mini-synth

Akai Professional has announced that the Akai Miniak is now available.

The Miniak combines Akai’s control surface with Alesis’ synth engine.

The Miniak lets you create programs with up to eight multi-timbral voices, each with three oscillators. You can create complex sounds using the Miniak’s two multimode filters, three envelope generators, two LFOs, stereo effects and 40-band vocoder with gooseneck microphone. The MINIAK also has a comprehensive sequencer with step and dynamic real time phrase sequencing, a drum machine/rhythm sequencer and an arpeggiator.

The MINIAK is available from musical instrument and professional audio retailers and has a U.S. Retail Price of $699.00 with an estimated street price of $499.00.

Details below.

If you’ve used the Akai Professional Miniak synthesizer, leave a comment with your thoughts. Read more…

This video looks at the Casio SK-1: Everyman’s Sampling Keyboard.

The SK-1 is a small sampling keyboard that was made by Casio in 1985. It has 32 mini keys, four-note polyphony, with a sampling bit depth of 8 bit PCM and a sample rate of 9.38 kHz, a built-in microphone and line level input for sampling, and an internal speaker. It also features a small number of four-note polyphonic preset analog and digital instrument voices, and a simple additive voice.

In the video, one man band Willis P. Jenkins demos the SK-1 and explains how he uses it in his music.

via gearwire

Teenage Engineering OP-1 at Frankfurt 09

Musikmesse 2009: This is a short video overview of the Teenage Engineering Operator-1, Teenage Engineering’s portable synthesizer. It’s a synth, sampler, drum sequencer and controller, all in one.

via musicradartv

Musikmesse 2009: Like tiny synths? Vocoders?

Then Akai’s got you covered.

The Akai Miniak is the first synthesizer from Akai Professional developed in partnership with the Alesis synthesis team. The Miniak is extremely compact and portable, but is also a powerful instrument for creating sounds for performance and production.

Description:

The Miniak lets you create programs with up to eight multi-timbral voices, each with three oscillators. The Akai Miniak comes with more-than-600 preset sounds. You can create complex sounds using the Miniak’s two multimode filters, three envelope generators, two LFOs, stereo effects and 40-band vocoder with gooseneck microphone. The Miniak also has a comprehensive sequencer with step and dynamic real time phrase sequencing, a drum machine/rhythm sequencer and an arpeggiator.

The Miniak also contains high-resolution, 24-bit balanced quarter-inch inputs and outputs and a 37-key semi-weighted keyboard with velocity sensitivity. It can also be used as a sound source for MPCs, computer software and keyboards via MIDI.

The Akai MINIAK will be available from musical instrument and professional audio retailers Q3, 2009. No pricing has been announced.

This is the first synth announcement out of Musikmesse to get me excited. Let me know what you think of the Akai Miniak in the comments!

AnalogSuicide.com’s Tara Busch checks out the microKorg XL at the NAMM 2009 in Anaheim, CA.