My girlfriend very nicely bought me a Monotribe for christmas, and from everything i'd read and heard online, it sounded like a nice little analogue box, anyhow, after messing around with it for an hour, i've discovered that it's a sick, sick, little beast.
Here are a few of the things i've noticed and are kinda undocumented (I hope this will be useful for anyone thinking of grabbing one)
- They all seem to come with OS 2.0 installed now, which is nice, less messing about with cables etc.
- The drum roll features are brilliant, they make the drums trigger in a quantized fashion, from crotchets, quavers, semiquavers, triplets, etc right up to hemisemidemiquavers (ie glitchville) and you can trigger them live, ie, get your synth loop going, then trigger little intricate fills using gate-time and the ribbon, or, you can record these drum roll changes into your sequence. By using triplets on the hi hats, i managed to get a nice 2 bar swung (12/8) rhythm ala-soft cell. By doing the thing at random on a 4/4 beat i got all sorts of intricate hi hat patterns. Inspirational :) My only complaint is that the snare gets REALLY loud when glitching it, making it annoying and kinda useless.
- With the S/H LFO, all your waveform shapes, and the nice filter with SCREAMING resonance, you sound palette is already pretty big, it's certainly a full featured 1 VCO monosynth, but, and here's the best bit of the whole 'tribe i reckon, the LFO's on fast mode, go up into the audio spectrum! This highly controllable madness (with both speed and intensity controls) can be applied to VCO, VCF or both, and, depending on how much you dial in, gives you a STUPENDOUS amount of timbres, some subtle, some screaming and in your face, amongst the sounds i got were (when applied to VCF):
+ Glitchy Vowel like sounds, going from a very warm vowel-y hum at the bottom end into a sharp and fizzing sound, with an interesting chorus effect somewhere in the middle.
+ Bizarre overtones coming in, the pitch of which can be controlled by the rate knob.
+ Phat and crunchy bass sounds which pack alot of punch for one VCO
+ All sorts of well defined glitches and sound effects.
- Haven't tried Audio in yet, but have seen a trick you can do, to let you filter external audio without the VCO firing, i'll be trying this next.
Here's a little clip, it's all the best bits from a 5 minute jam i recorded, a semi random synth loop and the internal drums :)
Here are a few of the things i've noticed and are kinda undocumented (I hope this will be useful for anyone thinking of grabbing one)
- They all seem to come with OS 2.0 installed now, which is nice, less messing about with cables etc.
- The drum roll features are brilliant, they make the drums trigger in a quantized fashion, from crotchets, quavers, semiquavers, triplets, etc right up to hemisemidemiquavers (ie glitchville) and you can trigger them live, ie, get your synth loop going, then trigger little intricate fills using gate-time and the ribbon, or, you can record these drum roll changes into your sequence. By using triplets on the hi hats, i managed to get a nice 2 bar swung (12/8) rhythm ala-soft cell. By doing the thing at random on a 4/4 beat i got all sorts of intricate hi hat patterns. Inspirational :) My only complaint is that the snare gets REALLY loud when glitching it, making it annoying and kinda useless.
- With the S/H LFO, all your waveform shapes, and the nice filter with SCREAMING resonance, you sound palette is already pretty big, it's certainly a full featured 1 VCO monosynth, but, and here's the best bit of the whole 'tribe i reckon, the LFO's on fast mode, go up into the audio spectrum! This highly controllable madness (with both speed and intensity controls) can be applied to VCO, VCF or both, and, depending on how much you dial in, gives you a STUPENDOUS amount of timbres, some subtle, some screaming and in your face, amongst the sounds i got were (when applied to VCF):
+ Glitchy Vowel like sounds, going from a very warm vowel-y hum at the bottom end into a sharp and fizzing sound, with an interesting chorus effect somewhere in the middle.
+ Bizarre overtones coming in, the pitch of which can be controlled by the rate knob.
+ Phat and crunchy bass sounds which pack alot of punch for one VCO
+ All sorts of well defined glitches and sound effects.
- Haven't tried Audio in yet, but have seen a trick you can do, to let you filter external audio without the VCO firing, i'll be trying this next.
Here's a little clip, it's all the best bits from a 5 minute jam i recorded, a semi random synth loop and the internal drums :)