ManyStation

Well - I shall be the first one to review this and put forward my comments on it.

Firstly - I was looking for a "rompler" style synth that game me some more natural sounds - I own EVE, which contains a lot of vintage sounds and some good "odd" synth swirly sounds but perhaps not a lot of "bread and butter" sounds. I then followed a trail from EVE to Wusikstation, picked up "The Second Wave" and then took up the discounted offer of buying Manytone.

Well - I am very impressed. The interface reminds me of of the good old synth workstations (korg etc.) and for the first time I can see me actually programming my own presets.

And the presets? They are fantastic - honestly, I paid about £40.00 for this synth (my triton cost me about £800!) and this contains a huge range of presets - going from guitars, basses, synths, pianos and much much more. The basses and guitars need special mention - I don't own Halion or Kontakt but I must say that these are the best that I have heard on a soft synth. The tremolo guitar is awesome - worth the money alone.

Essentially you have loads of sounds to create your own presets from and its also very easy and clearly laid out. The effects are also very good - The Second Wave soudns give you an idea of what you can really do - plus the matrix (again used in some presets) could you allow you to program deep evolving passages of sounds from one button!

CPU hit? Well - I run a Pentium 4 3.0ghz (HT) with 512 ram and I notice some issues when running on High quality mode, but this maybe due to the lack of ram. This has been addressed slightly in the new patch and I will be purchasing new RAM shortly. However, if you put the synth into normal mode it plays fine.

The people at the Manytone were very helpful when ordering and overall cannot praise this enough. It's a really good "workhorse" and could be the staple synth for a lot of my songs. Excellent work!Read Review