ShortScale.org

(just noticed the weird lighting makes the bottom of the keybed look bowed. neat.)

As mentioned here, I noticed my MS-20 Mini preorder from early February had finally kicked in earlier in the week. I've been super-jacked to get it and once a day had been searching for MS-20 videos on YouTube and sorting by upload date, but somehow I still had immediate buyer's remorse before it had even arrived thinking I should spend the money elsewhere.

Well, fuck that. After playing with it for many hours last night, I'm sold. Yes, honeymooning and that, but at this point I can't imagine returning it.

I can't believe how intuitive it is to program. Marc Doty's recent and very comprehensive tutorials (YT playlist here) were a great help and I'd watched them a billion times while waiting, but of course any original MS-20 stuff will apply just the same. My other hardware synths that include keyboards, a Moog Little Phatty and Ensoniq ESQ-1, are also very intuitive to program but are not knob-per-function. I didn't ever consider this to be a huge issue as everything is only a click or two away, but having access to absolutely everything on the panel is a very different experience.

My first experiment was to play around and recreate my Little Phatty patches used for Bright Nights on the MS-20 to play along with our recordings. This was not only a lot of fun, but a lot easier than I expected. What a great sound.

The two biggest complaints I've seen repeated are the knobs being wobbly and hiss being present. As far as the knobs, my model seems a whole lot more solid than the model Nick had in the sonicstate demo (see ~01:35 here), but as he notes somewhere later in that demo or this 50-minute marathon Q&A, the wobble is inherent to the pot shaft and not the entire pot wobbling and stressing the PCB. The gent in the video linked below explains the knobs have the same feel as some modular gear (including ultra-premium and expensive Buchla), and this is not something that worries me.

As for the hiss/noise, it's definitely present. I'm guessing it's somewhere in the VCA or later, as with both OSCs all the way down and filters full open, sweeping them has no effect. This is also not something that worries me, and people more well-versed in MS-20 history have validated its "normalness": http://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=86744

Here's a video showing both the knobs and noise (knobs ~02:30 and noise ~12:20):

[youtube][/youtube]

You can also hear the noise here around 03:30 when he sets the PW to 100% and presses some keys:

[youtube][/youtube]

I really dig the MS-20 Mini and look forward to doing great things with it. I'd be happy to answer any questions!

argh, totally want one of these. maybe for christmas...

Yooooooouuuuuuuuu....

MOTHERFUCKER.

really cool. bet it's a lot of fun.

the noise seems totally negligible. even more so compared to the signal level.

Watts, just hurry up and buy that shit already.

And yeah Mages, after trolling around YouTube and watching old MS-20 videos, the noise seems pretty clear it's one of those, "it's a feature not a bug" kind of things.

I've been balls deep in this thing since its arrival, and man is it awesome. The external signal processing stuff absolutely incredible, and my favorite thing to dick around with thus far. There are several ways of patching in external sounds, but I have been taking the ESP section's preamp and cranking the level way up into overdrive with an iPhone/iPad running the FunkBox drum app driving it. If you use the pitch tracking and send it back out to just VCO 2, you can have it pulse VCO 2 at a pitch of your choosing while playing VCO 1 along with the crunched-up drums.

My only worry at this point is being unable to properly document all the different setups and patches, which is both exciting and terrifying. The easiest method so far is to just snap a quick phone photo with a quick sound bite to capture whatever I was going for.

Another thing I really didn't realize until having it in hand was just how great the size is. The smallest keyboard-based synth I had prior was the Little Phatty, which is pretty large and heavy in comparison to the MS-20 Mini, which also has 37 keys. I've been using the MS-20 Mini on my lap while on the couch or in bed, and it's quite nice. This is something I could never do with the LP, which means I would be less likely to use it when not at rehearsal/writing.

I have yet to find a negative, other than it's a massive time sink once I sit down with it.

For people in Edinburgh and London who want to check this and more, this is happening.

int'restin'.