Alesis MICRON Analog Modeling Synthesizer Best Quality

I quote from the Micron's manual:

"All Micron patterns have four beats per bar. You can still create odd-meter rhythms. It just takes a little calculation and a willingness to ignore the tempo indications given by the [tap] button. For instance, one way to create a 3/4 feel is to combine a length of 1/2 bar with a grid of 24 steps..."

It is this limitation that has caused me to return my Alesis Micron keyboard, much more than the firmware flaw that causes tones to stick on when certain memory functions (i.e., "revert-to-stored") are employed while notes are being played, with the only resolution available being to power the machine off. (My Micron also came with a somewhat bent body, which was another petty irritant that I could mostly ignore.)

There are two settings one can fiddle with to try to work out an odd time signature on the keyboard, and it's true that a few calculations and quite a lot of tinkering allowed me create a 5/4 metronome and from that build a rhythm and background groove in 5/4. However, what if I want to change time signatures? Or what if I want to create a pattern in, say, 11/8? Not possible, unless I create two patterns and manually alternate between them, which won't allow me to play as complex a lead part over the top of the groove -- but there is no good reason I can think of why that sort of limitation should be thrust upon me. I can't imagine that an average software programmer couldn't increase my options with just a couple lines of code. For any musicians who are less obsessed with odd time signatures than I am, I should mention that it took me almost as much work to build a 3/4 pattern as the 5/4 one. Now, in my experience, there's quite a lot of music in the world that has been composed in 3/4. It seems weird to program this arbitrary everything-divisible-by-four rule into the keyboard to hamper rhythmic/metric creativity. Stranger still is the fact that, while a simple bar of 3 quarter notes is not available, a bar of a single quarter note divided into 32 "steps" is. I have trouble understanding how a pattern the length of only half or a quarter of a bar could be more useful than a full bar with an unusual number of beats. Very frustrating. And what is this about ignoring the [tap] button, which exists to provide a constant tempo for the musician? I don't want to have to ignore the tempo indicator if I'm trying to play something in any time signature other than 4/4. I want the [tap] button to continue providing me a useful service.

Otherwise, cool design, some great sounds and quite a lot of pretty useless ones, an immense number of tools for tweaking the built-in sounds, and a really elegant interface for doing it. Unlike some reviewers, I found the single control knob to work incredibly well. There were a handful of firmware limitations that I had to work around, but every complex gadget has a learning curve, and ultimately I found a solution for every issue except the time signature one.

On the other hand, here are some additional downsides:

All memory is internal, which means that once you've created a certain number of saved patterns, etc., you either have to spit them out via MIDI and start programming over them, or simply skip the MIDI step and delete your past work. A memory card slot would have been very welcome.

I kept finding that anything I played on the right hand got transposed up an octave when I tried to play it back with the same starting not. I can only assume that the Micron is automatically shifting all recorded material as if it had been played with the root note in the octave above middle C (or some such thing - I never managed to figure out what was going on there). There are ways to get the playback back in the desired octave, but I'd prefer that the octave I played in initially was the default octave.

The metronome that plays behind every pattern as you record it is infinitely adjustable, but you can't save multiple metronome settings (rather, you can't select what plays behind the pattern, it's always the pattern labeled "* Metronome") so you have to rebuild the metronome every time you make a serious change in rhythm/meter.

Overall I think this keyboard needs a great deal more improvement. The external design and the interface are great, but there are a number of firmware/hardware limitations that make the Alesis Micron much less desirable.Get more detail about Alesis MICRON Analog Modeling Synthesizer.