Korg Minilogue XD

It sounds decidedly digital and requires some menu diving, but it's a great value if your style is more Skrillex than survive. Honestly, though, the m...

The Minilogue XD was my first synth and I'm glad I didn't go for anything else. Not only does it come with a good amount of presets, you can find free preset libraries online. However, after starting with a default patch and building my own presets, I slowly started realizing what a beast that machine actually is. It's one of the best decisions I've ever made and it helped me understand synthesizers in a much better and coherent way.

So I decided to try another synths, got some other 3 synths, and one of them was the Minilogue XD. As I mentioned earlier, I already had a Prologue 16, but Minilogue XD captured my heart on the first play. I could only think, "What an AMAZING synth, that's what I was looking for".

Very straightforward interface, tons of fx and modulation options once you get comfortable experimenting in that area, based on your music styles: you’d get a good use out of this as it was apparently created with a Roland Juno emulation in mind. Also, there’s tons of cool tutorials for this synth as well. Another option is the Korg Minilogue XD, less voices though. But you can put these cool Sinevibes plugins in the synth and come up with some unique sounds.

* It’s not so easy to pick up an existing patch and find out how it was created. On the Korg Minilogue XD, you can see a tiny arrow and asterisk when you’re right on target on the setting corresponding to the preset. On the JX-08, you load a preset and then you have to move faders and things will randomly change until you find your way back to where the fader is supposed to sit. Luckily they have mostly standardized on envelope 1 being for the filter and envelope 2 for the amp, so it’s easy enough once you get into the groove, but you have to play it by ears, literally speaking.