Just out of curiousity. I've been dabbling with using a small synth as part of my live rig. Currently I use a Roland "analog modeled" synth (code for digital representation of an analog synth). It sounds nice enough but I am wondering if the MiniMoog Voyager sounds enough better to warrant the price tag.

Hey Glenn,

Not sure how you're using the synth in your live setup, but you may want to look at the Moog Slim Phatty if you don't need a keyboard. 100% analog and you could chain 3 of them together polyphonically for the price of a MMV. Just a thought.

Hope that helps,
Mark

Right now I am using a keyboard and I like doing that. I do have a MIDI pickup on my Stick and I've done both but lately I've been really digging doing synth stuff on keys. Mostly I feed lines into loops and so a monophonic unit would be fine but it occurs to me after reading your post that if I went back to using my Stick, the lack of polyphony might quickly become a shortcoming. Hmmmmm.

I've always wanted a MiniMoog but they are expensive. Probably worth it. But expensive.

I am looking at used Juno-60s too. I have a soft spot for those

Ahhhh, early 80's synths... Where are Howard Jones and Thomas Dolby when you need them?

Science!

Classic analog my friend! It never seems to go out of style

I do own a minimoog but I haven't had an opportunity to compare it to hte voyager or any of the other analog models. I remember an article in Electronic Musician on this topic some years ago that said that some of the soft-synths from Arturia or whatever were pretty good. Plus I believe they have polyphonic capability.

I've owned Minimoogs and when my repair shop was active I would have them, ARPs, Oberhiems, etc all the time.

It's really hard to say which would be better. Originals are very expensive - even the new ones are not cheap. Benefits for the new ones are that stability is better, the key contacts should be better (less glitching) plus you have patch memory recall. Polyphony though is a problem if you decide that you want to hook your GK back up to a synth. You can run monophonic and chances are it will track really well - great for solo and monophonic melody parts. Analogs do sound good.

You could look for an older Kurzweil K2xxx series. I have a K2000V3 and it has a guitar mode that works pretty good with Stick. Pretty good sounds. It's a pretty heavy keyboard to lug around though. A rack unit could be an option. The new series are supposed to be awesome.

I got so tired of repairing synths in the shop though that I decided to stay 'in the box' and run mostly VSTi's. There's no shortage of good ones to choose from. You do need a good sound card though or they will not sound great. There are other benefits to VSTi. Much wider sonic pallette available. Plus if you are running them on a laptop you can have all kinds of backup/supporting instrumentation if you want - simple percussion to all out orchestral backup.

Dave

I have the Arturia bundle. They do sound nice. But I really have no idea how they sound in a side by side with the real deal. I have Absynth also which I really think is amazing.

I like the real units with all the sliders and knobs though so I can tweak on the fly. For some reason there is something a little less satisfying about doing it at the computer. There's also something about the MiniMoog that just looks cool to me.

But yeah ... the new ones are not cheap (around $3000 at the their absolute cheapest). I have a line on a mint Juno-60 which I have a bit of a sentimental attachment to. I loved the sound of those but I do remember that for some reason they couldn't provide a "glide" function on those early DCO units. Plus there's no MIDI without the added MD-8 unit.

In the "for what it's worth" category, I've been driving synths for years with guitars. I went the same route as Dave, except I settled on using Reason/Record (from Propellerheads). It's a closed system (can't plug in VSTi or DXi modules), but its totally stable live and the shear amount of power in this thing is insane (3 soft synths - 1 with 6 types of synthesis in a modular format, 2 samplers, vocoder, sequencers, loop player, drum synthesis, effects, etc.) It's modeling analog, but holy cow is it good modeling. Of course with it or any softsynth, you can add a simple control surface (for next to nothing) and assign its knobs/sliders/x-y pads, etc. to control any parameter you like from a physical device (Glenn's right... doing that with a mouse is the pits).

Just sharing what has worked for me.

Mark

Yeah, I have a nice Roland MIDI keyboard controller that can have all of the sliders and knobs setup to control something like the Arturia MiniMoog and that's something that I've considered. Plus that then lets me use Absynth live which is tempting.

One of the things that tends to bother me about the soft synths though is the "stair stepping" effect you get when you do things like sweep your filter cutoff or resonance on the fly. Some soft synths are better (or worse) at this than others but it's been my experience so far that they all do it and the manufacturer's message boards are loaded with people complaining about it.

I guess another factor in using the real MiniMoog along with my Stick to create loops in a live setting is the picture I have in my head of marrying the gear from two great musical inventors of the 60s all in one live setting