Digital Modelled Analogue Synthesiser Keyboard

The digital modelled analogue synthesis world is reasonably well populated with products such as the Novation Supernova and Supernova 2, the Access Virus Range, the Nord Lead and a whole host of others, to say nothing of the range of VST and DX instruments available. One of the latest additions to this proliferation of products is the successor to the fully analogue Alesis Andromeda, the Ion – so how does it measure up? Smooth and refined or a bit rough and in need of ion-ing?

The Design

The beast itself sports a rather small 49 key keyboard, three wheels, pitch and two mod, and a huge array of buttons and knobs. The knobs are a variety of colours and have a rubberised feel to them. They are pretty nice actually and serve their purpose

rather well. They are 360 degree knobs (they go all the way round) and are very grabbable. The buttons are almost disproportionately small, and very clicky, but do the job, the mod wheels are smooth and have the wondrous attribute of glowing more and more red as you turn them up (you can switch this off if you want). The screen is a small flat LCD display 160 by 160 pixels, it is fine for me but the viewing angle of it is not adjustable, which could leave the occasional user a bit miffed. The keyboard itself is a very bouncy light synth-weighted affair and I have to admit to preferring playing it with my balance weighted keyboard on my Yamaha S90.

In use the design is okay in parts and not so okay in others – I have already mentioned the keyboard which is not to my taste and also whilst on the subject has no aftertouch although it does have velocity and release velocity. The aftertouch thing is a real shame because there are some lovely standard patches where an aftertouch enabled keyboard creates some really quite excellent sound augmentation. You can assign mod wheel 2 to aftertouch which is a workaround I guess, but not so great if you want a two handed chord with aftertouch modulation.

The mod wheels and pitch wheel are really nice and smooth. Most of the knobs are smooth turning except for the clear plastic one by the screen which has a notchy feel to it.

The knobs are well spaced but because of the screen functionality, which jumps to display whichever control you are amending and the fact that the knobs are high resolution and extremely sensitive, means that a brush with the hand can often mean you end up looking at something you had not intended. You can turn this functionality off, but then you lose some of its benefits. The buttons may not be to everybody’s taste, I find them small, but they are positive enough to not be a hindrance. The other annoyance is that some of the controls are shared, rather than being dedicated. This is not so bad once you get used to it, but it does mean you have to observe the lights and read the words on the panel, which is not the clearest in the world, particularly if you are using it in low light level conditions. Some of the buttons glow at different brightness levels depending upon the setting they have attached to them, I find this a bit odd and not very informative.

The overall front panel layout is fairly logical and follows the path of creating a patch, through oscillators, mixer, modulation, filters and envelopes. I have no major problem with it.

The back panel (segment shown above) has stereo outs and an extra set of outs on 24 bit balanced TRS jacks, sockets for control and sustain pedals plus stereo audio input sockets, which are also 24 bit balanced TRS jacks. Power is by a standard kettle lead – no wall-warts here. There is a standard MIDI in/out/thru trio and a headphone jack. Strange placement for a headphone jack though.

The Engine

There are oodles of chips inside the Ion, the manual states that the DSP power is an Alesis originated design, although I have read that the main CPU is a Motorola chip, augmented by 9 further chips of Alesis originated design.

In terms of real world performance what I have read about the specs, rather than gleaned from my owner’s manual, suggest that this is a very powerful machine. Why then does it only have 8 note polyphony. What was that? 8 note polyphony. Yes, that’s right a total of 8 notes at any one time to divide up into 4 potential layers. Hmmm, well the energy of the processors certainly is not going into that is it. To be honest this is a really sore point for some users. If you want to produce massive 4 layered patches you cannot even play a simple major triad. The other competitors in the field general perform much better in terms of polyphony, so lets note that down as a minus point for the moment.

There are 3 oscillators per voice which are very editable, they can be tuned, tweaked and transposed to your heart’s content. The waveforms are continuously variable types tweaked with a knob based on saw, sine and square. Oscillators 2 and 3 can be synced to oscillator 1 using two methods hard and soft. Hard causes a snap to zero when Oscillator 1 starts a cycle, soft means that the other oscillators reverse when the waveform starts, which means no hard edges and produces a different overall sound. Oscillators can of course be on or off and also go through a pre mod- pre filter mixer where you can add noise of all types and ring modulation. Pretty conventional really – except that the oscillators can also be used to do Frequency Modulation. This is very cool, but defies description, get your hands on one and twist the knobs and you will see.

The Modulation Matrix

The mod matrix has twelve stages allowing you to assign the various sources (three envelopes and two LFOs plus sample and hold) to various destinations. If you want to know more go to www.alesis.com and download the manual which lists them all. It is fairly conventional and I won’t dwell on it, except to say that it is well specified, covering lots of MIDI controller numbers, value offsets and re-mapping, which you can use, if you wish, to turn a linear input into a really crazy one.

The envelopes are very good and very controllable. They appear on the screen, are edited using a combination of soft buttons and the clear plastic wheel and change shape as you twist the knob. The slopes are adjustable in length and can be changed into curves. If you turn the sustain right up it goes into hold mode and stays on forever. They can set to free run – so you hit a key and it does the full envelope cycle for attack and release no matter how long you hold it. There are so many variations and tweaks that they cannot all be listed here – they are amongst the most adjustable envelopes I have seen.

The Filters

You get two filters per voice, there is a mixer to decide how much raw sound you send to each, there are 17 types and 1 bypass mode. I won’t list them all, they are in the manual and use cunningly coded names which begin with “mg” and “ob” and the like. Whilst they don’t say so, these are obvious references to the types of filters they are trying to emulate. They sound very nice indeed but appreciation of the quality for me took a little time and comparison with my other VA sources, it was not instant, as I am sure it would be with some afficionados.

The Sounds

512 sounds in four colour coded banks. The last (yellow) is designated the User bank, which is a bit odd since you can actually overwrite them all if you want. The Ion starts up with the last sound you had on the screen, which means you can switch off and start up where you left off if you want. Recall is a relatively simple affair, as is saving of patches.

There are some really nice presets, but if you can play them with an aftertouch keyboard. As I said earlier, I play mine with my S90 because you can get some really nice sounds using the aftertouch sensitivity. Overall the sound (unlike the filters to me) was instantly impressive. Smooth and “old” sounding, not digital sounding. To be fair it is reasonable to report some of things I have heard and I have heard many things about the Ion from other users. Some same it lacks bass, some say it lacks top end clarity. Personally, I think it sounds really nice and I don’t think I am easily pleased.

The Effects

The absence of a lot of effects, no, there’s no reverb, hints at why the quality of sound is so good. All the processing capability goes into sound production leaving scant available for other duties. There is a smattering of dynamics and overdrive and distortion, but really you are going to have to rely on a separate box or plug-ins to do effects for you. All effects are set up in Part A – there is no independent effect per part type of thing – you can take a send from parts B to D but that’s all.

The Vocoder

A 40 band vocoder is included in the box. These are fairly commonplace nowadays, but 40 bands is generous and the implementation is a good one. There are some preset vocoder patches which enable fairly quick testing. It is nice, give it a try if you can.

Parts

As already mentioned you can have up to 4 parts (A to D) in a setup, you can save up to 64 set-ups and the Ion will save along with it MIDI settings and channels, controllers and keyboard assignments.

If you want you can layer the parts on top of each other, but remember this seriously limits your polyphony because you will be playing more than one notes per note, if you seem what I mean.

Other things

The keyboard is not up to the standard of a performance synth in my view, so you are more likely to play it on stage via another keyboard than using its own, but there are some nice features to help you. The number of dedicated buttons, enabling you change it from poly to mono and providing ready access to a lot of parameters is useful, as is the ability to adjust the application of the wheels and arpeggiator settings. A great deal of effort has been put into making it sound like an analogue box, even including things like analogue drift which you can change the amount of (analogue circuits used to sometimes behave a bit erratically). All in all it is a very well specified synthesiser.

In Summary

Despite the rubbish effects, the poor keyboard and the teeny tiny buttons I think this is a really nice synthesiser. It sounds great, is very adjustable and a great deal of effort has been made to make it sound analogue. I think that Alesis have done a cracking job in that. The other big plus about it is the price – at about £550 brand new, it is a cracking buy and you could afford a £200 effects box to go with it and still it would cost a lot less than a Virus KC and about the same price as a second hand Supernova II. Sure you get more polyphony with both of those, but other than that it is a personal preference thing on sound quality. I reckon the Ion is right up there in terms of that measure. The only big nasty I have had was upgrading the operating system. It started as a relatively easy “play a MIDI file” type of thing, but took several goes before the machine accepted the upload – unfortunately it takes quite a time deciding if the upload is correct!

So, if you can, get hold of one to try, I think you’ll like it.

Glen Clark bio

I am 36 based in Cambridge and whilst I have always been a music lover, came to recording and performing quite late in life. I have appeared on stage in a variety of amateur productions and over a period of time have assembled a respectable, if small, studio set up and have learned the basics of recording and production. In the process I have had my fair share of technical mishaps which have been a valuable learning experience.

I play the piano and keyboards (badly) and do vocals of varying kinds, which is how I started as a performer on stage. Now I write and compose my own songs as well as assisting others in setting up their recording set ups.

You can write to me about anything on my reviews at glen@abstractfriends.com I am happy to take questions on them and happy to discuss and advise on any aspect of recording. Visit my website www.abstractfriends.com under the "services" heading for more info and for more details about my small studio set-up.

Back To Reviews Home