Muff's Modules & More

Bath House

I've been having fun with my MC-50 sequencer but it's got me thinking - was anything analog, multitimbral, and GM spec ever made?

ignatius · Posted: Fri May 25, 2012 12:39 pm Post subject:

no -

edit: as far as i know general midi is rompler only for older roland stuff (though it still exists)

there are some multi timbral analogs but generally they split up as a couple monosynths or they're polysynths that allow you do separate the voices in some way but only a handful at most and not many voices.

general midi spec on an analog synth would be kind of a wasted implementation.

Bath House · Posted: Fri May 25, 2012 1:55 pm Post subject:

I guess that makes sense - opening up the category, then, to "are there multitimbral analogs with MIDI?"

Hanz · Posted: Fri May 25, 2012 1:58 pm Post subject:

General Midi compliant analogues (hence: 24 voices, 16 part multitimbral, drum kit on channel 10, full midi) you will not find.
I think the closest ever realized was probably some crazy Casio, a bit in the vein of the HT-6000, which appears like a massively underrated synth btw.

Analog multitimbral synths (which implies MIDI, doesn't it?) are not too hard to find, really. If I recall corectly... from the top of my head (and a bit of Google to verify)

Modern analogs;
SE Omega 8 / Code
Alesis Andromeda
Dave Smith Instruments Tetra

Vintage analogs;
Oberheim Expander / Matrix 12
Sequential Six-track / Multitrack
Cheetah MS-6 (Oberheim Matrix 1000 lookalike)

If you decide to include bi-timbral synths, the list is even longer, as a number of synths have this using 'split / layer' functionality.
For instance, Roland JX-10 / MKS-70, Roland Jupiter-6 / MKS-80, Akai AX-60, Chroma Polaris, Crumar Bit-One, Siel DK-80, Prophet-08 etc.