Korg Monotron Duo

The Monotron Duo is a cool little box with plenty of fun sounds in it. Just don't expect too much from it. Adding a second oscillator and an x-mod to the original monotron design provides more cool sounds and possibilities. The filter is the same and sounds very juicy and breaks up really nicely at extreme resonance settings. Plus, you can use the filter to mangle any outside source you plug into it too! This is a real analog synth, so it sounds very alive and a little unpredictable.

I feel that it's a bit of a mix between a toy, and effect box and a real instrument. The filter, the oscillators and the sound are great, but a couple of things prevent me from taking it too seriously. Firstly, the little ribbon keyboard is pretty hard to play if you want to play melodies with it. The second thing is the noisy output, leaving a moderate amount of hiss to everything coming out of it.

I'd describe it as a cool gadget that can add spice to your music, or be fun to just play around with and create all sorts of weird and wonderful sounds. Can't beat the price considering it's fully analog!

for the price it is amazing, lots of fun, running external audio thru the filter is a nice bonus. the only negative is the noise, there is a constant loud hiss which is due to the nature of the circuit design. it wont be a problem for everyone but it was for me. its most noticeable when the filter is nearly closed, which makes using the filter as a studio production effect not an option, for me anyway.

if you have the patience you could record samples of each note and use a noise analyzer/reducer on each sample to clean it up. then use a sampler for poly action!

the cross modulation can give some really big and aggresive techno pads when both oscillators are slightly detuned.

this tiny Korg would be a perfect introduction to analog synths, I have owned some classics in the past and sold them all but buying Monotron Duo brought back my love for synths!