The Akai Miniak Song

Published on Feb 12, 2016 ProckGnosis

"To skip the babble and beer preamble and hear the song, go to 2:00. To hear the isolated patches used in the song, skip to 6:00.

Nice little melody mostly in 5/8, with a middle section in 6/8. All sounds from the Akai Miniak, including the drums. My attempt at doing some proggy electronica, I guess. Majority of sounds are presets from the synth, with 2 or 3 being slightly tweaked or modded from presets.

The Akai Miniak is an 8-voice, 8-part multitimbral, virtual analog synth, with the same voice engine as the Alesis Ion, Alesis Micron, and the VA part of the Alesis Fusion. It's a pain in the butt to program without some software, but with 6 options for modulating the sound on the fly (pitch wheel, 2 mod wheels, and 3 assignable knobs), it's still capable of plenty of interactive, real-time modulation. Lastly it has some seriously deep programming options and a great bunch of filter models to choose from. And just to emphasize again, those seriously deep programming options are a pain to get to without software.

Though the raw oscillators are missing a bit of that analog presence, it is VERY much an acceptable substitute in a live environment, and even fine for most studio applications.

It's a shame Alesis/Akai has gotten out of the synth business, because they produced some decent sounding stuff. Yeah, they still do MIDI controllers, but it would be nice if they could have used some of the expertise that built the Andromeda and even the Fusion to carry on and improve on some of the earlier ideas. But they didn't. Oh well. So it goes..."

Miniak's on eBay