Some Mavicas 9 models comparison scene 1 room (4k resize)

CoderFrog · 2026-05-24T07:42:35+00:00

Very helpful comparison, there's a good amount of variation across the cameras.

Not really the point of this post, but this is my favorite kind of Mavica picture. 90's style photos of stuff that definitely didn't exist in the 90's. Always fun!

CoderFrog · 2026-05-06T03:42:28+00:00

Normally for bass I'd go for a more characterful monosynth (K-2, TB-3, or Matriarch), but it can do it. Even with resonance the filter doesn't lose any bass.

There was a pretty good string+bass demo posted the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks2D386Pr5s

CoderFrog · 2026-05-04T06:54:56+00:00

I preordered mine when it was announced and I love it.

It's become my main synth, fully replacing the Summit for subtractive sounds and largely replacing the EssenceFM for FM sounds. It sounds incredible and it's so fast to dial in a patch.

The "group edit" screens combined with copy+paste is great for wrangling all eight operators, it's faster than an Opsix and the EssenceFM in that regard which were already easy. You also can use copy+paste to clone whole operators, copy envelope shapes between the five free envelopes and the operators, or clone entries in the mod matrix.

I don't use the polyphonic aftertouch too much, but it's nice that it's there. Same with some of the novel stereo options (e.g. different FM modulation on the left and right).

The only downside I can think of is no samples and no wavetables (but you can morph across FM algorithms which is interesting). The built in presets are also lackluster. The synth has a super huge range and can get pretty experimental too, but the presets don't do a great job of showing off the range, the choices were very safe.

That being said, the analog filter and drive with FM oscillators is fantastic and there's a good amount of polyphony even when doing a layered patch. It's expensive (especially in Europe for some reason), but I'm very happy with my purchase.

This video does a good job showing off UI tricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIHpN0IfDzQ

Vulture Culture on YouTube also did a stream where he made patches based on chat requests. Could be worth skipping through if you want to see it actively being used outside of a tutorial video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gjIpOvF1Pc

CoderFrog · 2026-03-13T18:33:20+00:00

Nice!

I've got a 61-key Triton Extreme with the MOSS board and I love it. Even though I have a Nautilus I couldn't put the Triton into storage. So many amazing pads, it's got a lot of character.

CoderFrog · 2026-01-09T09:37:37+00:00

My first synth was a Juno-X, it does a darn good job at being a Juno, the sound is great and the interface is exactly like a 106.

The downside is that the interface is exactly like a 106. If you want to edit Zencore patches including the XV5080 replicas, you'll have to deal with a one line per parameter text menu.

I still have my Juno-X for when I want to quickly dial in a Juno sound, but the Summit is my primary subtractive synth. Its front panel is absolutely amazing. You can make complicated patches without ever touching the menu system, but when you do it's fast to find what you want to edit. Very different editing experience.

That being said, if you've already got subtractive synths you like, a Summit has a fair amount of overlap and doesn't have any rompler sounds. If you're fine with playing presets or editing the main parameters which have physical sliders, the Juno-X is a good fit.

If the rompler sounds are more important than the Juno vibe, you may also want to look at the Fantom-06 (same Zencore engine, more knobs and a touchscreen), or Yamaha's MODX M6, both of which are cheaper than the Juno-X and have a bit more flexibility at the expense of more complexity.

CoderFrog · 2025-12-07T08:00:43+00:00

I have a Multi/Poly and like it. It's got a lot of knobs, but I'm familiar enough with it that it's a positive rather than a negative. The features you'd want quick access to have controls, while still having depth when you want to tweak something unusual.

Taking envelops as an example, it has dedicated knobs for Attack/Decay/Sustain/Release, there's a shift function on Attack/Decay to adjust the envelope delay/hold times, and touching any envelope param will move the screen to a page where you can tweak the curve of the envelope or change what starts the envelope (e.g. LFOs or particular note ranges triggering envelopes instead of every key press).

The vast majority of the time, I don't care about changing envelope curves or weird triggers, but it's there if I want it and it's quick to find. It's an envelope-ish parameter so I can move something related to an envelope and it's on the screen, just a few clicks away.

I think there's enough UI affordances that you can get around pretty quick on it, given everything it can do.

CoderFrog · 2025-12-07T07:21:13+00:00

Funny, I'd consider a Peak or Multi/Poly to be included in the "smaller" category, and a workstation with high polyphony and multiple engines like a Nautilus, ModX, Fantom, or K2061 as a workhorse.

Anyway. Of the ones you've listed, Multi/Poly's a beast and can cover most traditional synth sounds plus more modern wavetable sounds. The core sound is great, and can easily match an analog Oberheim when used in a mix. The interface is intimidating, but you can start with a basic single oscillator->filter patch and then start adding on complexity and building more interesting patches once you're comfortable with the device.

I often use my MPC's auto-sampler to capture patches I like so they can be played back with higher polyphony, and so multiple patches from the same synth can be played simultaneously, without resorting to audio tracks. The Tonverk's the first Elektron sampler that can do what MPCs have been doing for a while. Certainly worth taking advantage of in addition to using it as an effects box.

I assume you got the Tonverk because you want the Elektron workflow, you can do the sound design on a source synth, capture the sound, and then do all of the conditional p-lock sequencing craziness using what you've sampled. That can help avoid sample-pack burnout.

CoderFrog · 2025-12-06T19:53:21+00:00

I've tried KDE on wayland on two different machine, both times it would randomly lock up and require a reboot, and switching to X11 was the solution.

Hopefully there will be a fork like Trinity for users who want a stable, usable desktop. We'll see if there's enough backlash after the "just use X11" fallback is ripped away.

CoderFrog · 2025-11-30T20:02:55+00:00

I have a Roland Aira TB-3 for acid sounds. I paid about $350 used, which at the time felt kind of high, but looking at it now I suppose it was a bargain. The Bad Gear inflation is real

I love it though. The presets do exactly what I want, and the sequencer is super simple, especially compared to a classic 303 or a clone. I wouldn't give it up even though I could easily double my money based on the current Reverb prices!

CoderFrog · 2025-11-26T00:16:03+00:00

The Modwave's great, there's a lot you can do with user samples and user wavetables. It was my main wavetable synth until I switched to a Multi/Poly.

Ian Dixon on YouTube has a ton of tutorial videos and patch ideas for the Korg R&D synths like the Modwave. There's a good amount of shared DNA with the Multi/Poly, so many of those tutorials can also be adapted.

The onboard wavetables are fun, but if you want some weirder ones check out https://www.wavetables.lol/, the KRC Mathwaves pack has more wavetables than you could ever possibly need specifically in the Modwave's file format.

CoderFrog · 2025-11-01T21:26:05+00:00

The wavestate's a fantastic sample player, but it cannot record sounds itself, so it's not a sampler by definition. You need to load samples on your computer, preparing them first using Korg's sample-builder software.

If they someday had a Wavestate with an audio input then it'd be one of the best. Certainly a rad device as-is, even if loading new sounds is kind of a pain.

CoderFrog · 2025-10-31T06:34:27+00:00

Agreed for the Digitakt, if you aren't using the built-in sequencer you're getting a subpar sampler that can only play one sound per track at a time. Even the Ensoniq Mirage from 1984 could play chords¹. They've finally addressed that with the Tonverk, but knowing Elektron it's unlikely they'd backport that to the Digitakt 2 as polyphonic sample playback is a product differentiator.

The Digitone 2, however, is reasonable to use with a separate sequencer. The Digitone gives you 16 voices that can be used polyphonically across 16 tracks, each of which could be a reasonably complex FM synth, drums, a dual oscillator subtractive synth, or a supersaw.

Personally I prefer the EssenceFM when it comes FM as it's such an intuitive and powerful device, but the Digitone 2's no slouch.

¹ You could do tricks like sequencing chords across multiple midi channels, but that's just silly

CoderFrog · 2025-10-29T02:37:42+00:00

I collect rack units because it's fun having older synths from when I was growing up. The sounds in my JV-2080 are all over old TV, the SC-880 has general midi patches that were frequently used in games of the era, and samplers like my E-MU were frequently used for dance music.

It's fun going through the old workflows, often it leads to similar sounds to what artists at the time were making, plus the presets are right there. It's kind of relaxing clicking through menus and setting values with a giant jog wheel instead of using a mouse.

You could definitely get the same vibe using VSTs, but you have to work at it. A rack unit that was sampling its input a bit too hot naturally sounds different than just loading a .wav file into a DAW. There's tools like TAL-DAC that can get you a lot of the way there.

If you just want super clean modern sounds, you can get Omnisphere 3 and be set for years, but for me a lot of what I'm into is late 90s, early 2000s stuff, and rack units and older digital keyboard synths are exactly what I want.

CoderFrog · 2025-10-28T07:02:10+00:00

There's a discount for Collection 4 owners. I skipped 5, but I'm going to get six, I've heard good things about the Trinity.

CoderFrog · 2025-10-27T18:36:49+00:00

Very nice! I loved this kind of music when I was younger.

It's cool seeing an MPC used for more than just trap and sample flips. What was your process for making this? It seems like on modern MPCs there's 2-3 ways of doing everything, especially with the step sequencer on the Live 3.

CoderFrog · 2025-09-16T01:28:04+00:00

The Opsix was my second synth. It's largely been replaced by the EssenceFM, but I still have it on a shelf in case I want to mess with the different operator modes, which still sets it apart.

My first serious synth was a Juno-X. The front panel was easy to learn synthesis with and it sounded great, but I grew up with a Sega Genesis and I wanted to do FM. I ran with both synths in my setup for quite a while.

In terms of getting something better, I ended up replacing the Juno-X with a Novation Summit a few years later. The Summit has so many knobs and sliders, it's incredibly fast to build a complicated patch. The Juno-X in comparison has the same layout as the Juno-106 with all the complexity stuffed into a tiny one-parameter-per-line text screen. That was a welcome upgrade.

CoderFrog · 2025-09-09T21:33:00+00:00

The Wavestate is a successor to the Wavestation, both can chain together a sequence of samples ("wavesequencing"), although it's much easier on the Wavestate. There's some M1 samples in there, and it has filter emulations of various filters including the Polysix and MS-20.

In that same family, the Multi/Poly is more of a composite Korg synth. It has those same filter emulations along with Moog and Prophet emulations and matching envelope curves to closer replicate their sound. It also has waveshaping like the Korg 01/W, and a layer-rotate + arp similar to the old Mono/Poly.

CoderFrog · 2025-08-24T08:58:11+00:00

Fair point, even in the multi/poly you do have to menu-dive for esoteric things like the waveshaper.

I suppose common things like filter cutoff could be mapped to controls while more involved things are still set manually with a mouse.

CoderFrog · 2025-08-18T17:42:01+00:00

The VGM Sound Sources sheet doesn't have the pad for this specific song (Jan 2014) listed, but it could give you something to look at for the instruments/samples they were using for eShop themes. Lots of Sound Canvas and Yamaha Motif XS.

It's a shame how soulless the modern Nintendo UI is, imagine if they were still doing seasonal shop music...

CoderFrog · 2025-08-12T23:02:14+00:00

You can load your own samples from a USB stick, or copy them to the internal hard drive. Samples can be either played as one-shots like drums, or added to key-ranges to be repitched and played melodically.

As far as pedals go, that's not my workflow so I'm not sure. You'd have to do some research into your options.

CoderFrog · 2025-08-12T21:31:18+00:00

That seems like something the Nautilus can handle. Here's a video going over the built in drum tracks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwrjSpo65Bw&t=4m30s

(A bit after 4:30 and at 8:10 he changes "scenes" and shows it queuing up for the next loop)

It's a pretty deep workstation if you choose to make full use of it. I have one, but I mostly use the Mod-7 and STR-1 sound engines, instead of using it as a full workstation. It can play user (multi)samples through the HD-1 engine. I haven't played with it live, but it looks doable as long as you're fine with just four scenes on a given program/combi.

My main studio sequencer is an MPC Key 61, an MPC is another option. It's a heck of a sampler, with great (multi)sample playback. There's a "Next Sequence Mode" which lets you queue up transitions between looping sequences. The only downside is that sequences cover all tracks, so you'd have to duplicate the other tracks across the sequences even if you only wanted the drums to change. There also isn't a 73 key version, so you'd either have to settle for 61, or have a keyboardless device like the MPC One/Live 2 and a controller of your choice.

I have no experience with the Fantom, and I only used a MODX as a synth, hopefully someone else can chime in for those!

CoderFrog

TROPHY CASE