MiniMonsta thoughts

Before I got MiniMonsta, the Moog on steroids softsynth, I scoured the web reading comparisons between it and Arturia's MiniMoog V. Some of the most lengthy conversations were on the forums at KVRAudio.com. There were pages after pages of people with some kind of opinion about them. People with hardware minimoogs would say one or the other was a dead-on impersonation, while others said this one was too harsh, or that one was too dull. Some people were won over by some of the esoteric features added onto the emulation, whether it be Arturia's modulation matrix, or GForce's "melohmman morphing" feature.

I was just looking for something that would approximate a Moog synthesizer without costing the small fortune that I'd have to pay to get a real one, or one of the new models in the Voyager line. I like that Moog synth sound, and my Prodigy, though one of my favorite keyboards, has some limitations as to what I like to do with it. I think there are only about 3 basic sounds that I can set it for that I particularly like, and have used in several songs.

It seemed to me, from my reading that a lot of people liked the MiniMonsta. I tried both demos, side by side, and really couldn't tell that much difference between them on similar patches. The Arturia presets are very classic kind of things, whereas MiniMonsta has some really far out stuff that is made using some of their built-in modulation routes and automation along the lines of using an LFO to modulate the stereo pan, or the emphasis and cutoff frequency.

I still feel like I can make my own programs easier with MiniMonsta, and have already downloaded sound banks that other people have made on theirs, so I still feel good about that.

Some of the more complex polyphonic voices start to break up on my old powerbook that I plunk around with. However, this is easily remedied by cutting back on the number of notes polyphony, which I wish was a global setting, but it has to be done for each patch.

I've got a more powerful windows vista notebook that I do most of my recording with, but this brings me to something a little unexpected that didn't come up in any of the comparisons that I read. Gforce is a little rough around the edges in some of their programming. Arturia was probably a little more refined piece of software if I had known. One thing that Gforce does is that if I set the main mini input device, I can save it to a file, but the next time I load the program, it has forgotten and I either have to load the configuration I saved, or set it again. This is slightly annoying on the PC, but doesn't seem to happen on the mac. When I set it, I get an error message that says it can't set it. But if I do it again it works.

It really is hard to choose between both emulations though, they both sound fantastic to me, though I don't have a real MiniMoog to compare them to. Ironically, some of my favorite sounds on the MiniMonsta are from a set of Prodigy voices that somebody put together. Those 3 basic sounds are all there, in full 2-oscillator glory, which I find rather heartening since it means I don't have to power up the Prodigy and goof around with the knobs whenever I want to record those kinds of sounds. (The prodigy doesn't have a voice memory bank.)

I am still happy with my choice though. Someday, maybe I'll get Arturia, just for overkill. There are so many softsynth analog clones these days though, you could go insane trying to pick only one or two. If you use Cakewalk's latest version of Sonar, I think it comes with Pentagon and Z3ta+ which are two very nice instruments that might be all one would need to get that retro analog sound going on. Reason users can choose from samples of the Moog Prodigy, or the Korg Monopoly, Juno 60, lots of others. It also comes with some very admirable synth simulators, though I don't know much about them. I've read comparisons and opinions about so many of these things it has made me lose interest in these forums to some degree just from all the lengthy exchanges about features that a person is either going to like or not like based on their own tastes.

I take a line from Gforce's MiniMonsta documentation, where they are urging people to support the developers and not share the software. They say they respect people who make good music with only a limited number of tools more than they respect people who make mediocre music using every tool imaginable. I can see where they are coming from, as a software developer myself, and that was a motivation for me to actually go ahead an purchase a copy of MiniMonsta. I like to reward people who put an honestly good effort into making something as nice as they can, and then support the people who decide eventually to use it.