Nord Micro Modular - Opinions?

[eric]

Fellow G.A.S. victims...

 

It's been a couple of months since I bought anything and I'm aching for a quick fix. A new toy might help me here. So I was looking at the Micro Modular, which is going for a good price these days. I understand that it shares specs with the Modular, but stripped down in certain areas. I used a Nord Lead for a long time and loved it. Can anyone comment on how you like the sound of the Micro, is it hard to program and load new sounds, how hard to assign the knobs and use it live, change patches live, any general comments. Thanks in advance!

 

Regards,

Eric

[Analogaddict]

...being slightly biased here..!

 

I really dig my Micro. I bought it because I found one really cheap, and it´s a great instrument. There´s a 'knob floater' in the edit window where you assigh knobs on the fly. Couldn´t be simpler. Loading patches is really easy, programming is what you make it; you can start from a patch and tweak away, or you could start from nothing and gradually build something great! I´ve built a couple of patches using the MM as an fx box for my Rhodes, giving me compression, phaser auto pan and more, all controllable in rate and depth by the knobs! There are a couple of really cool pitch shifters and vocoding units too. Switching patches live is pretty easy, for small changes in value you have the buttons, for bigger steps you can use one of one of the knobs (in 'shift' mode). All in all, it´s a really nice and analog sounding little synth. If you see it as a monophonic synth with audio ins, you´ll be pleasantly surprised that some of the less complex patches are polyphonic! One disturbing thing was the default pitch bend value - 1/2 step - and this had to be changed in every patch where I wanted to use the pitch bend...

 

/J nas