Novation MiniNova Mini-Keys Synthesizer

I bought a MiniNova last year because I thought the three oscillators, dual filters, and effects engines looked fantastic. While this thing sounds great out of the box. It absolutely does not program from ANY software except Reaper. I'm an Ableton user and the programming plugin was completely pixelated and horrendously unusable. Not even partially usable. I contacted Novation customer support and all they told me was that it works solely in Reaper. This is a MAJOR shortcoming. All in all if you're looking for cool presets this COULD be useful but for a sound designer such as myself I am absolutely unable to program this synth without diving into a new DAW. With so many synth options on the market these days I simply cannot be bothered. I returned it immediately upon hearing back from Novation customer support.

Versatile! Portable! Powerful! But the factory-shipped presets are from 2012. I updated with the new 2022 update "ultimate patches" to get modern sounds, and was surprised how good they were, especially the guitars. Thank you Novation!

The sound is the thing. I am constantly impressed at how this little gem holds up against all my soft synths and my other hardware. It's very versatile. I prefer the sounds on pads and leads, but overall it's a very capable VA engine. And the 18 voice polyphony is hard to beat. There are other AWESOME synths in this price range, but many of them are lacking a bunch of the features that make this little monster so capable. It's not true analog, but with keys, a vocoder, arpeggiator, onboard editing, eight modulation slots, presets and user patches, the free plugin for DAW control and the free librarian? This is definitely enough to keep someone busy for a long time, the sound is good, but the built in presets feel a little dated. Check their website product page or search the web to find TONS of additional presets or use the editor and design your own. All in all, this was my first Novation product and I've been impressed enough that I would definitely buy more from them.

Wonderful beyond all my expectations. Vastly powerful, with rich, vibrant, luxuriant sounds to fit any style of music, from heavy metal to orchestral/classical. A stunning achievement in music technology. Highest recommendation and a great value.

This should cost 3x what it does based on the sound quality, live performance features, and innovation. The "Animate" feature is brilliant (you can assign 8 temporary tweaks to patches at the touch of a button, the tweak reverts away as you remove the button). The included patches are sufficient, and it is very easy to load 3rd party sound banks you get from the internet. Another great feature is the MiniNova Editor. It's a VST that you load in your DAW; then you have an outstanding interface where you can edit ALL parameters in the synth. It more than makes up for the tedious included menu system. I hate to even mention this because the synth is one of my favorites, but new users should not get discouraged with the on board menus until they download the free Editor plugin.

This has a great sound engine that his a few layers deep in the menus. This would NOT prevent me from buying the piece though - once you get into it, it's fairly logical, but you do have to scroll through some menus to create/alter sounds and it's not always fast. Also, there are some MIDI weirdness - I can't see to find a way to use it as both a sound module and MIDI controller - I just want it to send and play MOD wheel back, for instance. Can't figure out how to do it - it could be a simple toggle I am missing. Otherwise, this is a fantastic tool for modern electronic music. Tons of useful presets covering a full range of sounds so if you have a sound in mind, it's easy to go find it, then you can tweak to your hearts content. This is critical feature if you are creating and can't get distracted by creating something new from scratch. The vocoder is very useful, and keys are light and easy, and the unit can generate some big bass. Beautiful package for a low price. Outputs are clean so no dialing out white noise, either.