Modal Electronics has taken the DNA of its $4,495 Modal 002 wavetable synth and packed it into the Argon8, a new synth that costs a far more affordable $699/£579/€649.
This slick-looking machine offers eight voices of polyphony and is packed into a steel and aluminium chassis. It comes with 37 velocity-sensitive full-size keys with aftertouch, and a multitude of sound design features.
Despite its 002 heritage, Modal says that the Argon8 has a completely new sound engine that’s capable of complex synthesis. It also has a class-compliant USB connection, enabling you to use it as part of an integrated setup, and there’s a free software editor for desktop and mobile platforms.
Find out more on the Modal Electronics website. The Argon8 will be available later this year.
Modal Electronics Argon8 features
- True 8 voice polyphony
- Road ready Steel and Aluminium chassis
- 120 carefully crafted wavetables split into 24 banks of 5 morphable waveform sets, covering virtual analogue classics through to cutting edge EDM and many from the original Modal 002 as well as a whole range of mathematically generated tables. Additional PWM bank and 4 noise/modulation banks accessible on Oscillator 2
- 28 static wavetable processors including de-rez, wave folders, wave shapers, phase shapers and rectify that can be applied to the 120 wavetables to give a mind boggling array of permutations and new waveshapes
- 32 high resolution wavetable oscillators, 4 per voice, with 8 types of oscillator modifier including: Phase Mod (FM), Ring Mod, Amp Mod, Hard Sync and Windowed Sync
- FATAR TP9/S Full size 37 key keybed with both velocity and aftertouch
- 1.54 inch large OLED display – that provides instant visual feedback to the user at all times of playing/editing
- Bourns continuous rotary encoders throughout as standard
- A 4-axis joystick that can be assigned to a huge range of modulation destinations and virtually ‘locked’ when desired
- Three dedicated envelope generators for AMP, MOD and FILTER that can be accessed independently or all three simultaneously including negative (reverse) versions.
- Two pole morphing resonant filter
- Waveshaping distortion
- Three incredibly powerful independent and user configurable stereo FX engines that can create sophisticated Delays, lush Reverbs, Flanging, Phasing, and Rich Choruses
- Glide/Portamento with both legato and staccato modes
- Hugely powerful “Mod Matrix” with eight assignable slots with four additional fixed routes, 11 mod sources and 52 destinations
- 500 patch memories, all fully editable and ships with 300 factory programs and 200
- user patch spaces. Patch upload and download through the free MODALapp
- Two Audio rate LFO’s with tempo sync (one poly, one global). Polyphonic LFO can sync to frequency divisions
- Inbuilt sophisticated programmable arpeggiator of 32 steps with rest capability with up to 2048 steps before repeating
- Real time sequencer with number 512 steps with input quantise and four recordable/editable animations
- Multiple keyboard modes, Mono, Poly, Unison 2, unison 4, unison 8, Stack 2 and Stack 4
- All time-based FX, LFO’s and sequencer arpeggio can be either clocked internally or externally
- Sync in/out
- Full size MIDI five pin din sockets
- Full size quarter inch jacks for both audio and external control such as sustain and expression.
- 3.5 mm stereo input with ability to route incoming audio through the FX
- Free dedicated app that works on Mac, PC, iOS, Android and works under VST3 and AU.
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