That would be great if did poly chaining.
Good idea, i’m sure they thought of that too. It doesn’t take a lot of work to handle that sort of chaining. Another wish to pop into being if this isn’t also in the plans.
It has a really interesting voice panning/spread parameter that sounds very lovely. I’m imagining quadraphonic panning now…
At the very least, I’m glad they put all the controls together and to one side, so you can use that space to the side of the controls for a tablet or an effects unit or another synth or etc.
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So what front panel controls get left out of the module? Perhaps there are more “switchable” control modes so you can still get to everything.
There are ears so it can be rack mounted too.
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I’m squinting, but it looks like some of the oscillator parameters are probably stacked, and some of the modulation sources, too. (I don’t see a dedicated button for each envelope for quick access, and it looks like only one of the LFO control sets has been transferred.) And the sequencer/arpeggiator controls… quite a lot looks like it has been buried and/or put as a shift-accessed control actual.
Edit: Or there’s a closeup image I could have been looking at. Thanks @Jukka 
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You can click through on the one i posted too.
The Module still has the joystick though that’s nice.
You can see which way i’m leaning. I already have the Hydrasynth Keys (a very nice controller) and i’ve got the Osmose on order, and Elektron just added external sequencing to the AK and i’ve got a Novation SL MkIII 61 with it’s sequencer built in too. So i’m thinking i don’t need another keyboard synth.
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So looking at the 61 key version, it looks like they just took the electronic hardware they already have and just dropped it in larger box with the larger keyboard. That no doubt accounts for how they can do this with such a small bump in price. The tooling and development costs for this have been kept to a bare minimum.
Interesting that they decided to keep the controls all the way to one side. That’s likely so you can put stuff in the blank area like you suggest chm_jacques. So which side would be better – all the way to the left or all the way to the right? There are reasons for both options – this is probably better playing melody with your right hand and tweaking with your left.
You want it to cost more? To be very fair to Modal, they are a small company and I’m sure they had to sell enough of the standard model to even consider investing more money in multiple SKUs, it gets more complicated on every level from a logistical standpoint every time you put another model into production.
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I absolutely agree Hawk – right on!
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Yes, I thought the 61 key version should be at least 10 million dollars.
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Modal 003 coming I bet , an update of 002
The up side to this is it does give them a flexibility that’s difficult to achieve in a larger company. It’s Jackson – and a small crew who work in support of him.
Remember in the first video with Nick Batt, when the first unit was a prototype – not that long ago. Nick asks if it had Poly-Aftertouch – like the Hydrasynth, announced a week earlier. You could see the wheels going around in Jackson’s head – “Yeah i can do that, should i announce that now – No id’ better not.”
So Jackson has been told by the investors, grow the company and he has done a heck of a job in that direction, cutting corners when it makes sense to, carefully calculating where to spend their development resource for the maximum bang for the buck.
d2ba – Yeah maybe a Modal 003 – but it’s going to cost less than $1500.
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This module mode looks so cool, and everyone always wants a module version of every synth so bad, but I just LOVE a keyboard version even though they take up a lot of space. Modules can feel a little clinical to me but keyboards turn into distinct characters in my mind, like they’re people (especially 61 key synths, it’s the magic number). Keyboard synths are more stylish too.
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ARGON8X – Width: 885mm – 35 inches / Depth: 300mm – 11-3/4 inches / Height: 100mm – 4 inches
ARGON8M – Width: 384mm – 15 inches / Depth: 127mm – 5 inches / Height: 80mm – 3 inches / Desktop or Rack mount – 3U 19” rack
ARGON8 – Width: 555mm – 22 inches / Depth: 300mm – 11-3/4 inches / Height: 100mm – 4 inches
The 8M is almost Eurorack size. Rubbing the lamp – CV interface. 
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Dude, that would be amazing if it had a eurorack compatible patch bay! Ugh, and there’s so much tasty room on the 61 key version…
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So at 23:30 Nick suggested some additional sequencer modes. I wonder, given how close he is with Modal (close in both senses) i wonder if any of this may be in the cards? Doesn’t sound like these would be enormous changes to make. They no doubt pay pretty close attention to his ideas.
BTW: February delivery on these two seems pretty aggressive. But i had doubts about their schedule on the first go round, and was definitely impressed how quickly they turned things around, even with the small slippage. So this time i think they probably can do this.
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As you mentioned, a small company has the ability to be aggressive and change tack quickly. During development I contacted the Modal dev team with suggestions and they communicated back and forth with me a number of times, even mentioning to me that they had brought my suggestions up and discussed them during one of their production meetings. I’m just a regular person with no ties to the industry and almost zero influence, so that speaks very well of them in my opinion. I’m certain that they give even more weight to suggestions from a well-known person in the industry, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they implemented Nick’s sequencer ideas.
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So judging by the difference in width from the original a mk1 A4/Rytm/OT should fit nicely on the 8X.