Model-E

A useful synth if you are maybe new to analogue synth clones, and want some fat-ish sounds, but this one really fails to inspire me.

It's one of the older analogue clones, and it really shows. It's also not cheap - for what you get, in fact it's very expensive. The filters don't sound anything like any Moog I've ever played on, and the actual oscillators themselves are not that big, which was a character of Moogs.

If you want to learn about analogue synths then this is not one to learn on - they insisted on using the arcane terminology of Moogs, which I could accept, if they made it sound like one! But it doesn't. It only looks a bit like one.

Admittedly you can get some lovely pads, and occasionally some pleasing leads, and even some powerful basses, but it really doesn't have an awful lot of character to be worth the asking price. Many free VSTis that are given away nowadays have a wider range of sound and are more authentic than Model-e.

You can get lots of banks of sounds for it, but when you d/l them and play through them all, it soon becomes apparent that they sound very similar - that's because the range of Model-e isn't very wide. The envelopes are slow, which precludes most twangs and blips, although you can get the odd boing from it. The modulation options are limited, and the stupid terminology won't help if you are new to synths.

But it's not all bad - it's just that newer VSTi's have overtaken it by a long way, and some of the new clones have got the character of the old synths better - this one didn't really capture anything of the old Moogs. It's useable, but they need to drop the price a long way to get many sales I would think.Read Review