Need A Synthesizer - HELP!

Truthfully, I wouldn't advise a person in search of their first keyboard to buy anything less pianistic than a Roland XP-80 or (at very least) a JV-80.

The D-50 was fine for its time, but it thrived in an age when anything shrill, fizzy and digital seemed edgy and fresh. Its chief virtue was not getting in the way of the frequency range of guitars. The D-50's sound is still appropriate for certain applications, I suppose, but is rather too limited. (I used to like to program odd combinations of the last preset loops and combine them with various out-of-sync filter envelopes and modulation routings.)

The XP-80 would give you the D-50's sound but would also offer acoustic instruments, classic piano and organ sounds, better resolution and a far wider frequency range. It also reproduces every instrument from Roland's vintage techno palette (the TR-303, 808, 909, Juno series, etc.). Yes, I find it rather thin by current industry standards, but I'm a studio keyboardist and my requirements are different from yours. (I use a Bosendorfer sound at home that loads sixteen samples per key and takes up obscene amounts of memory, but that's because I need the most faithful reproduction possible for spoiled clients.)

None of the keyboards we're discussing can deliver the satisfaction of an 88-key weighted controller, a laptop with lots of processing power, NI's Komplete, Ableton Live and several hefty acoustic sample libraries. Consider those a few years from now, when your budget and appetites loom larger, and if you find yourself longing to do more "MIDI" work, as you put it.

For one-of-a-kind artificial sounds, I've always liked the Korg Wavestation and the Prophet VS, though they're rather difficult to find. You might also want to peruse old issues of the magazine Future Music to get ideas about more recent keys to buy used. I rather liked Clavia's Nord series, for example. Anything more current than that might cost a Hank more, I fear.

And now for something completely anomalous: A post that is voiced entirely in the vernacular.

Pardon my feverish eructations, Aman, but the only overkill I'm guilty of is in presenting you with a huge number of variables. I can see how that might seem unnecessary, but the above info might be more pertinent than you think. Even though you hadn't specified the sound and price range you wanted until now, I covered those areas in my response to your mention of the D-50.

Pause, if you will, and consider how strangely synchronous it is that you and I should be talking about this: I'm a keyboardist who has tracked parts for a living ever since I moved to New York; you're a trained percussionist who is getting serious about his keyboard sound. If that doesn't seem to pertain to the music you "play and want to play," then tint me mystified. But if it does pertain, then let me try to help one last time.

If I go into detail about something that seems irrelevant to your needs, then please simply disregard my semi-segmented segue. I'm only trying to offer the, erm, benefit o' my years (cre-e-e-ak).

By the bye: Here's a vintage synth-finding page that you might find useful: http://www.vintagesynth.com/cat/index.html

Since you're interested in getting a fat Moog-like sound, then let me reiterate: the D-50 is famous for the thinness and airiness of its texture. It uses a lot of what engineer friends and I used to call "hairspray": built-in digital reverb, delay and voice allocation tricks to make it sound more weighty at first than it proves under scrutiny.

In studio parlance, the XP-80 and the XP-50 sound much fatter than the D-50: both synths have far more midrange and low end.

A bit of detail on cloning the Mini-Moog: Moogs are analog-digital; they have real oscillators and thus possess a depth and width that late eighties PCM-sample-based synth hybrids (such as the Roland D-50 and the Korg M-1) couldn't possibly reproduce. Mid-80s digital-analog synths -- that is, synths with wave-drawn oscillators that imitate the analog kind -- came a bit closer to what engineers and programmers usually refer to as fatness. In my opinion, the fattest analog-digital synth ever made was probably the Roland Super JX. A close neighbor to that, which you can sometimes pick up for a few hundred piasters, is the illustrious JX-8P; or you might consider its Limburger siblings, the Korg Poly 800, the Juno 106 and the Juno 60. All are wave-drawn digital-analog. All have the characteristic lower midrange fatness of analog but -- here's the drawback -- lack much of the high-end bite and resonant low end for which Moogs are famous. (Still, in my experience, they're closer to the sound you're describing than the D-50.)

It's difficult but not impossible to find actual analog-digital synths. I myself own a Prophet V, which I bought for $450 from a friend, and a rack-mounted Super Jupiter.

For your purposes -- as you describe them -- I would really look into a Nord Lead 2. It sounds exactly like what you want: It has more of the bite and low end you're looking for as well as the fatness. It's good for solos as well (which the name implies). The Lead 2X sells for $799 new at Instrumentpro; the Lead 2, which was discontinued, should sell for half that much used. For its specs, look here.

If you still want to buy the D-50 after all this, I won't try to talk you out of it. After all, you're the musician who will be playing the keyboard and the sound of the D-50 excited you. Who can belabor you about the head with a rubber bladder for that?

One last thing:

Often, used synths have a short shelf life, which works to the buyer's advantage. Individual sellers often need to clear real estate in their living rooms and are looking to dump anything that takes up space. Generally, I make better deals with individual buyers than with music stores. When I'm looking for a great keyboard for a modest price, the lack of overhead in a private deal can make all the difference.

Aman, I think I read somewhere that you go to school for music production. If you'd like to get into synths, I'd advise taking a class on synthesis or electronic music if it's offered. If you really want to get into programming your own patches and creating some truly unique sounds, it's the way to go...once you have the background understanding of how synthesis works, it will be much easier to dial in a sound no matter what piece of gear you're using (although it will be much more difficult on a MicroKorg than it will on, say, a Nord Modular).

If you're just looking for something to play leads/solos, the MicroKorg would probably do fine...it's certainly a 1 box solution on those terms. But truthfully, you could probably get a midi controller and some free synth software online that would have a similar feature set, and would set you back about 1/4 of the price. Of course, you'd have to drag a laptop to practices/gigs, etc, which has a lot of disadvantages.

If I had to pick one synth for production, leads, pads, etc. (basically everything but drums), I'd probably pick the Nord Modular G2, only because the editing software is very intuitive and the features are solid.

I don't know what "sounds" best to me...unlike a guitar synths don't really produce complex waveforms unless they're very well layered, so a square wave tends to sound like a square wave to me, and a sine a sine. I would guess that the amplification makes more of a difference here than the actual synth (although I understand that some filters sound noticeably different than others).

Someday I will get a mega-pimp synth to go with the rest of my awesome studio equipment that I will someday have...

harmony central synth forum - I usually look at the guitar stuff here.

synthzone - just found this one.

I have a Nord Lead, and it's great. I mostly just use it to get sounds from though.

lol I forgot to mention it is not a keyboard model. I guess I didn't reat the op too closely.

I've always hated Rolands. They sound flat, phasey and thin. I don't know

why people like them so much. And their manuals are the worst.

A microkorg on the other hand is a great idea. 

Your 2nd post... a 6 year old thread... wowzers