On the mod options - cant remember how much it has - some rediculous number of envelopes and LFOs assignable to pretty much anything. Badly let down on the multi-sample front by lack of crossfades between zones and layers so for eg velocity transition between samples sound very obvious - no real way to soften them up. Sample side -ok as a sampler - actually sound quality wise its better than many. Stacks of modulation options, but otherwise no modern VA bells and whistles really.įM side pretty good too - completely free form routing, again loads of mod sources. Filters are so so - better than many VAs but nothing like a waldorf or virus, but that probabl a matter of taste. The VA side has pretty good sounding oscs - actually quite meaty for a VA. Its a board with loads of really good features and mostly very good internal bits, but a very poorly thought out whole. I have an 8HD and TBH it gets mostly used a controller now. They don't sound anything like a Casio keyboard, but anyone who really wants to find out, I'll swap my Casio MTK541 for a Fusion any time, any place, any whereīTW - who says Alesis are on their last legs ? Maybe they might withdraw from the synth market but that is not where their profit is, they are very successful still at drumpads, drum machines and audio interfaces like the IO26. I know one real popular internet multi instrumentalist who still uses the Fusion for 90% of his keyboard sounds, preferring it to several good vstis he has.

Their design isn't everyone's cup of tea but they compare to at least the cut down Triton LE or TR series, they have a lot of good bread and butter synth sounds, that make it suited for live performance and a reasonable keyboard. The openlabs NEKO is an unusual concept, I mean Roland and Yamaha etc don't allow 3rd party virtual fx either, and they can be easily applied in your DAW.

That notion even was going out out of fashion not long after the Korg M1, although it briefly was revived (in theory at least) in the Karma (nobody I know who owns a Karma actually renders their final demo mix with it, they export the audio tracks into a DAW). I don't think anyone thinks of a workstation as a good production suite anyway these days, eveyone just renders out audio into a DAW.

Alesis io26 drums