Ableton Forum

Hi all

I need a little advice. My much loved darkstar XP2 virtual analogue synth looks like its been lost in the post by royal mail on its way home after a repair job. If it doesn't turn up i'm looking at £200/£250 compensation for it.

Its not made any more, so getting hold of one is a bit hit and miss.

Any recomendations for an analogue/virtual analogue synth-

£250/200 new or second hand
with good knobs on the front, so I can get it squelching as I play
easy to programe or with computer programing (eg midiquest)

suitable for industrial music, it needs grit.


Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

How about one of these bad boys

I'm sure you can find a second hand Red Sound jobby. What about the Elevata?

OR, I would say you could find a Korg Electribe, or MS2000 Rack for the same price. The MS2000 was a seriously fun little synth. Not powerful, only 4 or some voices if I remember correctly, but INCREDIBLY tweakable.

clavia nord micro modular

futureproof wrote:How about one of these bad boys

Is sure has grit

Lots of control but there's a lot of pressing buttons around the grid to get to parametres, takes getting used to/learning but once you know what does what its absolutely wicked!

montrealbreaks wrote: .... MS2000 Rack for the same price. The MS2000 was a seriously fun little synth. Not powerful, only 4 or some voices if I remember correctly, but INCREDIBLY tweakable.

Think the rack ver has 8, great synth for the money, vocoder and millions of knobs too.

VIRUS A Desktop, very knobby and great to programm form the front panel. you can dl a free standalone programmer for mac/pc but i hardly ever use it.

Even though it's the first model it still has a very impressive feature set, expecially if you get the latest (and free) OS 2.8. Industrial sounds are very well possible.

i paid 400 euro for mine 2 years ago, this could still be in your price range. there's an auction here for instance:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... eName=WD2V

bytheriver wrote:suitable for industrial music, it needs grit.

It's not a VA, but if you want a gritty synth for £200ish then you could check out the Yamaha DX-200... although the on board sequencer is a bit limited at 16 steps and I wouldn't rate the drum sounds, it is AWESOME as a sound module, really fu*king gritty too.


http://www.soundonsound.com/readersads/ ... derDatAZ=2[/img]

Thanks for the advice, the nord micro mod looks pretty promising. The only thing that puts me of is it seems a lot like reaktor, which if I wanted a modular synth might be a better buy?

Do you think the nord micro mod is similar to reaktor, or does it have a different or very different sound/way of working?


I was planing to use an older friends PC he's giving me as a 'reaktor box' if I got on with the software.

bytheriver wrote:Thanks for the advice, the nord micro mod looks pretty promising. The only thing that puts me of is it seems a lot like reaktor, which if I wanted a modular synth might be a better buy?

Do you think the nord micro mod is similar to reaktor, or does it have a different or very different sound/way of working?


I was planing to use an older friends PC he's giving me as a 'reaktor box' if I got on with the software.

It's a lot easier to work with than reaktor. All the modules are common modules found in synths and pretty straight forward to work with. The sound is also totally different to reaktor. Its very crisp and it can be very oldschool sounding. At first you might think it sounds basic untill you get better at programming it or start downloading patches off the net (there are millions)

The micro lacks knobs, it only has 3 assignable knobs so if you really want to tweak it up go for the rack version Its only slightly more expensive and its 4 miromodulars in one.

novation nova would light things up.

I currently own all sorts of synths from the Nord Lead to the Roland JP8000 to the Waldorf Microwave XTk and Micro Q, but my favorite new synth has to be the Dave Smith Evolver as shown by Futureproof above. Don't jump into buying anything without first checking this thing out. It is a TRUE analog AND digital synth (not a virtual analog) and it just sounds amazing for such a little inexpensive box. I've been playing with it more than any of my other synths!

don't underestimate any synth. i did that with my jp8000.

while i am in a different country to my andromeda, i have made 6 tracks with the JP ranging from tech-house to trance and electro and all of them have been commended on the sounds... not trying to big myself up, rather make the point that it depends on how familiar you become with your equipment/process.

try finding something that you will find easy to operate and wont get frustrated having to spend lots of time with it.

i'm sure the tonal pallette of the dave smith thing may be great, but i can't imagine myself intuitively controlling multiple parameters from different sections of the synth without going bonkers... it does have the best of both worlds though.

on the other hand, seriously consider getting a JP-8000