Free Midi Patch Editors

M-Audio Venom Keyboard Is a Synth With Some Bite

M-Audio is positioning its Venom keyboard as “virtual analog” device. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The big trend in synth design is to fire up the Wayback Machine and accurately recreate the sounds of the beloved ’70s and ’80s analog synths, then roll up the results into one does-it-all keyboard. Incorporate modern touches like USB and MIDI ports, microphone pre-amps and digital audio outputs and you’ve got a package ready to serve any GarageBand or Pro Tools jockey.

The Venom does all of that, and it does it for around $500. Stand-alone synths or software-and-controller combos usually cost at least that much. So given the added versatility, the Venom is relatively affordable — especially considering the quality of the sounds within.

Rather than rely on digital synth modeling, M-Audio has used raw samples of the original instruments to give the Venom its voice. Taiho Yamada, the designer of the Venom, wheeled out dozens of specimens from his vast synth collection (and called in a few favors from friends) to gather samples. These samples of vintage synths — Moogs, Arps, Oberheims, Rolands and the lot — form the foundation of the Venom’s sonic palette. Yamada’s team also sampled some bizarre old hardware. A Harvestman Zorlon Cannon , which employs the same kind of tone generator used in the Atari 2600, was used to achieve some chiptune flavors. An old, tube-driven Hewlett-Packard test oscillator yielded a pure and glassy sine wave. A circuit-bent Roland TR-808 supplied some crunchy drums.

The samples — 41 waveforms and 53 drum sounds — are all played back over the Venom’s three oscillators. There are also dozens of unique creations, all adding up to 512 single-voice patches and 256 multi-voice patches. You want it, you’ve got it: monophonic and polyphonic lead sounds, fat bass tones, arpeggios and thick synth pads.

You’re equally spoiled for sound modeling options, including 3 LFOs, an AMP modulator, multiple frequency cutoff filters, an arpeggiator (syncable or tap-tempo) and on-board effects for adding echo, delay, chorus and distortion.

Though the Venom retains the sonic character of each original instrument, what can’t be sampled is the vibe; specifically, the long-term behavior of the old synths’ oscillators. Analog oscillators can drift around, introducing funky inconsistencies. The Venom adds these wobbly bits back in, altering the sample start points as much or as little as you’d like.

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I’ve used it, it works great

It’s not quite as slick as a software editor that receives SYSEX dumps so you can see what an existing patch looks like, but compared to using the data slider it makes things much easier.

I’m using it with a TX7, which you’d really have to be determined to want to program just on its own. It makes experimenting with this synth fun instead of a chore.

Of course, it will be more useful in a week or so when the Missing Link is released, but there’s no reason why someone can’t adapt this for osculator or pd. The SYSEX info is all right there in the OSC address space for each control.

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