Making a decision on keeping my Alesis Ion...

[aeon]

Search the Sound On Sound website for their "Secrets of Synthesis" tutorials...some good stuff there to be sure.

 

Google is your friend on this one.

 

 

cheers,

aeon

[Miket156]

Aeon:

 

You hit the nail on the head with your posts my friend.

 

FearMeWithMyLP:

 

You've gotten some great advice. Some of the examples that were given were excellent, give them a try on your ION. We have to be careful not to just listen to the factory programs and come to the conclusion that is all the synth can do. Mistake. Two weeks on ANY synth is hardly scratching the surface.

 

 

Mike T.

[Array]

 

Originally posted by FearMeWithMyLP aeon, that's a fantastic post there! It makes a lot of sense! I was wondering if anyone could suggest some places where they learned about oscillators, filters and whatnot. The one book I have (Power Tools For Synthesizer Programming: by Jim Aikin) is a great book, but I'd like to get some other info as well.

 

 

Gordon Reid's series of articles entitled "Synth Secrets" should be of great help:

 

http://www.soundonsound.com/search?page=3&section=/&Keyword=synth%20secrets&session=432189c327e78acbe4817d40d041ec0b

 

Theres more than 30 of these, so it should give you a very thorough understanding of synthesis if you have the time to go through them all.

[sizzlemeister]

I'm presently reading the Ion manual from cover to cover again for the fourth or fifth time. Each time I do this I identify capabilities I glossed over previously and figure out new ways of doing things. There are SO many options; it's a deep deep synth. There's no way you can learn this synth quickly.

[Yoozer]

I personally love the Ion's bunch of filters - having one part with Obie filters and the other with the ARP really makes it sound like it's not out of the same box. The Nord Leads are definately great. I got a Micromodular here which can be basically a NL2 with less polyphony - 'can' in the sense that you don't have to use parts if you don't want to - but the filters on the Ion I think are more "musical". The Micromod's better for filtering beats IMHO - it's dirtier. A similar difference of character can be found between my Q rack and the Virus C - the Q's filters are more 'mathematical' while the Virus is more musical.

 

I think a Micro Q would complement the Ion pretty well. Both are, in that sense "precision" synths. I can however whoop up a nasty 303-ish sound with the Ion, thanks to the filter model - it really nails it. I recommend flipping the filter from the creamy mg4 lowpass to the more agressive rp4 lowpass (which seems to have its own 'drive' built in) or the tb3 lowpass. For extra madness, set the filters in parallel, filter first with the lowpass, then with one of the comb models.

[mr.rob]

This is coming from a guy who has never touched an ION. But if you want to make synth heavy electronic music which relies on sequencing and having a lot of dense tone colors and synth lines and pads and bass sounds, well, then I think you'd want something with more polyphany and not less unless you're keen on multitracking everything one track at a time.

The ION sounds like a cool synth, btw. I sure as heck wouldn't ditch it for an ms2000 or jp8000.

[Miket156]

I suggest anytime you want to know any of the nuances of one synth to another, consult with Yoozer. Let me know when you buy a DSI KB Evolver, I'll want to know how you compare it to my ION and Prophet 5

 

 

Cheers,

 

 

 

Mike T.