Mono/Poly

I've been working with softsynths for 15 years now and am ready to finally say for sure that Korg's Mono/Poly is my favorite. Sometimes over the years I've had doubts, but no longer, I'm sure now. I have Alchemy, Sylenth, Massive, Serum, and have used countless others, and this one, for me and my musical purposes, is the best. It sounds fantastic, is incredibly eclectic, anything from arcade sounds to kicks and snares and a bottomless variety of lead and bass possibilities. A local music shop has a hardware Mono/Poly that they'll loan out to trusted customers, so I had a chance to do a comparison a few years ago, and not only does this plug capture the hardware's sound almost exactly on every patch I compared, the plug actually often sounded *better* and offers true polyphony and an awesome mod matrix and other features as well. (To be fair, I was comparing a computer program to a 35 yo piece of machinery so, take this as ye may.)

I've done everything from imitation glitch to classic acid with it. The Mono/Poly with the MS-20 (not as realistic to the hardware but still fantastic in its own right) and Polysix (also very close in sound to the hardware and just as good as the Mono/Poly plug) are an unbeatable team in my book, relatively straightforward synths that together can do pretty much anything you'd want. Add the M1 (incredibly good emulation and also in many ways better than the hardware) and Wavestation, and Korg has the best deal in softsynths going at the moment with the Legacy Collection, despite their age. Despite a lot of options, at least 3/4 of my tracks over the last decade have used one or a combo of them, often exclusively, and I have buyer's remorse from buying several other more expensive synths that I almost never use.

My biggest complaint about the Mono/Poly plug is that I'm indifferent to its built-in FX, which are really Korg's MDE-X plug built-in to the synth's DSP. Some of the FX are OK, the reverb is unique and sometimes useful as are the delays, most are pretty blah though, so I turn them off and use Renoise's built-in FX or other 3rd party plugs. The separate MDE-X plug us the weakest of the Legacy Collection bunch, I never use it. Other than that I recommend the Mono/Poly or entire Legacy Collection unreservedly, including over much more recently developed competitors.