However, there are still many people who prefer hardware, and it would seem that Dave Smith is one of them. If you like hardware and you like keyboards, check out the PEK — it's a deep, unique-sounding synth with vast sonic potential.

A major innovator in the hi-tech music world since the mid-'70s, he designed the first truly programmable synth, Sequential Circuits' Prophet 5, as well as the monophonic Pro 1, Prophet 10, the gorgeous T8, and many others. The Evolver began as a mono desktop unit, then became polyphonic, and now there's a polyphonic keyboard version. It's also worth pointing out the four-voice limitation here — each of the four parts is, of course, strictly monophonic.Combo mode is by far the most entertaining, as it can be used to realise complete compositions. Despite having developed the world's first software synth (Seer Systems' Interestingly, his objection is not so much one of sound quality, but more to do with the long-term 'value' of software. It drained our resources, so by the time we pulled back to professional instruments, it was too late. Inserting a cable into these (balanced) quarter-inch jacks removes that signal from the main stereo outputs, as it should in my opinion. Furthermore, good labelling makes it perfectly clear how the signal flows through the instrument, especially with regard to showing the various feedback paths that occur in each voice.Other functions, such as Envelope 3 and the four LFOs, are found at the top left of the panel and the four step sequencers are to be found at the top right. Each PEK voice gets its own stereo output, so in addition to the headphone jack and main stereo outs, there are a further eight jacks (two per individual voice), plus a stereo pair for the audio inputs, then the power connector, connectors for sustain pedal and two continuous footswitches, the de rigeur MIDI trio (plus an extra connector for daisy-chaining other Evolvers and Poly Evolvers), and finally, those completely gratuitous (but very impressive-looking) blue LEDs!It'll look great on stage... the PEK in reduced lighting conditions. 4. I guess it's only a matter of time before synth nerds in the audience will be guessing which patch is being used based on the respective rates of those LEDs...The PEK has three main operating modes: Program, Combo and Global. I am a bit at odds with some of the presets, many of which attempt to sound 'modern' simply by slapping on distortion rather too often for my liking, but this is easily rectified by, well, turning down the Distortion knob. The Filter Cutoff control, for example, requires a few turns to create a full manual filter sweep, and the Resonance, LFO Rate, and Filter Env Amount controls, as well as others, seem to require more turns than we're perhaps used to.Reservations about the encoders aside (which might well not bother anyone else — it's something of a personal gripe), there is generally a dedicated control or switch for each function, which is great. But these compromises are understandable, as it would be unfeasible to provide dedicated controls for all of these.In most other respects, this is very much a 'no-compromise' design — Dave Smith could easily have tucked a few of the dedicated functions away on a menu-based programming system, and the PEK could probably survive without some of the 'eye-candy' like, for example, the master octave LED indicators, the pulsating blue LEDs for each of the four LFOs (especially those duplicated on the rear panel! There's no way to increase this polyphony with, say, voice expansion cards, although you can daisy-chain multiple Poly Evolvers to achieve this.Whether this is an issue for you is up to you to decide.
Others are 'free-running' quadra-timbral sequences over which there is no control other than by moving the front-panel knobs relating to the currently selected part — transposition of these from the keyboard is not possible, which is a shame. There is no denying that the Combo mode throws up many interesting musical ideas that might not be apparent when working with a more conventional multitrack sequencer.At first glance, the PEK's control panel looks pretty straightforward (and indeed, for the most part, it is) but I was surprised to find continuous encoders for all the controls. I am not denying that there are few areas (notably modulation) where you have to figure things out (and here, a larger LCD might have have helped) but overall, this is generally a gratifying synth to use despite the programming depth and complexity available to you.Sometimes it feels as if software synths are gradually displacing their hardware forerunners, and might one day cause them to disappear from studios altogether. Others stack Programs or create keyboard splits. Each voice has two digital 'vector' oscillators and two analogue oscillators per voice which are fed to an analogue low-pass filter (the digital oscillators by way of a digital-to-analogue converter) and an analogue voltage-controlled amplifier. Dave Smith Instruments Mopho X4 (controls) The garish little Mopho desktop analogue synth certainly turned heads when it was launched in late 2008 - not just for its standout colour but also for its standout sound and versatile feature set, and all for less than £300. This was at the encouragement of In 2015, Smith announced the Prophet-6, described as a spiritual successor to the Prophet-5.


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