jimmarchi1's Music Gear Setup

I'm over the moon for my prophet 600 right now. My unit has seen some serious road time and has been hacked into at least twice, but one of the hacks was for the GliGli mod which corrects the knob resolution to eliminate stepping, makes the envelopes a lot snappier and adds some prophet5 modulation features via the multi encoder and embrane buttons. Its a great upgrade and it made me open to buying a synth that has always gotten mixed reviews. What the prophet lacks (noise gen, what?) it makes up for in sound quality. The midrange is superlative on this board and the cranked resonance on the filter is the stuff of legend. Its a little more nasal than a prophet 5, but can cop the whole prophet thing better than a the new prophet 6. Its more lush and sits in the mix better. Cuts where it should, never where it shouldn't.

Scored at a guitar center for very, very cheap. These are overshadowed by the more capable DW8000 but overall have THAT korg hybrid sound. If you don't need more LFOs and waveshapes this will cover a lot of stuff. Not a good FIRST poly, but a great adjunct to a big rig that's mostly analog and pure digital because it splits the difference beautifully. Not wavetables, but just wave memory. Like a less evolved ESQ1 (right down to the extra envelope stages), but also simpler to dial up a nice pad. This has more aliasing on the waveshapes but is at the same time warmer sounding for some reason. I want to think both synths feature Curtis chip filters, but maybe not as the filters sound quite different to me. Both are bright but the korg is less aggressive and SCI-ish making it capable of some very Japanese pad and key sounds that can get downright juno-ey, but that's not its main thing in my opinion. Mine needs a power cable repair. Time to warm up the soldering iron.

this synth was fun right out of the box, but with some extra patch cables and some hardware sequencers? damn. It came with enough peripherals to enjoy right in the box, but more is always better, right? It feels like if roland decided to make an ARP2600 clone in the 80s. Its both an instrument and an intimidating sound fx generator... both musical and alien and it bridges the gap between 70s and 80s subtractive sounds perfectly having the cutting power of an Odyssey, a filter that can go from roland to oberheim and a lushness that makes me think mono Jupiter. I'm absolutely in love with this thing and I own a lot of synths. It feels awfully sturdy for a Behringer product. The value for dollar is insane. Expect an extended review with demos published on Equipboard soon.