graspee's Reviews

It's very metal and heavy...

OK so this thing is very chunky, heavy and metal and it does the job. It's kind of a cheat that it's called a 6 channel mixer though: really it's a 4 channel mixer where 2 of the inputs are stereo: you can't set the levels of the two mono halves separately or anything. While it's nice to have EQ to play about with it would be even nicer if there was a bypass button to cut the EQ circuitry out if you wanted. Most annoying is the lack of mute and solo buttons. You get what you pay for I suppose, and in this case it's a hefty chunk of metal that can sit on your table and allow you to shove 4 different things into your amp, or by USB into your DAW (if you can settle for not being able to deal with each channel separately)

There are pros and cons but overall it's fantastic

I love this thing for quickly jotting down drum patterns. I'm not saying this is the only tool for doing that of course, it's just faster for me than other methods (as in I have my Maschine turned off and would have to turn it on).

Pros: A lot of tweaky options for making cool synthesized drums Synthesized drums mean the installation takes up barely any space and storing loads of presets is no problem Polyrhythmic which means each drum line can have its own number of beats, for complex rhythms, also speed of each drum track can be set to a fraction of the main tempo.

Cool things that admittedly are found elsewhere like multi hits per beat (think "roll") and configurable chance of beat firing every time it's up for it Cool "tweak over time" graphs that you can use to vary almost any aspect of the drum's synth or effects over the course of the pattern

Cons: No song mode, which limits the usefulness of the stand alone version of the program (as in - not vst) Could do with more graphs: while you get 4 different graphs and can set the values for each graph individually for each pattern, the effects that are tied to each graph are tied to that graph for each pattern. (As in if you use graph 1 to vary snare harshness and flanger amount then while you can set graph 1 to different heights on another pattern, it will still vary the harshness and flanger amount...) Something is messed up with the mouse editing so it's stupidly easy to enter a multi-hit beat when you just meant to click one solid beat Note velocity is hard to see (it's done by fading the square representing the beat. There's no way to set things like velocity, percent chance of firing as exact numbers. There are some bugs and it's looks like it's not being updated any more.

Blah

Like V Station, it's not bad, it's just not that exciting. It's nice that it worked out of the box with the knobs on the Launchkey 61 though. The UI is really small even on 1080p though so if you have a bigger monitor you're going to have a bad time.

not bad

It's not bad, it's just not that exciting. It's nice that it worked out of the box with the knobs on the Launchkey 61 though.

It came with my Launchkey 61

So yeah, I downloaded it because it was free with my keyboard. It's not bad. I think it's limited to 8 tracks though. I won't use it probably because I have Sonar Artist and waiting for FL Studio on steam.

It's not bad

The step sequencer is better than on any other DAW I've tried (although I haven't tried many). You can vary the steps per beat and beats per bar which means you can set it up to allow triplets.

It has a musical notation input which is something no other DAW I have demod has. It does seem a bit quirky though so not sure how useful it is.

FANTASTIC softsynth

This is a really full-sounding synth. It has 6 oscillators and really good control over the shape of the waves; there's 2 filters with quite a few choices for the type; there's 4 "all voice" LFOs and 2 "per voice"; there's 6 envelopes plus one each for amplitude and pitch; there's a bunch of digital effects you can tweak and reorder; there's an arp, and finally, the best thing, there's the modulation table which is like the patch bay: you can route pretty much anything anywhere.

This is great value as it is, at the full price, compared with other softsynths, but if you wait for the big sales on Steam, Winter and Summer basically, you can get this for 75% off which is A TOTAL FREAKING BARGAIN.

Great synth with polyphony!

This really is a fantastic synth. It has 2 osc and 1 filter. It's pretty limited as far as waveforms go though, but it has polyphony! It came out in the 80s. I received it as a present from a beautiful girl at university called Helen. That was back in the early 90s. Today it has spent a bit of time in storage under the stairs where it turned out to be a bit damp, and it famously has this weird foam in the synth that dies and turns into goo after a while so 2 of the keys stick down. I should really open it up and see if I can clean it.

Great build quality and sound

It really does have a nice build quality and great sound considering there's only one osc.

It's not bad: 3.5/5

At first I regretted buying this because I couldn't get the VST to work properly- no sound while editing the instrument. Then I found it was a local echo midi thing and all was fine. I still kind of think I shouldn't have bought it because it's essentially a wavetable vst except in a hardware form but without the full ability to edit the sound on the machine itself, and I have serum, massive and z3ta+2 for making sounds on the pc.

In the end though the factory patches are quite fun and it's a useful smallish keyboard to explore ideas with when inspiration strikes. In fact the best thing about the mininova is that it makes a handy compact midi controller for the pc. The novation launchkey 61 turned out to be a bit too big for my pc setup.

<to be updated>

Arrived without UK power supply so can't comment on it yet