Alternately, you can switch the Timbre Wolf to unison mode and have all four voices stacked on the sequence for the first voice. Tapping on a Select button switches the sequence to that voice, so you can repeat the process up to four times, creating fairly intricate patterns rather quickly. As you hit keys, the appropriate LEDs light up on the 808-style sixteen-step strip above the keyboard.Īt first, I thought the sequencer was going to be a strictly monophonic affair, but glancing up at the synth section, I realized that each voice could have its own discrete sequence. The basics are obvious: Hit Record and Play and start riffing. In fact, I was up and running with it in just a few minutes of unboxing the unit. The Timbre Wolf’s four-track sequencer is surprisingly intuitive and capable. Unfortunately, there’s no ability to save these patches as presets, which is a bit of a shame in this context. Or, you can quickly set up each voice identically for a more traditional approach. The fact that each voice can have its own sound gives chord comping a really unique texture. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.Īs for polyphonic operation, it’s just a matter of switching the mode to poly and playing chords. And if you want to go really big, you can twist the Howl knob, which not only adds a megaton of distortion but amplifies the overall volume to a dangerous degree. The quirks of the Timbre Wolf, like the quirks of the Rhythm Wolf, are part of its sound, and with all four voices layered and detuned, that sound can be incredibly fat at times. No one will ever mistake a Moog for an ARP, and that’s the key here. After all, many early analog synths had flat-out weird designs (Korg Sigma and Delta, anyone?), but that didn’t keep their sound from being extremely useful, and more importantly, identifiable. None of these issues feels like a deal-breaker in the larger context of the Timbre Wolf. Adding a touch of gain boost in the filter circuit could have addressed this, but we’ll just chalk it up to the synth’s identity in this case. What’s more, it would have been great if each oscillator included an octave switch, which would have added some range to the Timbre Wolf’s massive lead sounds.Īs for the filter, increasing the resonance beyond 60 to 70 percent really thins out the sound in a way that’s cool if you’re looking for pseudo-highpass effects, but misses the target for sounding like a true 303. A wider range would have allowed for interval tunings in unison mode for those oh-so-trendy stacked parallel seventh chords. For example, each oscillator’s tuning knob only covers the detuning range-basically a semitone in either direction. That said, there are still a couple of caveats to Akai’s implementation. Ultimately, it’s like having a collection of four 303’s that can serve as four monosynths, a polysynth with rotating voice allocation for Mono/Poly and Oberheim tricks, or stacked and detuned for a massive lead sound. That is, there’s a single saw/square oscillator that feeds a lowpass resonant filter, followed by a simple decay ramp envelope that can be applied to both the amp and cutoff. Bottom line-Akai’s new oscillators are now on par with the rest of the analogue market.Īs for the architecture of each voice, the Timbre Wolf’s parameter array is strongly reminiscent of the Roland TB-303. Don’t believe me? Grab the tuner in Logic or Ableton and play a C in every octave and ponder the results. And it’s worth mentioning here that many of your favourite vintage monosynths include some form of tuning instability. In my tests, I was both impressed and relieved that Akai has addressed this issue and can confirm that any tuning deviation is well within a tolerable range for an analogue synth. These voices are actually in tune, and Akai has included a voice-calibration function that retunes the voices should their drift become noticeable over time. Each of the Timbre Wolf’s four voices consists of the same mini-synth found in the Rhythm Wolf, with one notable exception.
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