I'm looking to purchase my first real synth and the online demos of the VR-09 caught my eye because of the organ/synth/piano/e-piano variety. I spent the past few days (!!) reading this entire thread, so I'm aware of the unfortunate quirks regarding registrations and effects. Putting those aside, I'm really in need of some feedback from those of you with more experience as I have no hands-on experience with synths and combo-organs.
First things first: I'm not a gigging musician. I've never used a Hammond. And, (sacrilege, I know) I'm really not that interested in the leslie effect. What I am looking for is a keyboard that allows a fair amount of easy tweaking of the sounds/effects and that provides nice sounding organs, electric pianos, and some basic synth textures (decent acoustic pianos are a bonus). That's what really caught my eye with the VR-09. Sure, Nord has all this too, but it's almost 5 times the price (!!) and, for me, this will be an entry-level purchase (i.e., hobby, not profession).
The basic context is this: I'm finally in a position where I can dedicate time to learning music theory and building up my keyboard skills. I've been practicing on a crappy cheap Yamaha YPT300 and am tired of the awful sounding presets. The music that really inspires me is Berlin School, so my end goal is to combine mellotron/organ/synth sounds. I recently purchased a memotron m2d module (paired with a cheap Behringer midi controller) and now I'm looking for something to pair with that. The sound that I really adore is the 1974-1976 audience recordings of Tangerine Dream which means lots of mellotron, some electric piano, moog/oberheim/arp leads, and a foundation of textures/chords from a farfissa dual compact plugged into a VCS3 for ring modulation. As best I can tell, all the synths they were using at that point were mono synths, so the wonderful chords that I'm hearing are all farfissa run through ring modulators (?). Other Berlin school from that era (Michael Hoenig, Ashra, Klaus Schulze) all have a nice mixture of organ/synth and many of the newer incarnations (Airsculpture, Electric Orange, RMI, etc.) also make liberal use of organs paired with synths/mellotrons.
While there's been a lot of discussion on this list of the minutia of the Hammond sounds, percussion, and leslie effect; there's been comparatively little discussion of the transistor organ emulation. I'm not interested in a bright organ sound - I'm looking for mournful/melancholy/edgy textures. From what I gather, I can't send the organ sounds through the resonant filter - that only works for the synths, correct?. But I seem to recall one of the online demos assigning the MFX knob to ring modulation for an organ. The drawbars then give me simple additive synthesis to pair with the MFX and reverb, so I'm hoping that will get me some nice tweakable organ textures that aren't too "clean" or bright sounding.
Am I barking up the wrong tree? Can one get nice organ sounds on a subtractive synth? The entry level analog synths only seem to have 2 oscillators per voice and only 3 or 4 voice polyphony, so I'm having a hard time believing I can get the textures I want out of a minilogue, volca, or the roland boutique series. But, again, I have no hands-on experience with real synths...
I realize the synth section is more of an 80s sound, but it looks tweakable enough to keep me busy for a long time and the ability to layer sounds is very appealing.
Sorry for the long post and thanks for all the insight - I've thoroughly enjoyed reading the archive of this thread.
