[cJ0th]

Korg has to be my favorite synthesizer company atm. They really hit the sweet spot of great aesthetics and usability. The sound is, of course, a matter of taste. The monologue is more mid-rangy than you'd expect from an analogue synth but I guess it has its place and, more importantly, it gives the synth a unique character. Personally I think the market is over-saturated with emulations of classics.

Someone else mentioned that the Monologue seems too limited and I think that's the wrong way to look at it. What counts, imo, is that a synth has a certain something that makes you want to be creative with it. The monologue/minilogue does that for me. While there is a place for complex synths, too many knobs can turn you from intuitive playing to abstract thinking which is not necessarily what you want as a musician. An extreme example: There are more people who made a career out of tweaking a 303 or a Moog than there are people who did so by (actually) programming a dx7 or a modular system.

[baldfat]

I am of the mindset that the really interesting world is software synths. I love all the tools and sounds out there.

I use to buy chips for chip tune sound and own a few hardware synths. Now software rules for me.

[filoeleven]

I went with softsynths for a while, and you certainly get a wild variety of sonic possibilities for a lot less money. They are fantastic for sound sculpting. If I was going to do a movie soundtrack, or sound design for games or something, I would likely rely on them almost exclusively.

However I found myself really missing the immediacy of knobs and buttons, especially when I got back into playing my Korg MS-2000 with other people. That's not a true analog synth, but it has a front panel that is comparable to them. I have used MIDI controllers to try to get the same kind of feeling from a softsynth, but there's something to be said for having your control surface's layout match that of your synth--I never had the same kind of intuition about keying in or tweaking a sound via MIDI controller as I do with the Korg.

I dream of an interface that can be physically rearranged so that its knobs and sliders mirror the layout onscreen. Like a tactile touchscreen. A good synth's signal flow can be understood by "reading" its control layout, whether it's hardware or software, and for me at least, there is a huge loss when mentally mapping a well-designed interface to a boring row of eight unlabeled knobs.

[gtani]

Knobby synth (ms2k, sh201, jp8k or 8080, Supernova, ESQ1, DW6k/8k, AX60, KS4, AN1X etc etc) + knobby/easily mapped controller (i use Axioms and Novation SL Mark 2 even tho the pots/faders/encoders have proved not especially reliable) is a great combination.

(And when korg/roland/Yamaha/teenage/Waldorf/DSmith come out with new stuff, i'll spend some time on sonicState's youtube channel and the forums (Wigglers, Slutz, /r/Synthesizers) to see what the excitement's about.

[baldfat]

I know this is 4 days late BUT have you looked at Native Instruments' keyboards? They are made to solve just this issue with their software.

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/keyb...

[return0]

What are the best software synths that map easily to midi keybords?

[TheOtherHobbes]

There are so many. Some popular options -

Free and probably not easy: PD; SuperCollider; Csound; ChucK

Not free: Arturia Suite; NI Reaktor, Massive, Absynth; Serum; Sylenth; Nexus; Spire

They all have a different sound. Some are modular, some are straight analogue clones, some are hybrids.

I used to design analogue synth hardware. Now I design non-analogue software. The software does a lot more, is vastly less expensive, takes up much less space, is easier to keep clean, and much easier to move. :)