Future of Synths

Since we got a pretty good run down of the old school history of synth and drum machines this past week, I looked into some newer synths. The synths that I am love with are the Roland Fantom series which are considered synth workstations. These keyboards have thousands of preset sounds and instruments just like A.Live and allow you analog knobs and sliders to control massive amounts of digital parameters so you can have the flexability of an old school analog synth. This synth also has a laser which grids your hand and judges the distance of your hand to the laser and adjusts the sound (modulation, pitch, frequency...etc) accordingly. A lot of cool features with this synth. In addition it has hammer action keys (weighted) so it feels like a real keyboard and not some flimsy piece of plastic.

Another board (pat fav) is the micro korg. (aka minikorg) the beauty of this guy is the versatility and size. It adds a good amount of sounds and allows you to tweak a lot of parameters. The cool thing about all of these synths is their midi (digital midi, usb midi) ability. You can plug these keyboards into your labtops and not only receive the sounds on the keyboard, but also all of the sounds on your labtop. With the ability to download VST plugins, etc, their are limitless possibilities for different sounds. A lot of cool stuff. Now keyboards are looking at connecting through wifi, bluetooth etc. to labtops to send and receive midi data. (one example are iphone apps that connect through bluetooth and send midi data to create music, pat has the app if interested) These boards are pretty extensive in their abilities and just a lot of fun to mess around on.

fantom g8