Modal Announces $699 Argon8 Polyphonic Synthesizer (Baby Modal 002?)

Anything about hardware musical instruments.
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Hot on the heels of the Hydrasynth...

https://ask.audio/articles/modal-announ ... ynthesizer

Looks pretty impressive to me at that price. List bellow in case you don't want to click the link.

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.
X32 Desk, i9 PC, S49MK2, Studio One, BWS, Live 12. PUSH 3 SA, Osmose, Summit, Pro 3, Prophet8, Syntakt, Digitone, Drumlogue, OP1-F, Eurorack, TD27 Drums, Nord Drum3P, Guitars, Basses, Amps and of course lots of pedals!

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Yeah, I just got an email from Modal about it. It does look very nice - https://www.modalelectronics.com/argon8/
NOVAkILL : Asus RoG Flow Z13, Core i9, 16GB RAM, Win11 | EVO 16 | Studio One | bx_oberhausen, GR-8, JP6K, Union, Hexeract, Olga, TRK-01, SEM, BA-1, Thorn, Prestige, Spire, Legend-HZ, ANA-2, VG Iron 2 | Uno Pro, Rocket.

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I love the recent swell in hardware over the last several years. We are now starting to see some competitive quality. Exciting times. One day Ill get some time to demo them in store...oh to be young again with expendable income lol.

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Looks really good on paper. Unless I'm missing something are you stuck with the wavetables on board or is there an 'upload your own waves' option?

Edit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3p6dMzyA9U

Are you safe?
"For now… a bit like a fish on the floor"
https://tidal.com/artist/33798849

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MFXxx wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2019 12:51 pm I love the recent swell in hardware over the last several years. We are now starting to see some competitive quality. Exciting times. One day Ill get some time to demo them in store...oh to be young again with expendable income lol.
Yes, some of the most talented and creative designers are definitely being employed with hardware...Behringer is leading the way making quality (analog) synths as cheap as plug ins (with a nod also to IK for the UNO), and there are a glut of new digital hardware synths that are really interesting.

I think the lure of developing new software synths is being somewhat negated with a really saturated (with quality!) market, race to the bottom pricing, subscriptions and of course piracy...
X32 Desk, i9 PC, S49MK2, Studio One, BWS, Live 12. PUSH 3 SA, Osmose, Summit, Pro 3, Prophet8, Syntakt, Digitone, Drumlogue, OP1-F, Eurorack, TD27 Drums, Nord Drum3P, Guitars, Basses, Amps and of course lots of pedals!

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Oh my - that's a pretty instrument. I've always loved Modal's design aesthetics but until recently (Skulpt) etc., haven't paid much attention because of the price (not that their products were overpriced, just high-end). They are doing some great stuff, and I love the 37-key format.

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Filter digital ?

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veloheinz wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2019 7:23 pm Filter digital ?
All digital

The digital filters sound superb, this is high end stuff
X32 Desk, i9 PC, S49MK2, Studio One, BWS, Live 12. PUSH 3 SA, Osmose, Summit, Pro 3, Prophet8, Syntakt, Digitone, Drumlogue, OP1-F, Eurorack, TD27 Drums, Nord Drum3P, Guitars, Basses, Amps and of course lots of pedals!

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Nice video, it looks really good and sounds OK, too.
NOVAkILL : Asus RoG Flow Z13, Core i9, 16GB RAM, Win11 | EVO 16 | Studio One | bx_oberhausen, GR-8, JP6K, Union, Hexeract, Olga, TRK-01, SEM, BA-1, Thorn, Prestige, Spire, Legend-HZ, ANA-2, VG Iron 2 | Uno Pro, Rocket.

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I would love to see a MPE capable version without keyboard. Keyboards are so 20th century...

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Desktop would be nice, but I am sure that they are pitching for those who dismiss Skulpt and CS2 because they haven't got 61 or 88 ultra-high spec keys... I could find space for a few keys like this perhaps where I just won't for a Quantum, Super 6, etc.
Loading own waves ... when you have a huge library... do you need to? And will people have ultra high res samples equivalent to the internals ... or will it be like playing mp3's into a high spec audio system?

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I'd much rather some method of getting sound out of the thing. Of all my desktop synths, the best one - MicroMonsta - is the one I use least because of the hassle of getting it to make a sound. So I much prefer synths with keyboards, even shitty ones like you get on Skulpt and Craft Synth 2.0. The one that gets the most use is Uno, simply because it has the best keyboard.
NOVAkILL : Asus RoG Flow Z13, Core i9, 16GB RAM, Win11 | EVO 16 | Studio One | bx_oberhausen, GR-8, JP6K, Union, Hexeract, Olga, TRK-01, SEM, BA-1, Thorn, Prestige, Spire, Legend-HZ, ANA-2, VG Iron 2 | Uno Pro, Rocket.

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WatchTheGuitar wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2019 12:59 pm Looks really good on paper. Unless I'm missing something are you stuck with the wavetables on board or is there an 'upload your own waves' option?
there is no wavetable import...and it doesnt seem as though they plan to add it with a firmware update either.
ImageImageImage

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chaosWyrM wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 11:06 pm
WatchTheGuitar wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2019 12:59 pm Looks really good on paper. Unless I'm missing something are you stuck with the wavetables on board or is there an 'upload your own waves' option?
there is no wavetable import...and it doesnt seem as though they plan to add it with a firmware update either.
I think I'll probably continue with my current policy of giving fully digital hardware a swerve in favour of in-the-box soft synths because eventually you should be able to do 100% faithful versions of anything digital hardware can do given enough CPU firepower, memory and bandwidth.

Are you safe?
"For now… a bit like a fish on the floor"
https://tidal.com/artist/33798849

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Has anybody seen anything mentioning a target release date? Don't see anything on their website about when it might be available.

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