[A6] micron musings

[Richard]

Hi

I'm late to the party I know, but I finally got my hands on a a micron and 
thought I'd give an Andromeda users comment on it:

Firstly it feels great, good keyboard, love the rubber the knobs... the 
layout is great, your hand just sits by the control knob and just feels 
right and it was flying around it in minutes ... nice feeling.

Secondly the OS is AMAZING - a brilliant piece of design which is soooo much 
easier to use than the Andromeda  - despite mostly using only 1 knob! - the 
microns setup mode is so much easier than A6 mixmode and you can flip 
between them without loosing data... the navigation is really a delight and 
a credit to Alesis that they put in the time and energy to get it right... 
in particular it really kills that old yamaha/roland/akai/korg page after 
page way of doing things. The manual is excellent too. Patterns and rhythms 
are nice extras... the assignable controllers are very well thought out... 
you really want to use them. This makes me think the A6 OS could be utterly, 
and I mean utterly, transformed if Alesis ever chose to reconsider the A6 in 
the light of what they know now... yeah I know, dreaming....

Soundwise, well, I  like it, the extra filters are great, and overall the 
sound is smoother than the nords (the only modern VA I have to compare it 
with) and the filter movements feel nice, like you can feel them physically 
moving which is not normally the case with digi stuff. Does it sound 
analogue? No, not really, it sounds smooth digi, clean digi, nice digi... 
but hearing all 8 layers of it sequenced it sounds a little samey... you 
start to hear that lack of weight and movement... And some animation is 
lacking the filters -  only analogue filters have that IMO. And basswise, 
well its not bad but I have an A6, and an evolver, nord modular, and a 
matrix1000 sitting here and it pales next to all of them for bass, I think 
Native Instrument softsynths will do a better bass too - so I wouldn't get 
one if your looking for a bass machine. I guess I might revise this view 
when I get more deeply into patching but that is how it seems at the moment. 
Does it sound like an A6? errm no, really not, its too small and neat and 
tidy. But because of its design you can do some pads and things with are 
reminiscent of it... which leads me to:

What surprised me and what delighted me was that I already knew how to use 
it : the structure of thing is so utterly based on the A6, right down to the 
pre and post mixer sections etc. It almost is a scaled down digi A6 - only 
everything about it is smaller. This meant that I knew how to construct 
sounds immediately and think I grasped almost everything the machine does in 
2 or 3 hours, this is a record for me with any synth. So if you have 
adjusted to an A6 way of thinking this is a great bonus reward - I can sit 
with it in front of the telly keeping an eye on cricket, sit in bed with a 
cup of tea and do some patching... I can carry it between studios, take it 
home, sit in a coffee house with it... I've never had a keyboard that wants 
to be used so much... and I think using this may even improve my A6 
patching...

I paid £200 for this thing used.... 10% of what the A6 cost new - that is 
just amazing, how the heck anyone is making a living from that I don't 
know... but its really a delightful little synth which I would heartily 
recommend, especially for people who already have an A6...

Richard