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Practical usability

When we first saw the Monotron, we were certainly excited to see if it could live up to our expectations. Most importantly, we desperately wanted the filter to sound good and for it to be a faithful recreation of the classic MS filter sound. The Monotron delivers on that front, and at this price point there really can't be too many complaints about the sound.

The bigger question is whether the diminutive form factor and imprecise ribbon keyboard make it possible to use the Monotron for serious music-making rather than just as a fun toy.

The lack of precise pitch control means the Monotron lends itself better to sounds that don't need to be pitch-perfect, and I suspect its most obvious use in the studio will be for special effects.

Filter sweeps, glides and rhythmic LFO modulation tend to produce the best results from the Monotron and we also got some nice effects by feeding various sources into the auxiliary input and manipulating them.

The currently trendy filtered white noise takes on some great textures with the addition of LFO filter cutoff modulation and manual manipulation of the cutoff and peak knobs, while audio rate LFO modulation of the filter is particularly good fun. It's certainly a useful tool to have around, although we doubt we'd end up trying to use the keyboard very much.

There's no ignoring the fact that the Monotron has a number of weaknesses. It's fiddly, there's no external control, the output's noisy and it's difficult to play in tune. But despite those issues, we still like it a lot and think the benefits more than outweigh the minor flaws.

Once you look past the limitations and remind yourself that this is a true analogue synth for a bargain price, the Monotron is a real winner. It's certainly not perfect, but it's an inspiring piece of equipment to have kicking around the studio and it sounds good enough to use it on a track.

When it comes down to it, the Monotron is a toy rather than a synth, but we really wouldn't be surprised if the Monotron made it onto quite a few records in the near future. If this really is the first sign that Korg are going to return to building analogue synths then we say bring it on.

Check out our audio demos to find out what the Monotron can do:

Examples of some of the sounds the Monotron can create:

Short special effects created using Monotron filter sweeps:

A simple riff from the Korg MS10 sawtooth oscillator:

The same riff filtered through the Monotron:

The same riff filtered through the MS10: