Jered Flickinger, the founder of Future Retro, was on deck at the Big City Music booth to show several great new products he has been working hard on, one of which is the Mondovox midi control device. What we see pictured are 3 Future Retro XS mono synthesizers stacked in a rack and a Mondovox unit in the top rung of the rack. The XS mono synths can only play a single note at a time which is just fine for some things, but sometimes you want to play a chord and have notes overlap for more complex sounds, enter the Mondovox! With the Future Retro Mondovox you can play a chord on your midi keyboard and each note of the chord will send to different synthesizers, taking 3 mono synthesizers and making them effectively a giant layered poly synthesizer! In one of the examples that Jered had setup, he had a midi keyboard sending midi to the Mondovox which then would split the chord played into the 3 individual notes sent out to each of the mono synths, mixing the 3 mono synth audio signals together we then get a nice thick chord. The Monodovox is not limited to working with only mono synths, you can string poly synths of all kinds together as well, making a poly poly synth so to speak. A person could play chords across a Moog Sub Phatty, 2 Dave Smith Tetras, a Nord Lead 4, a Buchla Music Easel, and an Elektron Sidstation all stacked together if they were so inclined, ANY synthesizer that can be controlled with midi can be part of your huge layered sound with the Mondovox. The Mondovox has several functions for adjusting how exactly you would like the voice allocation to occur per synth, routing setups can be saved as well for more complex installations that may change often. Stacking several synthesizers together to create chords in this manner used to require multi tracking and a lot of time in recording each individual part, in real time you can play or send a sequence and the Mondovox will control up to 256 different mono synths at a time, that is a lot of polyphony!
Article by
Natefrogg
