Let’s use this thread to talk about “naughty but nice” gear. It’s not analogue, but it benefits from skill transference by simulating analogue circuitry using digital hardware and software.
My Akai Miniak has risen from the dead, after appearing to die last year.
Well that turned into a real damburst. I’m devoting at least two hours a day to noodling with the Miniak. It’s full of great presets, which on this architecture range from simple rhythms and arpeggios right through to complex combinations of synth voices, rhythms and sequences, known as Multis. A pitch wheel, two modulation wheels and three rotary knobs provide in-play controls that can be assigned to a wide range of parameters. Other real-time controls include a latch switch to provide automatic sustain (as an alternative to the sustain pedal) and another latch for capturing sequences from the keyboard during performance.
The wealth of provided presets is a mixed benefit. They inspire composition and playing ideas, but in my opinion they can also discourage the kind of experimentation I would need to truly master this instrument. So it’s easy for me to pick one of the existing excellent Multis, and jam with it. The sounds are far better than anything I could play manually and feel much more spontaneous than anything I could compose in a DAW. But how much of the result is my own work, and how much is simply the product of my monkey-like tinkering with somebody else’s carefully prepared construction? I’ve found many a Multi that responds to the player’s every keypress by adding preprogrammed rhythmic elements or transposing an existing sequence to another key. Of course, this does often produce very beautiful and inspiring pieces, and I can see that it would be easy to produce good results by adding a chord here and there or tweaking the bass line.
I still want to investigate the really sumptuous range of sounds the basic synth engine provides. It’s ridiculously difficult to do this using the synth’s limited user interface, though. A comparison to performing keyhole surgery would not be an undue exaggeration. Fortunately there are editing solutions that make life easier, and of those available I’ve chosen to opt for the Windows and MacOSX-based editor provided by HyperSynth. It does the job for me.
My Miniak’s gooseneck microphone seems to be broken. You really have to shout at it to get any kind of signal out of the vocoder, and while that kind of playing might just work at Newcastle City Hall or Wembley Stadium where only sound fed into the PA actually reaches the audience, it’s actually quite upsetting to my family (especially our beloved greyhound Neve) when the normally gentle, quietly spoken bearded patriarch can be heard bellowing nonsense sounds in his bedroom. Is the poor fellow having a stroke? So I suppose I need to replace that microphone before they contemplate replacing me.
One thing worth remembering, though, is that the vocoder is part of the Miniak’s external input processing capability. Presumably I can take the line level output of my Crave or Neutron and mix this to produce new sounds. The Miniak has a full stereo external audio input, so I could feed it on streamed audio, radio or CDs and whatnot, and mix that with everything the Miniak can do, including but not limited to vocoder processing.
