oh fuck yah!

So I've been spending a lot of quality time with a Dave Smith Industries Evolver since my MS20 and SQ10 are in the shop having a checkup. and I've got to say that I've been programming some bad-ass music lately. The Evolver is the very first synthesizer I ever bought. I've owned an old Yamaha keyboard for years but I don't count it because I traded a book for it, this I actually bought. It's a tiny rectangular steel box with a row of knobs and another row of buttons and looks like this

it triggers itself with an 8/16 step sequencer and there's so much built into this thing that I really can't go into detail here but the Dave Smith Industries website will give you all the goods if you want to know about what this thing is capable of.

Some of the sequences I've made are so good that I can sit here and type this blog entry with it as background music and it sounds like it ought to be playing in a Goth Industrial club, seriously I could sample Interview With a Vampire and maybe some other dark stuff with this thing and it could be a full on industrial track.

This thing is so easy to play once you get used to the interface, it's all very intuitive: pick a row tweak knobs until you find something you like and repeat until you are ready to save it. The thing has four banks each with 128 spaces of memory so I could program 512 individual patches. The many of the factory presets are really something as well. It also has an internal signal processor so I could rout a guitar through it and there are 40 different ways I could get it to sound.

The thing is monophonic (can only play one note at a time) but Dave Smith has done some strange magic to it because it is waaaay more advanced than most classic monosynths. Part of it's appeal to me is that it doesn't require a keyboard, though it has full midi implementation
so I can (and have) plugged a midi controller into it before and used it like a regular synth but it's much more fun to program it with the built in sequencer. It also comes as a monosynth with it's own built in keyboard for an extra 500 dollars and there's a polyphonic version that has four voices (it can make up to four notes at once) but those are both too expensive and the added keyboard makes them impractical to me, I have enough keyboards in my life.

Two nights ago my friend James came over and we jammed out with electric mandolin the Evolver and my Yamaha being treated with a bunch of guitar pedals and it was the best jam I've had in about four years. I don't know if anybody who reads this blog is at all interested in synthesizers or making electronic music but if you are thinking about buying a musical instrument and have been thinking about analog synthesizers this one is far and away the one to buy. You can get a feel for it pretty easily, there's no special musical foreknowledge you need in order to make killer sounds and it costs a fraction of the cash that any other professional piece of gear does. (I bought mine on sale for $450.00 Canadian) And it comes with a power adapter that can fit plugs all over the world. (you could take it anywhere and it could fit in your carry on bag) . The thing is built like a tank and if you're anything like me, once you get used to the layout it's so much fun to play you'll want to spend hours with it.