Vanguard

It was love at first sight with the Vanguard. I've had it since it was released, and have used it quite a lot. It's easy to program and has revealed itself to be an extremely versitile instrument.

The factory patches it comes with are very good, but I have to say so dance-focused that you may get the false impression that's all Vanguard is (very) good at.

In fact, I was recently looking at fancy new synths because some of their sound samples blew me away. I figured I'd play with my trusty big V a little before shelling out another $200+ and I was impressed. If you pull yourself off the beaten path, you can make really modern sounds that rival some of Albino's more interesting patches.

If you want to get a better idea of the limits you can take this amazingly well-designed synth, check out the "SOUNDSHOP" link at the reFX site. The samples of the patches are really eye-opening, particularly "Xenox Signature 2" (although you shouldgive a listen to all the bank samples). By the way, these sound banks are high quality, pretty inexpensive and at times simply wonderful.

reFX have added a few tricks since version 1.0.x which should be noted:

- A "VCS" knob. One simple little dial that controls how rich the sound is. My patches went from "cool" to "holy crap" with a quarter turn. This was almost like getting a whole new synthesizer in itself.

- The tracegate now supports stereo patterns. You can dial up your own ping-pong gate effects, very nice.

- Also with the trancegate, you can save and load "gate patches" from a right-click menu, which is really convenient.

User Interface: lovely, but a bit big. I like the extra space between thing, but the knobs are small on my big screen.

Sound: Excellent. Two caveats: 1) make sure you have at least 1 more voice than you think you need; 2) don't use 0ms attack or release (in most cases), back it down to 1ms.

Features: There's almost everything you could want in a synth in here. The arpeggiator could use the ability to customize, but this is my only feature gripe.

Documentation: don't need it, but it's good anyway.

Presets: Shipped with very good presets, but "dance-heavy". However, a quick visit to the "SOUNDBANK" (which you can also access using the "ROM Pack" link in the setup) will deeply satisfy.

Customer Support: I had a few questions with 1.0.x and they were answered almost immediately.

Value for Money: Excellent.

Stability: Version 1.5+ seems rock solid.Read Review