Korg Monologue

[pflosi]

Thank you. We're going in circles here.

[meatballfulton]

I'm not defending the Minilogue at all, Adamstan...I got rid of mine because of too many compromises. I have little patience for instruments that require lots of workarounds to do basic stuff.

[Jabberwalky]

Just got mine. I dig it.

The Good:
Great sound.
Extremely powerful LFO, goes up to 3khz or something.
Sequencer is fun, and 4 tracks of motion sequence are excellent.
You can save, and change patches without a hiccup in sequencer running.
Slaves to midi clock without issue. (midi start/stop can be turned on/off)
Facking tiny, and solid feeling all around

The Questionable:
Lack of Square on VCO2
Envelope is AR type (but I don't mind this really)

My biggest issue for my uses:
You can't transpose sequence from the keyboard when it's slaved to clock (you have to first set to key trg, play the note just right in time, then hold key trg to keep it running hands free. Only then can you transpose the SEQ across the keyboard) Even then, you still must play each key just right in time, because a key press overrides and always resets the SEQ. This was a poor choice imo.

The Bass Station 2, once you play a key and go into hold, all the other keys you press are slaved, and do not reset the sequence. Much more intuitive, and you will never be off time.

EDIT It's possible to have the key transposes slave and be in time. However, you need to send the sequencer Sync IN instead. MIDI will not work. I have a volca sending sync, and it slaves. You lose Midi Start/Stop with this option obviously.

[pflosi]

Nice, congrats! Shame about the transpositions. Can you please tell us... Does the envelope always retrigger from zero like the Minilogue?

Thanks!

[Jabberwalky]

At it's INIT state, the ENV retriggers on keydown. Simply go into edit, set Portamento to 0, and it plays legato as a normal Mono synth would.

[pflosi]

Hmmmmm. That's not what I mean (legato). What does it do with attack and release at max, triggering the same note fast? Does the envelope build up like you'd expect?

[Jabberwalky]

Ah yeah, I see there's 2 issues concerning retriggering.

The old click is gone, but I never owned a minilogue, so who knows.

The RTZ...Yeah, it still retriggers.The BassStation2 does it as well (I'm not sure on other modern analog).

I suppose that was just a choice. I can understand the validity of wanting that available though.

[pflosi]

It's just a matter of designing the envelopes. If a new note is triggered during a release stage, it can either start the attack stage from zero, or from where the release was. The latter is what (virtually) all analog envelopes do. It's a feature that can be used very expressively.

So if I'm reading you right, the Monologue restarts from zero, like the Minilogue. Bit of a bummer...

Edit: Ah, I see that you clarified that a bit while I was posting, cheers!

[Jabberwalky]

Curious if that's ever been brought up to Korg. I imagine it'd be a pain to explain to some rep but if a designer actually answered the email, you might get somewhere.

EDIT: I figured I'd at least make it a mention to Korg. If someone can think of a better way to explain the issue without being 2 paragraphs long, perhaps they'll have better luck with support.

[meatballfulton]

While restarting EGs from zero is uncommon on vintage analogs it's not unheard of...ARP Odyssey did this, too.

We've been spoiled by years of digital synths letting us choose the triggering behavior, often per patch.

[Broadwave]

While restarting EGs from zero is uncommon on vintage analogs it's not unheard of...ARP Odyssey did this, too.

Umm... I have a MkIII and I'm stood in front of an early MkII (I'm repairing the VCF), neither retrigger from zero - They always retrigger from the current release voltage, as you'd expect from an analogue. However, they're always in legato mode, the the envelopes don't trigger if a note is already held down.

[pflosi]

The only analog envelope I know that can retrigger from zero (if you set it to) is the Cwejman CTG-VC. I have almost never used that setting so far. And the module is in virtually every patch I do. (It can come in handy for drum sounds, so that you always get the same attack transient regardless of release settings.)

The Microkorg does this correctly, it's forgotten knowledge over at Korg...

[adamstan]

There's no surprise that almost none of the analog envelopes do this, as returning to zero on attack requires additional circuitry - reset switch driven by trigger pulse.

[pflosi]

Precisely.

[Jabberwalky]

So it could be remedied if they redesigned the envelopes in the firmware... Seems that software is an afterthought with new analog.

Either way, this synth is really f**k cool! It has a really unique sound. Kinda like old minimal wave of the 80s. Some taste of Minikorg700s in there too. I think it's pretty well thought out in a lot of areas, especially some of the performance intricacies.

You can edit almost anything in the system such as, global settings, patch saving/loading, and editing sequencer steps, all while the sequencer is running!

I plan to make a good demo of it.