KingKorg vs. Studiologic Sledge 2.0

Anything about hardware musical instruments.
Post Reply New Topic
RELATED
PRODUCTS

Post

Shabdahbriah wrote:I just received my Black Sledge a few days ago, w/ver 2.2 OS installed, and 208 factory presets, which are mostly average, but some are quite nice, and a few are really cool, actually. I tend to be prefer 'bass' heavy.

I absolutely LOVE IT! Kicked out a dozen+ presets in minutes. Well o.k., maybe an hour, but it seemed like minutes. 8)
If you have time I'd very much appreciate it if you could do a patch dump of the new presets included in the black edition please and upload them here so us regular yellow Sledge users could have a listen to them too.

Thanks :)

Post

jazzygb1 wrote:
Shabdahbriah wrote:I just received my Black Sledge a few days ago, w/ver 2.2 OS installed, and 208 factory presets, which are mostly average, but some are quite nice, and a few are really cool, actually. I tend to be prefer 'bass' heavy.

I absolutely LOVE IT! Kicked out a dozen+ presets in minutes. Well o.k., maybe an hour, but it seemed like minutes. 8)
If you have time I'd very much appreciate it if you could do a patch dump of the new presets included in the black edition please and upload them here so us regular yellow Sledge users could have a listen to them too.

Thanks :)
that would be nice if someone with a sledge black would do that. I have asked Studiologic twice if they would release the new O.S. and patches. I assume they don't want to do it to entice us to buy a sledge black.
Maybe if more people contacted them requesting this they might finally release them.

Post

I've heard of Yellow Sledge owners running OS2.2 in the wild!

Post

I'm still on the fence about Virtual Analog. I have a Stereoping Qfeld on the way to give me real controls for my blofeld, but still not sure.

It was my first VA after a long time without hardware.

Just to compare if I really liked it next to my analogs I bought a Venom, then a KS4 Novation, then a Virus Ti2, then a Circuit with its two Nova synths, then a Virus Ti, then a Polymorph, then a JX-03, then a Spectralis 2, then.....

Yep. Still on the fence about VA synths.

:hihi:
"I am a meat popsicle"
Soundcloud Vondragonnoggin
Soundclick Wormhelmet

Post

Tested out a Sledge Black in the store (Andertons) on Tues 18/04/2017. I bought it! It sounds very good! The aliasing is minimal. I love the cross-over sounds (VA, Wave Table, Sample Playback, FM) it produces. The PPG stuff is great- Takes me back! lol. The keybed is the same as my Prophet 6 - very nice!
The apps are a bit basic, but that's not untypical of synth apps!

There are a few issues though:-

The menu option to switch off the send and receive of midi controller data does not appear to do anything!! The Sledge always receives and always sends controller data regardless of these.
Anyone else noticed this????

The USB interface is not iOS compliant. Or at least it doesn't work with my iPad 2 on iOS 9.xx. Whereas the Forte, P6 and Juno Di do. Shame coz this means it doesn't work on my Win XP machine. It does however work with Win10.

These are minor quibbles for the money it is pretty awesome! Hands on a simple to use.. Yey

Post

whats a synth app?

Post

I own the King Korg and I'll have a new yellow Sledge delivered tomorrow, very excited

Post

The Grand Wizard wrote:I own the King Korg and I'll have a new yellow Sledge delivered tomorrow, very excited
Keep us posted :phones:

Post

I'm really curious on why they left certain of the features out. What was their goal in designing this synth? Did they start to compromise or did they start to add on?

The filter modes, would not have been that more expensive to add (just a dial with a couple clicks more, and a little bit of extra print), they did keep the most relevant, except perhaps for that PPG filter.

Why did they leave unison out? They could have used the current control for toggling through the different modes. But there would have had to be some kind of detune control. But I figure it would be worth it, it is almost an essential feature on a polyphonic synth.

LFO delay should have been there. I’m not sure that part of the Blofeld engine is implemented, but it should have been. So many classic synths had it.

Noise color, I guess would have been worth it by just adding a single knob.

Ring mod would have been nice as well.

Filter velocity should have been there.


Does the second filter actually work?
That would have really had potential to expand the capabilities of the synth. So much that I think a lot would have been willing to pay for all the extra controls + added destination in the Mod section.
They could have made it a strictly serial configuration, as otherwise they would have had to add balance controls to the mixer section.


I feel like they could have used the space from the Effect section for other features and then had effects hidden in the menu perhaps. The effects don’t seem to be that good. But I understand from a preset demo capability perspective if they felt like they could not leave them of completely.
Or they could have gone just for a reverb, as that is the typical “make-it-sound-better-effect”. I mean sure choruses do fatten the sound, but on a 3 osc synth that isn’t as important as on a 1 osc synth, especially if it also had different polyphonic unison modes.


I would have liked to see the mod sources separated, for a better overview. Or perhaps they could have used multicolor LEDs, so that it would be possible to trace the routings at least.


It still seems like a good synth for the money.
But I think it could have been really good, almost great for just a little more.
It could have been the perfect starter synth/education synth (since it would have covered almost every common parameter, in a hardware form, with Panel mode).

Post

Gonna be watching a lot of George Hall videos, to figure this beast out

Post

Besides the knobbed interface the Sledge has a quite limited synth engine compared to Waldorf Blofeld.

Personally while testing the Sledge both at Musikmesse and at my local shop i also found that Blofeld seems to sound better than Sledge but i could be wrong.

FWIW i had owned my Blofeld desktop (+ Sl expansion) since more than 7 years now and still love it.

Sledge is not an offical Waldorf product so for them it would not be really a good idea if Sledge would use the complete Blofeld engine.

Another hardware synth that i used a lot recently is Novation UltraNova (got it since around 19-20 months now) that has a synth engine which is almost as complex as in the Blofeld (including e.g. 3 Oscs and a dual multimode filter) and in some parts even has additional features compared to Blofeld.
Ingo Weidner
Win 10 Home 64-bit / mobile i7-7700HQ 2.8 GHz / 16GB RAM //
Live 10 Suite / Cubase Pro 9.5 / Pro Tools Ultimate 2021 // NI Komplete Kontrol S61 Mk1

Post

@Ingonator
The idea of the Sledge is a more approachable synth, not the synth with the most complex synth enginge.
Complex synthesis in my view fits better on a computer screen, rather than a lot of menu toggling and knob twists to select the right modulation destinations and sources, instead of just a few mouse clicks.
It is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of synth.
And I think that is where hardware shines. A lot of software synths are close enough to the sound of analog to at least be convincing in a track. And compared to digital hardware synths, there are lot of soft synths, with more modulations, more forms of syntehsis.
So I get why Studiologic would want to stripped out features of the Blofeld, to create something more approachable.
I think it is a great idea.
From the available parameters, it looks like they were aiming to include most features of the classic polyphonic synths.
However, they perhaps left a couple ones out, that are in the Blofeld enginge, that they could have kept and made the synth cover even more grounds. It still would not still had the complete Blofeld synth enginge. It would not have the mod matrix for example.

I don't know if studiologic designed the fron panel, then talked to waldorf, and waldorf just deciced to make some slight changes to the Blofeld enginge, but kept it mostly intact. Or if studiologic had the waldorf enginge and from there started to design the front panel, based on what was accessable via CC, but asked Waldorf to change the modulation system because they did not wan't a mod matrix.
I just think it is too bad the certain of the features that are actually there on Midi CCs did not make it to the front panel.


Besides, there is also business involved. Studiologic did not steal the Blofeld enginge and got away with it.
They have some sort of agreement, and if Waldorf felt like the Sledge was developing so that it could take on the Blofeld in every aspect, they would have just asked Studiologic for a different deal. So in one way or another Waldorf still makes money out of it (even if the deal is a heavy discount of fatar keyboards, in exchange for studiologic getting a synth enginge based on the blofeld).

Post

JonHolstein wrote:@Ingonator
The idea of the Sledge is a more approachable synth, not the synth with the most complex synth enginge.
Complex synthesis in my view fits better on a computer screen, rather than a lot of menu toggling and knob twists to select the right modulation destinations and sources, instead of just a few mouse clicks.
It is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of synth.
And I think that is where hardware shines. A lot of software synths are close enough to the sound of analog to at least be convincing in a track. And compared to digital hardware synths, there are lot of soft synths, with more modulations, more forms of syntehsis.
So I get why Studiologic would want to stripped out features of the Blofeld, to create something more approachable.
I think it is a great idea.
From the available parameters, it looks like they were aiming to include most features of the classic polyphonic synths.
However, they perhaps left a couple ones out, that are in the Blofeld enginge, that they could have kept and made the synth cover even more grounds. It still would not still had the complete Blofeld synth enginge. It would not have the mod matrix for example.

I don't know if studiologic designed the fron panel, then talked to waldorf, and waldorf just deciced to make some slight changes to the Blofeld enginge, but kept it mostly intact. Or if studiologic had the waldorf enginge and from there started to design the front panel, based on what was accessable via CC, but asked Waldorf to change the modulation system because they did not wan't a mod matrix.
I just think it is too bad the certain of the features that are actually there on Midi CCs did not make it to the front panel.


Besides, there is also business involved. Studiologic did not steal the Blofeld enginge and got away with it.
They have some sort of agreement, and if Waldorf felt like the Sledge was developing so that it could take on the Blofeld in every aspect, they would have just asked Studiologic for a different deal. So in one way or another Waldorf still makes money out of it (even if the deal is a heavy discount of fatar keyboards, in exchange for studiologic getting a synth enginge based on the blofeld).
I know most of that but some people seem to expect to get a Blofeld with lot of knobs when they buy a Sledge.
While the Blofeld is much smallerm epsecially the desktop, it's synth engine still offers a lot more features than a Sledge.
This might not be not that obvious if you see alll those knobs and the quite big size of the Sledge compared to a a Blofeld.
Ingo Weidner
Win 10 Home 64-bit / mobile i7-7700HQ 2.8 GHz / 16GB RAM //
Live 10 Suite / Cubase Pro 9.5 / Pro Tools Ultimate 2021 // NI Komplete Kontrol S61 Mk1

Post

@jon, I agree fully with the things you think Studiologic left out. Some of them seem silly to have left out (LFO delay for instance) and others, as you said, could have been a few more clicks on a knob. I think they actually limited the versatility by using the little LEDs on things like the filter, because there is no way to expand the filters without being kludgey. Sure you could turn on a combination of LEDs to get a 4th or 5th etc) filter, but the tiny LCD screen could have been used a lot better for this option.

With all it's quirks and how it is limited sonically compared to the Blofeld, this synth still rocks for me. I've programmed hundreds of patches into it and am still surprised to find new combinations of things that bring a new sound to it. I can't compare it to a Blofeld because I don't have one, but this is definitely a "different" synth from others, in a very good way.

You can hear the sound in some demos I have on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnE9nvMTiiA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXbJh2cG-FU

I also have 450+ patches available for download on the website, and about 100+ sample patches, all free:
http://analoguesque.x10host.com
Last edited by analoguesque on Wed Jul 19, 2017 1:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

Post

For a knoby VA I think the System 8 is a good option, even if it is more limited in its architechture it has the more inmediate UI.
dedication to flying

Post Reply

Return to “Hardware (Instruments and Effects)”