Solton MS 40
Turas Mara
a midi accordion.
Dan Lavry
<19981021171129...@ng91.aol.com>...
> I am interested in opinions (good, bad or indifferent) on the Solton MS
40 with
> a midi accordion.
>
I do not know what information you already have. If you have none, you can
take a preliminary look at
http://nspgweb.com/musicmagic. They sell the Soltron. So does Petosa in
Seattle, Syn-Cordion in Engelwood N.J. Brown Music in MN and perhaps many
others.
The unit is rather powerful in features. It has tons of sounds. It has just
about any combination you may wish for with features such as 256 orchestral
voices, 128 user voices, 192 percussion sounds. It supports 16 midi
channels, reverb, echo, 24 patterns, recording onto disk and name it. In
fact you can have a "career" learning how to exploit all the possibilities,
and I guess most folks do not utilize all the unit's capabilities.
I believe part of the reason it is more popular in the Midi accordion
community is because of the function named "Accordion", making it easier
and more user friendly for Midi accordion use.
The unit is not inexpensive. Some Midi players use other stuff such as
Roland, Alexis and others. There are 2 issues involved here:
1. The various capabilities (Simultaneous midi channels, programmability,
features, such as drum machine patterns and about dozen more such things)
2. The sounds (types of sound, quality of sound, how many sounds)
Choosing a Midi unit depends on what is important to you. For example, I am
a sound quality fanatic, and I like them to sound as close to real. I am
not interested in "fat" guitar rock and roll sounds. I am not interested in
a unit that will play automatic patterns, or will define the rhythm
throuout the song like a metronome. I would then choose a unit based on
sound quality and having the desired sounds. For me, sampled sounds are the
best.
I am not saying that Soltron does not have good sounds. Some of their
sounds are very fine. What I am saying is that one can get a lot cheaper
stuff, without a lot of the bells and whistles and rather good sounds. I
would insist on listening to the unit or any other unit prior to buying.
I can almost assure you one thing: No unit has all excellent sounds. In
fact, by the time you listen to say, 200 sounds, I will be surprised if you
will like 20 of them. Most Midi gear has poor piano, or poor fiddle, or
both. The wood wind tend to be good. The Synth stuff sounds like synth
stuff... Some drums are better then other.. The brass varies... and you
often find a lot of useless junk (from cho cho train to space harps to
inverted bird on an upside down tree...)
Actually, after writing all of that, it occurs to me that Soton has been
pretty good in this regard, though they do have a couple of useless sounds
(telephone, square wave and a few more). This is all just my own personal
opinion.
How is that for helpful hints?
Best wishes
Dan Lavry
Turas Mara
looked at info on a Farfisa module.