News - MacBeth, MFB, COTK And Their Keys

MacBeth, MFB, COTK And Their Keys

You may find these brand names in the list of keyboards only if you’re completely lost in the world of musical instruments and don’t really know what you’re doing. Although you might see them as well if you take a wrong turn deliberately and don’t miss the right turnoff – it doesn’t look like the mainstream. When these companies launched the keyboards everyone who knew them got as interested as if they were watching a shooting star and didn’t have a clue about what was going on. Fanatical followers of the authentic old school sound MacBeth and Club of the Knobs decided to embody their ideas into a popular instrument casing.

MacBeth Elements Synthesizer

COTK C950 Polyklavier

MFB Dominion 1

The intransigent MacBeth shared its concept with us demonstrating how a simple even a bit austere synthesizer can sound pushing the modular-system-like volume out of Vortex, but it’s MacBeth Elements Synthesizer what grabs our attention: non-standard dynamic keyboard, 3 voltage controlled oscillators, crazy – according to the designer – filter, cross modulation, temperature compensated VC low frequency oscillator/oscillator, envelope generators dedicated to filter and amplifier sections and tape delay simulator with an impressive parameter control set.

Club of the Knobs doesn’t recognize sampling, mixing and additive synthesis and you might want to have a look at its keyboard – Polyklavier features 4 octaves with 2 polyphony modes, 3 mono modes, all the unpredictable arpeggio combinations, modulation wheel, pitch bend and a low pass filter.

MFB completes this peculiar trio offering its paraphonic Dominion 1 with 3 analog oscillators, analog and digital ring modulation, frequency modulation, noise generator, multimode filter, big patch memory (definitely inherited from brand’s modular synthesizers), 3 LFOs and 3 envelope generators.

Published: 09:25 12.08.2016