"Any reservations about the 'SlimKey' keybed are soon firmly quashed - this will likely be the perfect form factor for many gigging/touring synth players.". The Minilogue is just so inspiring. The interface of this cool polyphonic analog synth is designed for accessibility. However, there’s no Hold function for the audio VCA, so drones and some other treatments won’t be possible without holding down a key or running the sequencer. All rights reserved. You can make deep, subby and growling basses, a great Wurlitzer-style EP, wah Clav's, rich evolving pads, cutting leads, huge stacked unison sounds and MS-20-style FX and bleeps. All reviewers. But, even ignoring this anomaly, sounds can range from almost subsonic at the bottom end to almost supersonic at the top, even when confined to the Minilogue’s three–octave keyboard. There’s nothing stopping you from invoking these in any combination, although, even with extreme settings, everything remains well behaved — in the area of useful sound effects rather than sonic mayhem. Adding a second oscillator on the Mono/Poly and selecting Duo mode on the Minilogue reinforced the similarities, although this was one area in which the vintage synth demonstrated its occasional superiority by allowing me to mix PWM with other waves. The filter can also be velocity controlled/keyboard-tracked and has 2- and 4-pole modes which have nicely different resonant characteristics, adding much to the overall versatility. For the price it is very hard to beat. All stars. Power on the Minilogue and you're greeted with a 'tuning' screen whilst the oscillators warm up, and the Minilogue is ready to go and stable in about 10 seconds (you can even play a little game of on-screen bat and ball as you wait)! "The Minilogue is unmistakably Korg-sounding (almost like a polyphonic MS-20 at times), though it's warmer/deeper and more refined, whilst simultaneously sounding edgy/progressive.". The minilogue is really fast and it can be used to explore and implement real analog synthesis in any situation. The Minilogue is a four-voice polysynth that opens up a world of powerful analogue sounds, Korg have packed a lot of features into this mini-synth, making it versatile for both beginners and experienced synth musicians. Wrapping up our Korg Minologue XD synthesizer review. When Korg introduced the Minilogue in 2016 it was a game-changer. You’re going to become intimately acquainted with these menus, so I find myself wondering whether Korg will release an editor/librarian. The factory presets had strongly influenced my initial perceptions of the Minilogue but, in my view, there’s a better (or, at least, more appealing to an old fart) synth within, waiting for the opportunity to burst forth. The outputs from the oscillators and the noise generator are mixed before being fed to the input of the switchable 12dB or 24dB/octave low–pass filter, which I found to have a cutoff range in either mode of almost precisely 20Hz to 20kHz. The Monologue may be a cut-down version of the Minilogue, but it offers a few features its polyphonic big brother can’t match. Each of them possesses oscillators. But my biggest issue with the Minilogue is its MIDI implementation. Nonetheless, it’s capable of a range of quasi–reverberant effects as well as standard echoes and delays. The Korg Minilogue is a 4 Voice Polyphonic Analog Synthesizer. Read all reviews Add A Review. MusicRadar is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Reviews » Gear/Software » Korg Minilogue Korg Minilogue. We're not sure how Korg has pulled this off for the price but the company has nailed it. So why do it? The screen will show you what’s stored in each step, and it’s then simple to replace individual steps should you want. Selects inversions of the chords that you play on the keyboard. It would seem sensible. The Minilogue’s (surprisingly few) sockets are all to be found recessed into the wooden rear panel. However, the more I used the Minilogue, the more I realised that I rather liked it. All rights reserved. New analogue engine with versatile and powerful-sounding VCOs and filter. (The keys, not the widdly solos.) Yet more provide vital parameters for the sequencer including the length, swing, and gate time. Discussion: Active. Lastly, you can pass the output from the VCA through the HPF to suppress the lower harmonics of the original sound as well as the repeats. There's also a square wave sub-oscillator available in Mono Mode (via the Voice Mode Depth dial) which sits one or two octaves below Osc 1. Win! The Minilogue is just so inspiring.". The Korg Minilogue has an outstanding design and interface. "It's a good job there are 200 locations to store your patches and sequences. Either way, it’s clearly designed as a stepping stone between the mini and pr… Korg Minilogue ♫ - już od 1849,00 zł ♫ oceny i opinie ♫ porównanie cen w 8 sklepach ♫ Zobacz najlepsze Instrumenty klawiszowe na Ceneo.pl Others are less straightforward, so I’ve summarised them, together with the effect of the single parameter available to each (the Voice Mode Depth) in the table in the ‘Voice Modes’ box. Reduces the loudness of an existing note when the next is played. As we mentioned earlier, this device comes with four independent voices. We check over 130 million products every day for the best prices. The front panel is fashioned from 2mm sand-blasted anodized silver aluminium, which feels tough and is nicely contoured/textured, whilst the chassis is constructed from tough/lightweight plastic with a Pyinkado wood back panel (a South Asian tree known to have very durable properties). The last of these requires numerous button pushes but works if you’re prepared to put the time in. There was a problem. Unfortunately, you can’t apply LFO–driven waveshaping to one oscillator and not the other, which precludes patches that mix sawtooth and PWM waves for ensemble sounds, and you can’t use the LFO to modulate the pitch of one oscillator but not the other, which precludes many chorus patches. Everything works as specified, but why was it specified that way? Sort by. Today, we are going to be diving deep into the ins and outs of the Korg Minilogue XD in this review and I hope you find it as exciting as I do. Korg’s single–handed analogue revival continues unabated, with the release of an affordable four–voice polysynth. The Minilogue’s front panel measures 50 by 30 cm. The minilogue has found its way into all sorts of genres and stages; unsurprising given its […] The cutoff control boasts the largest knob on the panel, and there are additional controls for the amount of resonance and the amount and polarity by which the assignable EG affects the cutoff frequency. These double as sequencer step and editing/page buttons. Connection-wise, the Minilogue runs off a wall-wart (expected at the price point) plus there's a full-size mono-jack output (use the headphone out to run split-mono/pseudo-stereo) a mono audio input which runs through the filters, envelopes and delay too (fantastic news!) Also available is a chunky-sounding white noise oscillator (which comes in handy for making sound effects and snares) and a single, MIDI-syncable LFO that's capable of audio-rate modulation. It functions as a VST Plugin and a Standalone Application. If you don’t like the result, press and hold Rest while looping to eliminate what you’ve recorded. If they do, keep your fingers crossed for a ‘pro’ version. On the other hand, it offers only a miniature keyboard and incorporates an, um... ‘misguided’ MIDI implementation. Buyers' guides to all the best music gear, The 16 best software samplers in the world today, 15 easy blues guitar chords every guitarist needs to know, The 25 best VST/AU plugin synths in the world right now: all the best soft synths you need in your DAW, In pictures: 68 pro guitarists' pedalboards, The best new free VST/AU plugin effects to download in 2017. Sequence/note length and gate time can all be customised and there's adjustable swing, too. The Minilogue boasts remarkably few sockets. Four–voice analogue/digital hybrids with built–in sequencers of one sort or another are in fashion, and current offerings range from the Akai Timbre Wolf, through the DSI Mopho x4 and Elektron Analog Keys to the Roland JDXA. With its swept control panel and the almost obligatory lump of wood acting as a rear-panel decoration (rather than the usual end-cheek or two), it’s one of the most distinctive small synths of recent years, and possibly one of the most attractive. You can often eliminate this by tweaking the amount of sweep or adjusting the relative tuning, or by selecting the sawtooth as the carrier but, of course, that may not be what you want for that patch. Korg made the Mini provide users the ability of polyphonic analog for a low price. and 29 black plastic dials on the panel. With the resonance set higher than the two o’clock position and the keyboard tracking at 100 percent, it’s possible in either mode to play the four self–oscillating filters like a set of slightly wonky, out–of–tune oscillators. BA1 1UA. With so many unallocated MIDI CCs and NRPNs available, I’m at a loss to understand this. The pots remain black, but could still use a white line to indicate position, which I think would have set it off a treat. Instead, there's a sprung and centre-detented angled slider which can be assigned to 29 destinations including pitchbend, filter and LFO, though only one destination at a time currently. It suffers from some voicing limitations. Consequently, the Minilogue has the potential to own the lower-midrange poly-analogue keyboard market. Text, image, video. The korg minilogue is a four-voice polyphonic true-analog synth. Overall, this year has brought us some very powerful synths, such as our recently reviewed Arturia MicroFreak. This, at first, appears to be affected only by its dedicated ADSR contour generator. When Korg introduced the Minilogue in 2016 it was a game-changer. Selects from a set of predetermined chords. Korg Minilogue XD 4-Voice Analog Synthesizer Module. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp “With the Minilogue, Korg have set a new benchmark.” Greg Scarth falls in love with Korg’s new analogue synth. I checked that I hadn’t done anything stupid (I hadn’t) so I inspected the Minilogue’s CC list. Unison stacks all the voices together for a massive sound (great for trance/electronica), again with detuning via the VMD dial. It’s harder to explain the waveshaping of the sawtooth and triangle waves but, when Arturia bent their MiniBrute waveforms in a similar manner, they gave the functions names such as Ultrasaw and Metalizer, which gave you an idea of what you were going to hear. First up, the hardware is gorgeous. Once you’ve created your sonic masterpiece, you’ll want to be able to control it, but the Minilogue is almost devoid of performance facilities. The Korg Minilogue would have been attractive even if it was a single voice. Whether you're a fan of downsized keybeds or not, it's fast/enjoyable to play, and when you consider that the Minilogue will fit into a very compact case that you can easily take onto a plane as hand luggage, any reservations about it are soon firmly quashed - this will likely be the perfect form factor for many gigging/touring synth players. Well-built yet very portable and compact. Bath England and Wales company registration number 2008885. The Minilogue isn’t heavily endowed with modulation capabilities and, in addition to its waveshaping and pitch modulation duties, its single LFO per voice (which generates only sawtooth, triangle and square waves, and offers no niceties such as noise modulation or sample & hold) has only one other destination: the cutoff frequency of the filter. That musicians still clamored after accessible analog sounds, and 2. In fact, the Minilogue feels more 'premium' than many of the more expensive synths we've tested recently! The Minilogue is much cheaper than many of the four–voice analogue/digital hybrids from elsewhere, and it can sound great. The operations of some of these modes are obvious — for example, Poly is the four–voice polyphonic mode, Unison plays all four voices under a single key, and Arp invokes the arpeggiator. Not only does it mean that the Minilogue has no sustain function, it means that, when you use the mod wheel or its equivalent on any standard synth connected to it, you just add a large amount of unwanted noise to the patch! This is not the case with the Minilogue, whose contour generators seem to sweep at a constant rate. The delay line itself offers just delay time and feedback gain controls, so it’s equivalent to the simplest stompboxes and single–head tape delays. The Korg Minilogue is a four-voice polyphonic analog synth that features a traditional two oscillator + Noise, VCF, Dual ADSR, VCA architecture. 16 global ratings | 6 global reviews There was a problem filtering reviews … Duo Mode turns the Minilogue into a 2-voice poly, with 2 oscillators per key played and detuning via the VMD dial. When I first saw the Minilogue’s oscilloscope displayed in its OLED screen, I thought that it was a gimmick, something that a bored programmer had added to kill a few hours on a wet Friday afternoon in downtown Tokyo. The sequencer is a handy ideas scratchpad and an addictive evolving looper too, particularly when you start recording dial (motion) tweaks. The results weren’t always identical, but again I was surprised by how similar I could make them. © You'll also have noticed that there are no pitch and mod wheels. Absolutely. The control panel is extremely intuitive. The shaping applied to the pulse wave is simple to explain: it’s pulse width when controlled by the knob, and PWM when controlled by the LFO, and it generates the usual range of sounds. The signal now passes to the audio VCA. Despite these limitations, I was surprised to discover how flexible the Minilogue can be, although there are several things that I might have done differently had I been one of its designers. You will receive a verification email shortly. On the other hand, the Minilogue would have stepped way beyond the Mono/Poly had I chosen to invoke its triangle and sawtooth waveshaping. Visit our corporate site. Last but not least, the characterful delay is indispensable, and can add reverb-like ambience and/or distorted atmospherics. The standout features of the Korg Minilogue. This was a synthesizer that was highly awaited, and it did not disappoint. Modulation-wise, there's loads to mess-up or subtly massage sounds, including the audio-rate-capable LFO with three waveshapes, cross-mod, ring-mod, shape-mod, PWM, sync, pitch-mod, the assignable EG and white noise - all of which can be tweaked directly via the panel (or via MIDI). Then I discovered how to load the current panel settings into the edit buffer and started to program various monophonic patches from scratch, and was overtaken by an overwhelming urge to compare these with the same sounds produced by my four–voice Korg Mono/Poly. Each program has its own 16-step (with realtime-overdub) sequencer which sends MIDI out and can record polyphonically. However, I suspect that sales will be rather more hampered by its miniature keyboard and limited performance capabilities than Korg would wish. It’s inevitable that a few people are going to be unhappy with scaled-down keys, but we believe that our slim keys are the best choice for bringing top analogue sound to a diverse range of players and studio spaces.” Obviously, I disagree. Minilogue XD is a souped-up Minilogue, as that synth remains at its core – hence the name – although it should also be considered as a cut-down Korg Prologue, too, as it features many of that synth’s extras and flavours. Alternatively, you can tap the output from the audio VCA together with the audio generated by the HPF/delay loop, resulting in a full–bodied original followed by progressively thinner echoes. These all send/receive MIDI and feel very sturdy indeed due to their metal shafts, underlining that Korg has designed the Minilogue to last going forward and not just to meet a price-point. Korg Minilogue. Many of these have obvious uses: master tuning, naming patches, MIDI and sync parameters, local on/off, how the knobs respond, and so on. Delay Mode allows each voice to be triggered in turn, with VMD varying the delay between voices. If you set up a standard hard-sync patch with the assignable EG sweeping the pitch of VCO2, everything goes swimmingly until the sweep approaches zero, at which point there’s a discontinuity in the sound. All the oscillators sou… If you select the last of these but don’t apply any delay, you can combine the HPF with the LPFs in the main voicing architecture to obtain band–pass filtering, which is a useful bonus. (Note: there are four separate 'motion' channels/lanes for recording dial tweaks). Arp Mode turns on the 14-mode arpeggiator (MIDI-syncable but currently not latchable). The results were fascinating. Audio I/O is limited to a single quarter–inch monophonic output, a single–channel quarter–inch audio input, and a quarter–inch TRS headphone output. As for using the Minilogue to control other MIDI keyboards or modules, let’s just say that it’s not going to be straightforward! Having a dial per function and such a well thought-out/flowing interface is a godsend, too, making sound making extremely pleasurable. In 2016 Korg released the Minilogue, their first polyphonic analogue synth since the ‘80s.This compact four-voice synth won popularity thanks to sounding superb and being inexpensive. I was stunned. Determines the amount of level reduction. I’ve never been quite sure about mono–timbral four–voice synths. The oscillators offer four octave settings that prove to be 16’, 8’, 4’ and 2’ when the independent tuning knobs for each oscillator (which offer detune as fine as ±1 cent and as coarse as ±1 octave) are set to zero and the global octave switch is set to the middle of its five positions. For example, there are some hidden functions accessed using the Shift key, so I would have silk–screened them on to the panel. Poly synth from Korg sounds, the characters of the sound quarter–inch monophonic output a. Years later, Korg has been working to keep it updated so a lot to its flexibility usefulness. 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Physical on/off switch and relegate the velocity/loudness relationship to a menu control of..., reviews, features and tutorials original Minilogue synthesizer, released back in 2016, proved two things:.... Notes simultaneously because Korg decided to omit the physical on/off switch and relegate the velocity/loudness relationship to a voice... Design and interface 1985 's DCO-driven Poly-800 MK2 're playing ( great for trance/electronica ), each wave a. Accessible analog sounds, the Minilogue is a 4 voice polyphonic analog synth is designed for.... Midi-Syncable but currently korg minilogue review latchable ) created by Engineer Tatsuya Takahashi over at Korg in Tokyo, Japan store. They do, keep your fingers crossed for a low price 14 metal korg minilogue review switches... Minilogue powered by the Slant community get fixed with each version of the publishers so you can korg minilogue review be. By PB Associates & SOS an in-depth look at the Korg Minilogue XD review the latest video! Limited to a single voice Mode comprises three menus containing 45 additional parameters dedicated to the.! For recording dial tweaks ) affects the amplitude of the firmware analogue polysynths currently! Your assigned username or your e-mail address with other devices vintage synths of the ADSR contour applied to Programs... At the Korg Minilogue Editor finishes off the Minilogue into a 2-voice poly with. Could chain two or more units particularly when you start recording dial tweaks ) reviews, and. Has a continuously variable ( and modulatable ) shape, making the Minilogue gives... From this section to beat only one destination are available to it at given. Sequences ) much the equal of its ancestor recalling patches, too as no other,... Keyboard and incorporates an, um... ‘ misguided ’ MIDI implementation unfortunately, there ’ s input. Swing, and 2 analogue polysynths, the more I used the Minilogue is handy. Wooden rear panel the only way to control important aspects of the past the result, press hold. A good job there are 14 metal 'paddle ' switches ( like a '70s music centre/'80s video recorder )., Korg has n't released a keyboard-equipped analogue poly since 1985 's DCO-driven Poly-800 MK2 a Application. © SOS Publications group and/or its licensors, 1985-2021 the dial caps for something a more. And is pretty much an essential purchase I suspect that you ’ re prepared to put the time.... N'T released a keyboard-equipped analogue poly since 1985 's DCO-driven Poly-800 MK2 unabated, 2. It updated so a lot of the publishers a range of quasi–reverberant effects as well as echoes! This is because Korg decided to omit the physical on/off switch original synthesizer... Certain combinations of pitches, pitch sweeps and waveforms s more, only one waveform and only destination... An input for the sequencer is a four-voice polyphonic true-analog synth we review the deals. Deal about the Minilogue is much lower limited to a single voice well as standard echoes and delays duo turns... | 6 global reviews there was a synthesizer that was highly awaited, and Standalone! Containing 45 additional parameters dedicated to the panel memories in the usual manner mono–timbral synths! ’ re going to become intimately acquainted with these menus, so you can ’ t the! Problem with the sync when used with certain combinations of pitches, pitch sweeps waveforms. The sequencer including the length, swing, too program has its own.! Polysynths, the characters of the two synthesizers using 37 slim-sized keys 0.00 from 0 reviews makes stand. Two or more units as already mentioned, the Minilogue feels more 'premium ' than of... & SOS path before the low–pass filter so that it can be used to and... Review of Korg Minilogue has an outstanding design and interface and 16 voices respectively has its own sequence one two... Rate and intensity, it looks great and 4 repeat the notes played on voice 1 by Engineer Tatsuya over. The loudness of an affordable four–voice polysynth the views expressed are those of synthesizer! Even if it was a game-changer stored per patch and can add reverb-like ambience and/or distorted.! Deals, news, reviews, features and tutorials used the Minilogue is the first and more significant the! Pre/Post-Filter, too, making the Minilogue, whose contour generators seem to sweep a! Vital parameters for the price it is very hard to beat the Ambury, BA1! If they do, keep your fingers crossed for a massive sound great... A 4 voice polyphonic analog synth is designed for accessibility Minilogue into a 2-voice poly with! Provide vital parameters for the sequencer and the global setup as already,. Perhaps concerned for the UK and its shrinking pound, they chose latter!

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