Best $500 synth for ambient music
December 14, 2015 6:26 AM Subscribe
I want to make really spacious ambient pads to score a film. Whats the best synth in the $500-700 range to do this? Preferably an actual physical keyboard.
From my synth-obsessed husband:
"That's a big question! It would have to be used and digital, because for pads it needs to be polyphonic. I'd recommend going to vintagesynth.com and using the synth finder feature, or asking the electronic music subforum on gearslutz.com. It's a major decision."
posted by something something at 7:46 AM on December 14, 2015
"That's a big question! It would have to be used and digital, because for pads it needs to be polyphonic. I'd recommend going to vintagesynth.com and using the synth finder feature, or asking the electronic music subforum on gearslutz.com. It's a major decision."
posted by something something at 7:46 AM on December 14, 2015
I'd really suggest an audio host (I'm a FL Studio person which may not be best for you) and a solid USB keyboard. Seconding Absynth (which is amazing) as a softsynth. The benefit of softsynths over hardware is how much more customizable they are. Massive by Native Instruments is also spectacular for evolving, morphing pads.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:57 AM on December 14, 2015
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:57 AM on December 14, 2015
Hey! I'm an ambient musician into lush, layered droney sounds, and I'm a synth obsessive.
Above commenters are right that you should only be considering polyphonic synths (this means they have many voices that can be triggered at a time, not just a single voice. Think chords, rather than a single bassline, for example.) This rules out the most exciting synth of the year, the $600 Moog Mother32; perfect in all other respects, but alas is only monophonic.
Going with a few recommendations in different price tiers. As my first recommendation I'm going to stretch your budget, because for physical synths I consider $700 to be the bare minimum for the kind of high-quality, spacious, harmonically rich sound you're trying to achieve. I am absolutely in love with everything Dave Smith Instruments puts out - my go-to synth is their flagship Prophet 12, and prior to that I had their Poly Evolver; I can't get enough of Dave Smith for this kind of ambient music. I would highly recommend looking into a used Mopho X4, which would come in around $950-1000 (example listing on reverb.com). It's 4-voice polyphonic (which is more than enough for me to do wild layered stuff with; you might be considering 8-notes-at-once or more, in which case this may not be what you want), but most importantly it's analog, so you get those unpredictable, complex, rich sounds people praise analog for. And Dave Smith certainly knows how to make those sounds sing. Here's a demo. Far as I can tell, that's the lowest budget you can possibly get for a modern polyphonic analog synth with physical keyboard. If you're willing to spend that extra amount, I don't think you'd regret it.
Used vintage analog synths should be highly considered, too. They often sound like nothing else out there on the market. The Roland Juno 106 is a 6-voice polyphonic analog synth from 1984, and it's famous for its particular warm, instantly 80s-ish sound. Seek out some demos to see if it's right for you. If you buy it used on craigslist or ebay, it should be on the upper end of your budget. Just make sure it's been tested and can be verified to have no dead voice chips or anything else. If you try one out, make sure all 6 voices are functioning at the same time.
Of possible interest is the brand new Roland Boutique line, which is a series of portable, inexpensive, digital recreations of classic Roland analog synths. The aforementioned Juno 106 is one of the recreations. The Jupiter 8 unit may be of particular interest - I've spent time with an original Jupiter 8, and it's in my running for greatest synth I've ever heard. There's no way these can compare to the originals - no digital emulation of analog has ever managed it - but they may be what you need anyway, for relatively cheap!
This is a quirky one, but I have a Teenage Engineering OP-1 and I absolutely swear by it, and so do my ambient musician friends who've gotten a hold of one. It's strange and hard to describe - a digital synth that looks a bit like a toy, but is incredibly deep and powerful. And it's an all-in-one synth, drum machine, sampler, recording device, etc. I've certainly made some excellent ambient/drone/noise with it. If you buy it new, it's $850 (and currently sold out), but I've seen it on craigslist for around $650 fairly often.
Finally, soft synths -- parm is right that Absynth is top-notch. From the same developers, also consider Massive. Here's a Massive tutorial for ambient music, from Disasterpeace, the guy who made the Fez soundtrack. For my money, the best softsynth I've ever used is Aalto, a semi-modular synth that sounds to my ears as rich, strange, and harmonically complex as any digital keyboard you could buy. It's also simply a joy to patch and immediately gratifying, once you understand how it works. At $99 it's also eminently affordable, and the developer is basically one really smart dude whose efforts are really worth supporting.
Hope this gets some ideas flowing. Research as much as possible before committing to anything!
posted by naju at 10:03 AM on December 14, 2015 [7 favorites]
Above commenters are right that you should only be considering polyphonic synths (this means they have many voices that can be triggered at a time, not just a single voice. Think chords, rather than a single bassline, for example.) This rules out the most exciting synth of the year, the $600 Moog Mother32; perfect in all other respects, but alas is only monophonic.
Going with a few recommendations in different price tiers. As my first recommendation I'm going to stretch your budget, because for physical synths I consider $700 to be the bare minimum for the kind of high-quality, spacious, harmonically rich sound you're trying to achieve. I am absolutely in love with everything Dave Smith Instruments puts out - my go-to synth is their flagship Prophet 12, and prior to that I had their Poly Evolver; I can't get enough of Dave Smith for this kind of ambient music. I would highly recommend looking into a used Mopho X4, which would come in around $950-1000 (example listing on reverb.com). It's 4-voice polyphonic (which is more than enough for me to do wild layered stuff with; you might be considering 8-notes-at-once or more, in which case this may not be what you want), but most importantly it's analog, so you get those unpredictable, complex, rich sounds people praise analog for. And Dave Smith certainly knows how to make those sounds sing. Here's a demo. Far as I can tell, that's the lowest budget you can possibly get for a modern polyphonic analog synth with physical keyboard. If you're willing to spend that extra amount, I don't think you'd regret it.
Used vintage analog synths should be highly considered, too. They often sound like nothing else out there on the market. The Roland Juno 106 is a 6-voice polyphonic analog synth from 1984, and it's famous for its particular warm, instantly 80s-ish sound. Seek out some demos to see if it's right for you. If you buy it used on craigslist or ebay, it should be on the upper end of your budget. Just make sure it's been tested and can be verified to have no dead voice chips or anything else. If you try one out, make sure all 6 voices are functioning at the same time.
Of possible interest is the brand new Roland Boutique line, which is a series of portable, inexpensive, digital recreations of classic Roland analog synths. The aforementioned Juno 106 is one of the recreations. The Jupiter 8 unit may be of particular interest - I've spent time with an original Jupiter 8, and it's in my running for greatest synth I've ever heard. There's no way these can compare to the originals - no digital emulation of analog has ever managed it - but they may be what you need anyway, for relatively cheap!
This is a quirky one, but I have a Teenage Engineering OP-1 and I absolutely swear by it, and so do my ambient musician friends who've gotten a hold of one. It's strange and hard to describe - a digital synth that looks a bit like a toy, but is incredibly deep and powerful. And it's an all-in-one synth, drum machine, sampler, recording device, etc. I've certainly made some excellent ambient/drone/noise with it. If you buy it new, it's $850 (and currently sold out), but I've seen it on craigslist for around $650 fairly often.
Finally, soft synths -- parm is right that Absynth is top-notch. From the same developers, also consider Massive. Here's a Massive tutorial for ambient music, from Disasterpeace, the guy who made the Fez soundtrack. For my money, the best softsynth I've ever used is Aalto, a semi-modular synth that sounds to my ears as rich, strange, and harmonically complex as any digital keyboard you could buy. It's also simply a joy to patch and immediately gratifying, once you understand how it works. At $99 it's also eminently affordable, and the developer is basically one really smart dude whose efforts are really worth supporting.
Hope this gets some ideas flowing. Research as much as possible before committing to anything!
posted by naju at 10:03 AM on December 14, 2015 [7 favorites]
FWIW, Absynth (and Massive) comes as a standalone application as well as a plugin so you don't need a host to use it.
A more leftfield softsynth option might be Reaktor (also from Native Instruments) - it's closer to Aalto that naju mentions above, in that's it's a piece of software for building synths and effects. It comes with some interesting pre-built synths (all with loads of presets) but if you really wanted to get tweaking you could effectively build your own synth from the ground up. It's hugely powerful, and the latest release (V6) is both cheaper and easier to use (although it's still very complex) than earlier versions.
A similar option is Max from Cycling '74 - it's popular with hardcore sound designers as a build-your-own-instrument toolkit; I understand Thom Yorke (and the rest of Radiohead) to be a particular fan.
posted by parm at 10:16 AM on December 14, 2015
A more leftfield softsynth option might be Reaktor (also from Native Instruments) - it's closer to Aalto that naju mentions above, in that's it's a piece of software for building synths and effects. It comes with some interesting pre-built synths (all with loads of presets) but if you really wanted to get tweaking you could effectively build your own synth from the ground up. It's hugely powerful, and the latest release (V6) is both cheaper and easier to use (although it's still very complex) than earlier versions.
A similar option is Max from Cycling '74 - it's popular with hardcore sound designers as a build-your-own-instrument toolkit; I understand Thom Yorke (and the rest of Radiohead) to be a particular fan.
posted by parm at 10:16 AM on December 14, 2015
$500-700 is kind of an odd price range for a polysynth (which you will need for pads). And your requirements are strange too. You want 'spacious', but to me 'spacious' is something you can add to anything with a little reverb. Do you want it to be knobby and be able to design your own sounds? Are you already familiar with sound synthesis? Really anything could work, but every synth is different. You probably aren't going to find a new poly, unless it's one of the new Roland Boutiques. If you want a huge digital synth with every parameter laid out check out the Roland JD-800. If you decide you don't need a keyboard the Waldorf Microwave XT is extremely deep for sound design (but insane if you're just starting out). My favorite pad machine is the MKS-70, with a keyboard that's a JX-10. They are relatively affordable for a 12 voice analog polysynth but are decidedly not knobby at all. Oberheim also made some incredible machines, in your price range you could get a Matrix-1000 or Matrix-6. Don't neglect software either, Waldorf Nave is amazing and Omnisphere can do pretty much anything and U-he also makes amazing stuff. Your question isn't detailed enough to give a definitive answer, but I hope that gives you some leads.
posted by mike_bling at 11:17 AM on December 14, 2015
posted by mike_bling at 11:17 AM on December 14, 2015
A Korg Wavestation usually goes for well below your budget, I think i sold mine for $200 a couple years ago and I've seen them around that price and maybe just a bit higher since then. They were the go-to spacey ambient keyboard back in the day and there are still a lot of sounds available online. (They were popular enough that there's a software version still available from Korg via the Legacy Collection.)
They're not that easy to program but even with premade patches they can be pretty expressive. A lot of the patches make great use of the joystick controller on the front so you can do subtle (and sometimes not-subtle) changes over time. The rackmount version also had a vocoder function so you could feed your own audio through its engine to warp sounds.
There are lots of video/audio examples on YouTube and if you landed one cheap you'd probably still want to read a bit online just to try to make sure you weren't using a patch that hasn't already been overused and played out. (Wikipedia points out it was used a lot in the X-Files and it's not hard to come across even factory sounds that you could picture being straight out of an episode.)
posted by mullicious at 1:43 PM on December 14, 2015
They're not that easy to program but even with premade patches they can be pretty expressive. A lot of the patches make great use of the joystick controller on the front so you can do subtle (and sometimes not-subtle) changes over time. The rackmount version also had a vocoder function so you could feed your own audio through its engine to warp sounds.
There are lots of video/audio examples on YouTube and if you landed one cheap you'd probably still want to read a bit online just to try to make sure you weren't using a patch that hasn't already been overused and played out. (Wikipedia points out it was used a lot in the X-Files and it's not hard to come across even factory sounds that you could picture being straight out of an episode.)
posted by mullicious at 1:43 PM on December 14, 2015
Massive by Native Instruments is also spectacular for evolving, morphing pads.
I'd also probably recommend the soft-synth approach given your budget, so to go more in-depth on the practical differences between Absynth and Massive:
posted by invitapriore at 1:52 PM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
I'd also probably recommend the soft-synth approach given your budget, so to go more in-depth on the practical differences between Absynth and Massive:
- Absynth has vastly more flexible envelope control, which I think is its primary selling point as a good synth for spacey, evolving pads: I think you can have up to 64 control points in an envelope in either attack and release segments, they can be level-driven (so that they're triggered by audio in rather than MIDI event, which makes it a pretty sweet effects processor), and their amount and position can be modulated by various controls.
- Absynth has more interesting and more flexible effects, like the granularizing "Aetherizer," a resonator rack, a comb filter delay rack, and the physical modeling "Pipe" effect, which are all like tailor-made for giving your pads a sense of volume in physical space. Along those lines, you can draw custom waveforms and use them for waveshaping or LFOs or what-have-you, and a lot of the standard filters can have further modulation applied in the forms of waveshaping and ringmod and so forth.
- Massive seems to have a much higher-quality synth engine as far as its basic sonic materials go, or at least it's better tuned for that use-case: the same saw wave will sound tinny and weak in Absynth and full-bodied and thick in Massive, so in general the more unadorned your sound is in terms of effects and envelope development, the more Massive becomes the obvious option for implementing it.
- It's much easier to see what's getting modulated where in Massive, since most every parameter is visible at once in the window and below and on every parameter you can see what the modulation source is and how much it's modulating the parameter in question. Reverse engineering Absynth patches can have you tearing your hair out until you realize that the reason it doesn't sound like that comb filter is doing anything is because the resonance is modulated by a macro control in a long list in another pane and it's all the way down by default.
posted by invitapriore at 1:52 PM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
I think the Korg MicroKorg is pretty cool an inexpensive to boot.
posted by Annika Cicada at 3:00 PM on December 14, 2015
posted by Annika Cicada at 3:00 PM on December 14, 2015
Seconding the Novation UltraNova or MiniNova which have a great sound for ambient pads, and have actual keys (mini keys on the MiniNova).
Also there are the Roland Boutique polys which are great sounding reproductions of old Roland polysynths, albeit with tiny controls and mini keys (requires buying the K-25m keyboard case).
posted by w0mbat at 5:45 PM on December 14, 2015
Also there are the Roland Boutique polys which are great sounding reproductions of old Roland polysynths, albeit with tiny controls and mini keys (requires buying the K-25m keyboard case).
posted by w0mbat at 5:45 PM on December 14, 2015
Kawai K5000s is an old, digital additive synth. Not especially common so prices are all over the place from $300 to $900. The keyboard itself is fantastic and it is a solid beast, not a plastic controller. The sound engine really only excels at the kind of thing you’re describing. You want the "s" model as it has knobs for tweaking and programming the thing is kind of complicated. Twisting the knobs while take you all kinds of places without knowing what you’re doing.
posted by bongo_x at 7:41 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by bongo_x at 7:41 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
I used to have a pile of synths. One of my favorites was the Oberheim Matrix-1000. It's a rackmount module, so you would need a MIDI controller keyboard to play it—but those can be had pretty cheaply.
It has true (digitally controlled) analog voices, it's six-voice polyphonic (i.e., it can play up to six notes simultaneously), and it has a sophisticated voice architecture that's wonderful for shifty, drifty, complex timbres. It's made for cinematic ambient pads. You can program your own patches on it, but if you're not up for that, it comes with 1000 factory patches, many of which are quite nice.
You can find 'em on eBay within your price range. Beautiful, beautiful instrument.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:54 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
It has true (digitally controlled) analog voices, it's six-voice polyphonic (i.e., it can play up to six notes simultaneously), and it has a sophisticated voice architecture that's wonderful for shifty, drifty, complex timbres. It's made for cinematic ambient pads. You can program your own patches on it, but if you're not up for that, it comes with 1000 factory patches, many of which are quite nice.
You can find 'em on eBay within your price range. Beautiful, beautiful instrument.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:54 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
Oberheim Matrix-1000 demo; another. I miss it so much!
posted by escape from the potato planet at 8:01 PM on December 14, 2015
posted by escape from the potato planet at 8:01 PM on December 14, 2015
Though the Matrix 1000 is a good recommendation I'd recommend software here (the aforementioned Absynth in particular). $500 won't get you a bona-fide analog keyboard that is well-suited to ambient (that is, with polyphony, complex routing, and effects) unfortunately. Actually, really irrespective of budget many analog synths just cater to different types of sounds. I have the Odyssey and Pro-2 and while both are cool, ambient is not the first thing that comes to mind from them.
I'd argue moreso than polyphony, ambient is really all about the effects. I would want decent reverb and delay for that kind of music even if I had a great synth collection. If you have any sort of keyboard stuff already, I would look into the Eventide Space pedal and focus on processing and getting sounds that way. If you're using or would be open to using logic you could get really decent ambient tones out of any keyboard (or plugin) and space designer and delay designer.
Alternatively, older digital VAs would also work for this, although they would lack great or any effects. I've seen Nord Leads 1 for $500. Maybe the Korg Z1 or Yamaha AN1X? The Kawai that bongo_x mentioned is a legendary piece for ambient sounds and pretty affordable.
posted by tremspeed at 11:17 AM on December 17, 2015
I'd argue moreso than polyphony, ambient is really all about the effects. I would want decent reverb and delay for that kind of music even if I had a great synth collection. If you have any sort of keyboard stuff already, I would look into the Eventide Space pedal and focus on processing and getting sounds that way. If you're using or would be open to using logic you could get really decent ambient tones out of any keyboard (or plugin) and space designer and delay designer.
Alternatively, older digital VAs would also work for this, although they would lack great or any effects. I've seen Nord Leads 1 for $500. Maybe the Korg Z1 or Yamaha AN1X? The Kawai that bongo_x mentioned is a legendary piece for ambient sounds and pretty affordable.
posted by tremspeed at 11:17 AM on December 17, 2015
In before the thread closes - the just-announced Korg Minilogue, a polyphonic analog priced at $500, may be the definitive answer to this question. As was mentioned upthread, this is unprecedented; there's never been a feature-packed poly analog synth at this price range.
posted by naju at 10:13 AM on January 14, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by naju at 10:13 AM on January 14, 2016 [3 favorites]
I know this is a bit out of your price range, but Behringer has announced a polyphonic synth for $999 with DCOs and effects that you may find does many things you need. It's called DeepMind 12.
posted by infinitewindow at 8:35 PM on August 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by infinitewindow at 8:35 PM on August 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
A lot of the cheaper end of "proper" synths are going to be monosynths, which is really not what you want, so you're almost certainly looking for a digital polysynth. Something like a Novation UltraNova - it's a little long in the tooth (2011) now but the synth engine still sounds great and it's got stacks of effects. The MiniNova is basically the same thing, but in a smaller box and harder to program. The MicroKORG is probably also a reasonable choice but also suffers from the "tiny and hard to program" problem.
posted by parm at 7:07 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]