Are they terrible? Limited? Boring? Too big? Don't play well (in tune) with others?
I was thinking about one to go with the Spectravox I have.
Thoughts?

noodlehut.bandcamp.com


For my taste I experienced the subharmonicon way to hard to play with other instruments.
Because of the subharmonic character it can be hard to get musical results if you dont have a deep understanding of music theory, intervals, tunings and stuff.

If you do just noodleing and experimental music it might be a good playground but dont expect to get regular music out of it immediatly.

Greetings

Chris


It's a fun noise maker and experimental machine. But you have to go on the instrument's journey, rather than take the instrument on your journey. If you have a musical idea in your head and want to make it come out of a speaker, the subharmonicon has a pretty difficult workflow to make that happen.

You can get a really thick tone of out it, due to the architecture of its sub-oscillators, but like mentioned already, it takes a little bit of math and music theory (or just a lot of tinkering) to find the proper ratios for a properly harmonious stack of subharmonics. I also like that it has separate VCA and VCF envelopes, it'd be nice if the Mother-32 had that (not sure how they'd fit the controls on that panel though).

It has 2x 4-step sequencers. That's limiting in a way that can be creativity-inducing, but the fact that they're only controllable by liiiiiittle tiny potentiometers makes it difficult to dial in or perform live. The quantization options don't help either: You've got chromatic (reasonable, but it means you need to be careful for dissonant out-of-scale notes if your other instruments are tuned to a diatonic scale), and a few different xenharmonic scales (which can be cool but are really hard to play with other instruments unless you've gone all-in to microtonal world).

The rhythm/gate generation aspect of it is very cool. It's a great polyrhythm machine, just an awful lot of HP for that job :P