I really just keep loving my ST since the beginning. It’s has the analog sounds of my Rytm but with more clarity and punch, and staying in pitch better for both the analog and obviously the digital machines. At the start I found it a bit too clean and modern, a bit kitsch/tacky sounding because of it, but I’ve learned to get it sounding the way I want. (Just not using the fx track for sidechaining but for roughing up some tracks, for one). It’s small so it fits in a rack case that also fits my SPACE next to it and holds my 6U modular. There’s just so much to like, and it does it effortless. Lately I’m even discovering more machines that I didn’t or use - for example the chord machine. If you just skip the whack-a-mole chord part, scrolling the wave-morph is really great to get it poking out in a mix for example.
For such a small machine that’s so fast and intuitive with its limited machines machines (in terms of ease of use due to limited parameters), it’s really a great box to have in a small setup - just add some other taste you like and you have most/all you need. Or at least for me it is. Really great piece of gear.
I either use it by itself to sketch ideas (12 tracks is a lot!), or I set several tracks to the same midi channel and use it as a kind of super mono synth. It’s a scary box when you layer 3 analogs, and 5 digital voices as a mono, and still have room for drums.
To be fair, Syntakt has more analog cymbal/hihat sound possibilites than the majority of analog drum machines (and then you have a filter and two LFOs …). And I underestimated their possibilities (because like all the machines, they say things to you and suggest things to you …) … but you know, still I want
Blankfor.ms did an excellent video on the Syntakt a month ago, but it seems nobody has seen it since it’s posted on the Guitar Center channel, of all places. He uses it in a very simple way here, but the textures he gets out of it are lovely, and different from other Syntakt videos I’ve seen:
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