Radias for minimal and detroit style electronica?

[TechnoMusic]

From what I've heard so far the Radias sounds pretty nice. I was thinking of getting a radias to supplement my NI Maschine for making minimal and detroit techno. Does anyone here have experience with the Radias for this style of music?

Id probably be using it mainly for bass and synthesised percussion. Good investment? How is the bass end?

[X-Trade]

The bass end sounds phenomenal. Very precise and tight. However it is sometimes I think perceived to be lacking, not because it actually is but because the Radias goes up a lot higher frequencies than other synths. A kind of psychological balancing effect. Turning down the high EQ rather than boosting the bass works quite well. The drive and other distortion based effects and waveshapers can add a lot of grit whilst maintaining punch and clarity.

The dedicated 'punch' parameter is also particularly useful.


The drum section is incredibly powerful and IMHO terribly underrated. You have access to all of the synth parameters (more or less) for each of the 16 drum parts in a kit. So you can choose from PCM waveforms, or synthesize analog-style using the normal waveforms, you can bring in both filters for some resonant madness. You can use waveshaping to add grit or take the sound somewhere else completely. Then use the three envelopes to control all of these and make it incredibly detailed and dynamic.

[TechnoMusic]

Thanks for that X-Trade. Consider me convinced

So one more quick question. I know the Radias is 4 part multi timbral, so could I have 1 bass and 3 drum/percussion kits going on at once? OR is it 3 synth parts and 1 drum kit maximum?

[X-Trade]

You can only have one actual (16 part fully configured) drum kit, but you can get more out of it by making timbres that route key tracking to the drum PCM samples (you can use them in normal synth program timbres, great for physical modelling and linear synthesis). But there are only two step sequencers anyway. Of course you can work around that too, to an extent.


The Radias is a very powerful synthesizers and there are lots of ways to go about doing things on it.

The four timbres aren't 'programs' though. A 'program' on the Radias is actually a setup of those (up to) four timbres. And all of their parameters are unique to that program, so there's no 'sharing' involved. You can copy timbres easily from other programs though, for example if you like the bass timbre from something, you can get it into your new program.

The only resource that is referenced or 'shared' are the drum kits. There are I think up to 32 drum kits.

[TechnoMusic]

So Could I do key splits for example where each of the splits had 1 of the 4 voices assigned, each voice being a different synthesised percussion sound?

[X-Trade]

Yes. You can split and layer the timbres any way you like. You can set them to respond to different MIDI channels. You can assign them to different outputs, etc.

But as I said if you want to use a range of the sampled drums, you can create a basic drum kit from a normal timbre too. Using a drum kit and just one of those would give you a very wide coverage of different sounds across the whole keyboard.

[gjvti]

From what I've heard so far the Radias sounds pretty nice. I was thinking of getting a radias to supplement my NI Maschine for making minimal and detroit techno. Does anyone here have experience with the Radias for this style of music?

Id probably be using it mainly for bass and synthesised percussion. Good investment? How is the bass end?

For minimal techno/experimental sounds you may want to check out elektron monomachine as well... although as synth radias is better I think, monomachine is more versatile/universal