Stuff that caught my attention from Musikmesse:
Korg Volca analogue grooveboxes – Korg are continuing their much welcomed analogue revival with a trio of grooveboxes. If you shut your eyes and listen, they sound great. The disappointment for me is that they are made for the fingers of 3 year olds. Just watch the guy in the video try and play a lead line 1:25. Perhaps as they did with the Monotron, Korg are testing the market for analogue grooveboxes. I’m holding out for a full-sized analogue Electribe at some point in the future.
MFB Dominion 1 analogue synth and Tanzbär drum machine – MFB have certainly been busy lately with not one, but two flagship product announcements. Both look pretty impressive. The drum machine in particular seems almost unrivalled. Fully analog, 16 instruments, impressive sequencer (different track lengths for each instrument – yay!), bass & synth included. It’s hard not to be impressed with the specs for just 840 Euros (around half the price of a Tempest). The Dominion 1 synth is no slouch either with just about anything you could want from a mono synth – 3 oscs, waveshaping, ringmod, FM, a ton of patch points etc etc. Built in power supply too. It seems like MFB are upping their game with build quality.
Doepfer A-127 Triple Resonance Filter – Amongst a flurry of other new modular parts, including the limited edition Dark MAQ16/3, Doepfer announced the A-127, a very reasonably priced triple resonant filter bank or resonator. Any modular nerd worth their salt has drooled over the Cwejman RES-4, which seems to be the holy grail of resonators but their price and (lack of) availability means they are made of unobtanium. Analogue Systems do the RS-360, but these are often avoided due to power and racking compatibility issues. Doepfer to the rescue it seems.
Waldorf Pulse 2 – This one seems to be slipping by largely unnoticed. The original Pulse was quite a monster so it’ll be interesting to hear more of this in the months ahead. Personally I’m not sold on the Blofeld form factor at all, which probably makes this a no-go for me, but I imagine it will sell well.
Nord Lead 4 - I’ve never owned a Nord Lead. It’s always been on edge of the radar. Somehow it never quite drifted centre enough. The forth iteration looks pretty sweet though. Amongst the most interesting additions are wavetables and the variation buttons, which allow instant, or clocked, recall of patch variations, changing multiple parameters at once. I guess I’ll have to wait until the Nord Lead 7 comes out for these to be cheap enough to take a punt on.
Oh yeah, and the Prophet 12 picture? Well, that’ll be explained in a future post, but let’s just say it looks mighty fine in the flesh