How portable something is depends on one's personal tolerance for lugging stuff around, setting it up, dealing with cables and power supplies, etc. To that end, admittedly, my idea of portable can be more than what some people are willing to put up with.jray wrote: Wed Dec 22, 2021 2:42 am I've been thinking about getting a standalone synth to pair with my Linnstrument 128 recently [...] it would be nice to have something portable to take with me.
How is the Argon8m when it comes to ease of creating patches? I see that there's an iOS app where quite a few things are accessible, but what about on the unit itself?
I had a Novation Peak for a while (which I regret selling!).
In my opinion, the Argon is a very portable synth; but you will need a USB power supply for the LinnStrument and a DIN MIDI cable, in addition to the Argon's power supply.The Argon8M has about as immediate an interface as one might expect from a synth of that size and depth. It's not exactly knob-per-function, of course, but you can access every parameter from the panel with minimal menu-diving. It's in the same realm as Elektron in that respect: i.e. most of the important parameters have their own knob or button, and the rest are typically one button push away. There are a fair number of shift functions mind you. But then, that's the curse of small synths with deep sound engines. Another option you might consider is the MicroMonsta 2—it is yet smaller, and more akin to the Elektron workflow. The A8M and the MM2 are also the only two hardware synths on the market currently that seem to have MPE implemented properly.
The Peak, incidentally, is one of my favourite synths. If they were to implement MPE, it would be mine in a blink. Sufficed to say, I feel your regret.
Cheers!
