Ambient jam with the Sequential Take 5

video upload by Jay Hosking

"A live ambient track performed entirely on the Sequential Take 5, using only the on-board effects.

The Sequential Take 5 is not revolutionary in any particular way: it's a five-voice, subtractive, analog polysynth with on-board effects. But no matter how I look at it, the Take 5 is clearly the current best first choice if you're looking to buy a versatile analog synth that can do it all. It's got fantastic build quality, good keybed with full-sized keys and aftertouch, and on-board effects that sound better to my ears than others in its range. Its oscillators and filter are good, and its bass response is stronger than most polysynths I've played with. The mod matrix is simple to use but has plenty of depth. One of the effects is a high-pass filter, which allows you to carve out the midrange for your pad work. The filter drive doesn't offer much, but the separate distortion adds a lot. The layout is intuitive, workflow is fast, and you can get to making patches with very little effort.

I've got synths I like more for bass, pads, and leads, but I've got no one synth that can do all of them this well. This was a pad patch I made with some vibrato, "vintage" fluctuations in tuning and envelopes, the bucket-brigade-style delay, long reverb, and a nice slow set of envelopes on the filter and amp. I started playing and this song came out, a good example of how the sounds can inspire.

If you've got a bunch of synths already, you probably don't need this one. (I mean, let's be honest that we don't need any of them.) But if you're looking for that one synth that can play a lot of roles really well, the Take 5 would be the one I'd recommend.

Thanks for listening."