so maybe not what you're after either.

Swears, that is an incredible bargain. I got my first 101 for £70 in 1988 and I thought I did well. It's a crime to keep it in the loft.

MS2000 - I had to get rid of mine, i thought it sounded awful. It's fun to play with by itself but try to put it in an actual track and it just sucks. Just my opinion of course....

hint said:

Automat
Triple Cheese and Zoyd
Remedy
Apulsoft (various freebies, including Da Hornet)

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cheers hint those look fun

Get something with nobs and faders on it, because:

a) its more fun and intuitive

b) you'll pick up the basics easier; oscs, filters, envelopes.

MIDI is worthwhile, because at some point you'll want to hook it up to a sequencer...

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Edward or anyone: what would you recommend for MIDIfying the 101? The Kenton jobbies are too expensive... and even the Synhouse Midijack things seem a lot for what they are?

Yay, Dissensus synth workshop thread

bleep said:

Get something with nobs and faders on it, because:

a) its more fun and intuitive

b) you'll pick up the basics easier; oscs, filters, envelopes.

MIDI is worthwhile, because at some point you'll want to hook it up to a sequencer...

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Edward or anyone: what would you recommend for MIDIfying the 101? The Kenton jobbies are too expensive... and even the Synhouse Midijack things seem a lot for what they are?

Yay, Dissensus synth workshop thread

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Looks like Philip Rees discontinued their mini-midi-cv converter which is what you need - there's a cheap-ish basic version of it here here:

I would recommend the Kenton Pro Solo. It just isn't too expensive, it's totally rock solid and feature packed.

I'm gonna get on my high horse for a second (climbs up).... in these days of cracked soft synths and £300 laptops everyone wants something for nothing. £99 isn't much to ask for something of the quality of a Kenton product, you can use it forever, it's made in England by a small company.

The only more cost-effective thing is if you've got a lot of CV/Gate synths you can buy a unit that converts them all to MIDI at once.


Oooh just checked... Kentons have gone up to £125, so if you're skint then check out Doepfer, they do a convertor for £85 that looks good, not sure if that includes VAT or not.... check with their UK distributor EMIS
Here is their nicely old-fashioned looking website:
http://www.aues21.dsl.pipex.com/doepfer.htm

I haven't tried the Doepfer one but their synths work perfectly well so no reason to doubt their convertors....


The other thing you can do with the SH101 is just use the internal sequencer and clock it from something like a TR707, TR727 or Kawai R100.... all of which are cheap MIDI drum machines and you can use them for their sounds etc as well. Of course this is less good in some ways than using MIDI but it's cooler in other ways cos the internal sequencer lets you very quickly program loops with slide on individual steps for those acid lines we all love.

I'm not a *total* cheapskate but the 101 was ~£140, so spending another £125 on the kenton does seem a bit mental.

Leaning towads the midijack as its fitted internally:
http://www.synhouse.com/midijack.html

Thanks for the input.

Edward said:

Interesting thoughts.....


Swears, that is an incredible bargain. I got my first 101 for £70 in 1988 and I thought I did well. It's a crime to keep it in the loft.

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When I went around to the house it was an elderly couple, I don't think they knew what they had. They were selling a few old computers and games consoles as well, maybe it belonged to a son that had left (or maybe even died?) I didn't ask.

I'd go for the Doepfer one if I were you.....
Isn't the MIDIjack one of those things where you have to butcher your 101?

What I usually did with the 101 was play lines and sample and loop them on the PC.
But this has the disadvange of not being able to tweak the LFO/VCO or whatever while a sequenced pattern is playing to experiment with sounds. (Playing the keys with one hand while adjusting the sliders with the other is really awkward)

WOEBOT said:

i suppose nowadays it'd be conceptually impossible to build a synth which sounded like itself...so limitless are the possibilities

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Well, there's always the SID-station (www.sidstation.com). Even though it's built on a chip from the early eighties, it still has huge, untapped potentials and still sounds fresh and strange and like nothing else. So much can be done with it's weird internal loops. It's clearly not what you're after, though, as it's not just monophonic, but also quite lo fi, noisy, raw and harsh, and not very obvious for keyboard playing.

WOEBOT said:

ha! yes i walked right into that one.

i dunno i guess. i was thinking it'd be a challenge to learn a musical instrument. purely and exclusively for my own entertainment i'd assert.

in the cheesiest way possible it would probably need to be polyphonic. because otherwise i couldnt do chords and all that.

multi-timbral? yes i suppose so, but software synths are so good/big then i wouldnt see the point of buying a synth for its soundbank? no?

HOWEVER it'd probaly be fun to be able to plug it in to the computer and use it as a midi trigger (just for fun really- not essential then i suppose)

What do i want it to sound like? ---------- i think this is the key actually. i dont want it to sound cheap. i dont really want it to sound "sort of exactly" like a grand piano. i want it to sound like IT IS a synth (so i guess the mini-moogs are some kind of suggestion)

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If you're trying to learn to play on a keyboard, make sure you get one with weighted keys! And preferably a full, 88-key model. Otherwise, without weighted keys, your technique will never be right and to be honest, I don't know if you can learn to play piano/keyboard on unweighted keys--it's such a completely different experience.

My workhorse synth is a Korg Triton and it's great--weighted 88 keys, full sequencing capability, sampling, 16 track + recording, and a lot of good sounds. Triton's are great, too, because they're a great step in building a home studio. It has a good number of sounds that have the range from "grand piano" simulacra to lots of fun outerspacey and weird stuff. It can be expensive but the "LE" model is cheaper.

My next step is to get more fun "performance" oriented keyboard, which is a different story entirely.

Do you really want to learn piano?

Or do you want to muck around with synths?

They're not utterly incompatible aims but they're different paths.

I suspect you don't have time to "really" learn piano unless you're getting lessons. But you do have time to figure out where to put fingers on a keyboard to make little tunes and nice chords and things.

And synths (or controller keyboards for soft synths) are so cheap and so much fun they really are worth just diving into.

I still think a little Novation or Korg is most likely to do what you want to do, new, for noth much money. Check out soundonsound's reader ads for cheap second hand gear, of which there are near unlimited amounts.

nomadologist said:

If you're trying to learn to play on a keyboard, make sure you get one with weighted keys! And preferably a full, 88-key model. Otherwise, without weighted keys, your technique will never be right and to be honest, I don't know if you can learn to play piano/keyboard on unweighted keys--it's such a completely different experience.

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That's an odd statement I think. Are you suggesting that the technique of a church organist isn't "right"? There's different keyboard approaches, equally valid depending on what you want to do. Sure, if you want to play piano, you should get weighted keys. If you want to play synth, I don't think that's going to do much of a difference. A synth functions much more like an organ anyway.

hamarplazt said:

That's an odd statement I think. Are you suggesting that the technique of a church organist isn't "right"? There's different keyboard approaches, equally valid depending on what you want to do. Sure, if you want to play piano, you should get weighted keys. If you want to play synth, I don't think that's going to do much of a difference. A synth functions much more like an organ anyway.

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Don’t they divide it into ‘weighted’, ‘semi-weighted’, and ‘non-weighted’? Most synth’s being semi-weighted. I definitely would go down the weighted route, too—you can’t beat the feeling.

Guybrush said:

Don’t they divide it into ‘weighted’, ‘semi-weighted’, and ‘non-weighted’? Most synth’s being semi-weighted. I definitely would go down the weighted route, too—you can’t beat the feeling.

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I dunno, I've never had a synth with weighted keys and they do nothing for me - I actually find them a bit annoying, often. It has no importance for the way I use the instrument. Of course, I'm not much of a keyboard player anyway, but I really like to make dynamics with the synth knobs while playing, not with my key technique. As it should be obvious from this, I'm not good at playing keyboard two handed, which is another reason why I like mono syths - they're not supposed to be played like traditional keyboards, one of your hands is much better of controlling filters and envelopes!