Recommendations for Synth/Keyboard please.

[RobDavies]

I've decided to buy myself a new keyboard but I'm no expert. What I'm after is something that combines analoguey sounds (I used to own a Roland SH-09 and an SH-101) and something that does all the multi-timbral stuff too.

The last keyboard I owned was a Korg M1 and while I loved all the sounds it produced, I found the sequencing stuff very hard to get to grips with.

So what do you recommend? Second-hand is more than acceptable. My budget is about 400 quid.

[Ten Flew South]

YOu might be lucky and find a novation supernova II keyboard for that money, or a little above. They're great, I'll never get rid of mine, it's got very expressive sounds and an onboard control (knob, fader or button) for pretty much every function, it's mad hands on. Excellent quality semi-weighted keyboard with aftertouch, really easy to program, self-oscillating filters (filters are insane actually on this synth), 3 osc, 6 osc if you use all saw waves, 2 envelopes plus amp env, 2 LFOs that go up to audible frequencies so can be used as extra oscillators, everythign is basically routable to everything else, it's just a perfectly designed synth. Still better than anything else Novation have released since, synth-wise. They dropped massively in price for a little while, I picked one up for just over 200 quid, when they were normally going for 700. Bargain. Price is creeping up towards there again but you should still be able to get a good deal, I saw one of the ProX (48 voice) platinum versions in sos readers ads the other week and it was only going for about 500 quid. Oh yeah, it has an effects engine onboard - reverb is perfectly acceptable, the others are excellent. And you can have a chain of 7 effects on every part simultaneously. The normal version is 24 voice, 8 part multi-timbral with 8 analogue jack outputs, and 2 analogue jack inputs, which can take anything from a dynamic mic to a line level and sound good. And a 48 band vocoder with a graphic display of the input's waveform. I luuuuuurve mine. It's got a massive palette of sounds, I've not scratched the surface yet.

[Ten Flew South]

There's one here if you get interested, but if you do start looking at them, make sure you confirm it's the keyboard as there is a rack version as well.

http://www.soundonsound.com/readersads?page=2&Cat=7

4th one down.

And there's none on ebay at all, in any country

[RobDavies]

Hey - thanks.

I've got a feeling I'll end up buying two in the end.

A workstation type thing AND a synth capable of doing "proper" synth sounds.