Nord drum step sequencer series#

Nord drum step sequencer series#

You can get more technical details about the Microbrute in Marc Doty’s great series of videos. It has a Steiner Parker filter, a LFO and a step sequencer.

The Microbrute is fully analogue, and it can produce a good number of sounds through its one oscilator, by allowing you to blend in different quantities of sawtooth, sine and square, along with some extensive extras, such as a metalizer. It is my first polyphonic hardware synthesier, and so has opened up a whole range of new composition possibilities around chords. The whole thing is extensively controllable via MIDI also. It also has effects – delay and unison, as well as multiple timbers, meaning that you can have up to 12 different patches playing at the same time, each controlled with different MIDI channels. You can choose to map the LFOs to almost anything, allowing a great amount of flexibility. There is also a suboscilator, two filters, each with a ASDTR configurable envelope, the usual ASDTR for the amplifier, and three LFOs. It has two oscillators which have extra functionality, as you can choose the waveform from a large selection of presampled waveforms, in addition to the usual sawtooth, sine, square. VNV Nation, one of my favourite bands, produced their entire ‘Empires’ album with just the Access Virus A and a couple of samplers. The presets are really inspiring, several sounds that you will recognise if you were into electronic music in the 00s. But I think this is ignoring the tactile control surface that you get, and how it gets your head outside the computer and playing an actual physical instrument. Old digital synths seem to be unpopular at the moment, I’ve heard comments along the lines of ‘if it’s digital then I might as well use a plugin in my DAW’. It cost over £800 when it came out in 1998. I am very happy that I managed to get this secondhand for less than a MicroKORG. It, it was a staple synth for trance and electronic music in general for the early 00s. This is the original 1998 Access Virus A.