Well nobody can contest your dislikes, everybody has different tastes and a lot of things are very subjective. Take the Waldorf Pulse, I happen to think it's one of the best monosynths ever, just awesome and a lot of the gripes I hear are that it doesn't really have much of its own character and that it's just good at sounding like other things. But with the MD I think you have to first appreciate that you aren't going to get warm/robust/analoguesque sounds, not saying you have said that but I have heard it mentioned elsewhere. I personally don't get why they would have bought it. It's like me buying an analgue synth and moaning because I can't get it to sound digital.eggnchips wrote:I also got a MD recently and understand where people are coming from when they talk about its bad sound.
Here are my groans:
-Its very easy to get too much going and create mush.
-It seems hard to fine tune a single sound so it fits in the mix, unless you take off all the lower end away using the high pass filter.
-It's very easy to switch on and make the clichéd plinky plonky minimal sound, and to make something a bit fatter you have to work at it. It's not like say a 909 that would give you results in no time.
-It doesn't handle lower frequencies very well as they sometimes click. Resampling lower frequencies also results in clicks. Is this due to its 12 bit engine?
-It's expensive and for the price, I think more features could have been included. I have only had it for a month and find myself thinking often already, 'I wish it could do this, or this, or this etc etc.' Surely firmware updates could solve these wishlists.
Nevertheless, I will not give up on the MD as I know some of my favourite tracks have been made on it.
On the plus side, I think it's really fun to use and to get ideas going really fast, and I know that I really need to work and work on it until I can get it purring like it should. It does have lots of potential so I just need to realise that. I do not regret buying it one bit.
I could go on about the plus points but thought I would get my gripes out first to see if anybody out there wants to contest, discuss or agree with them.
I don't have the UW version so can't comment on that, I didn't really see that much value in getting that one as I knew beforehand why I wanted the MD in the first place. I'm not using it as my main source of drums - which sounds ironic probably but I have other source sounds for kick/shakers/snares and so on which are more geared towards the type of sound I want in that dept. I'm sourcing sounds from the MD in a percussive nature with interesting harmonic content and also, weird evolving backing tones and ambience type stuff. Essentially, I'm getting a lot of tonal content out of it more so than actual drums. That's really the kind of thing I wanted when I was reading about it, I just can't get that sort of sound from anything else. Sure, there's the temptation to simply use little plops and clicks and 808 type toms etc but you never get into what you can actually get out of it then. When you look at it as a sound source with a sequencer and not just a drum synth, there's an unlimited pallete of unique sounds to be found. I just find it endlessly fascinating myself.
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