OT: review (or something like that) of the Paragon Drum Synth
2009-12-26 by jesper
I've had a few Q's regarding the Paragon Systems four channel drum synth I won on th'bay recently. I had just tested it with pads and headphones up til now and wasn't too impressed by the "piouws" and "boings" but hooked it up in the studio today, fed it with a simple sequence of triggers and started fiddling with the knobs. This odd english fellow is hiding some potential under the black skin. But before diving into that I want to leave a comment that tend to concern most machines of english make... British engineers must be crazy! :) Or how do you explain a 19" rack unit that have rack ears, but no pre-drilled holes, is something like 3½ rack units high and whos netto width will _maybe_ slip in between the rack rails... if you're lucky (mine didn't, by a millimeter). Morons! Soundwise it's four identical channels in original, though one was known to be a bit defective and one proved to be either modified, defective (in a positive way) or just tweaked differently inside than the other three. More of this later... Each channel has a noise section and a simple VCO section. Noise controls include what you'd expect: pitch, peak (filter), decay and volume. VCO is made up of pitch, sweep, decay and volume. Sweep is only from high to low frequencies and not the reverse or both would've been nice. There are no modulation source available (except live tweaking) and the only other controls are the sensitivity inputs. This sounds quite crappy if you just read the specs, but when tweaking and testing a while I soon found out that this is the type of machine that is lousy when it comes to the things it was designed for. So no snappy techno kicks, no tight snares and quite lame hihats. But when taken beyond those demands, exploring the other end of the sonic palette, here's pure mayhem hidden. The oscillator drops looooow. I can get the cones in the studio speakers moving, without me hearing anything. There are also good stuff in the noise itself that makes it anything but the average white noise you're used to. It sounds very uneven with accented frequencies in the low and mid spectrum. My unit was said to have a broken noise section in one of the channels. I might fix this one day though I like the short burst of noise it can add now and it worked really well as an accented hihat. But the other odd channel have a noise section that self-oscillates in the most vicious way, unlike the other channels. This can be combined and tuned with the oscillator for a fleshy ringmod effect. Bad and lovely indeed. I hope this is the same on other units. I had my doubts when I won the auction, but this one is a keeper. :D -- electronically yours, jesper - -- --- ---- ----- ---- --- -- - www.electronic-obsession.se www.myspace.com/machinepop