SleepDeez
Believe The Hype
Alright the guitar center in hollywood set up a 2 hour sit down with the Miko LX (video coming soon as they edit it & send it to me)
At first glance, the board looks complicated, but if you look a little closer you're familiar with everything going on. Navigation was simple, you can have a beat up and going in seconds. It moves rediculously fast, and everything opens as soon as you click it.
Karsyn: This bascially organizes all of your vsts and becomes a rack module. It looks like Xpand! from Pro Tools but on steroids. You can easily layer sounds that you open up to make endless patches from or just use them to sequence. If you have thousands of sounds in your Miko no need to worry. Your stuff will still be separated by sound (strings, brass, guitars, drums etc) no matter which VST it comes from. From the Karsyn you can open up the VST for tweaking or to navigate through the soundbank on the VST.
Stock Sounds: I believe it was called Real Pianos? Well, they sounded very nice, all the sounds that came on board were decent, and the effects onboard are a real real plus.
Sylenth: This was the definite stock surprise. This thing is a monster!! I've never heard a soft synth have such an analog sound. Very warm, very fat over 700 presets, you can easily tweak every sound and save the patch for limitless sounds. You can purchase all of the vst's separate, if you never have intentions of getting the Miko or Neko, make sure you buy Sylenth its a sick synth.
Other notes, I opened sampletank, kontakt, b4 organ and about 60 other vsts at the same time and was still able to record with no latency. The sound card that comes in the Miko is that presonus firebox soundcard or whatever its called. Thats why it comes with Cubase and Sonar as opposed to Pro Tools. When you are getting this thing built YOU choose which soundcard you want in there. You can get whatever you want installed, you just have to ask when its being installed. They can easily install an M-Audio soundcard and you can run M-Powered pro tools on the board. The NEKO board comes with the Delta 1010 soundcard which is already compatible with Pro Tools.
Tech Support: If you install a bad program, or have any problems with the board, you just plug the board up to the internet contact tech support and they can see whats going on in your board and fix the problem, you'll see on the screen the mouse moving around and them troubleshooting your machine.
Mimik: Im sure this is one of the major features everyone wanted to know about. Can you really clone sounds from other keyboards/synths and have them sound the way they sounded on the other board. Well, the answer is yes, and no. While you can clone a sound (completely, aftertouch, all that) the playback engine that plays back these sounds do not compare at all. HOWEVER the files that Mimik turn these sounds into play back in KONTAKT. which is great b/c Kontakt plays the sounds back as they were cloned in. The rep told me, he sold Lil jon his, and he replaced tons and tons of racks that he was trying to rent everytime he was working away from his lab. He's also good friends with jesse carmichael from Maroon 5. His biggest issue was when trying to Mimik his Moog Voyager he didnt like the way it sounded b/c they were playing back from the Mimik play engine, when simply moving the files into a folder and opening them in Kontakt...he was thrilled by it and has cloned tons of vintage keyboards and synths into his.
Bottom Line: THe board has tons of Pros and very few cons if any. Its big and small at the same time, and extremely powerful. I wouldnt say its a must have for everybody, but if you are a tourning, or traveling musician or producer it is a must have. You will appreciate how portable this thing is. Its like taking your entire studio with you in a small bag. I'd prefer this over a souped up laptop, midi controller and interface bc thats simply more pieces to worry about when you can have the whole thing in one piece. Mimik turned out to be legit and with new keyboards always coming out, you're an hour from cloning any new board that drops in the future. FL Studio users..they had FL Studio on there and were running it with tons of plug ins, however you work you can work that way in here. Reason users, you can work reason in here, rewire it and use reason with tons of other soft synths or sounds from the motif, fantom etc. Like i said before im here to answer a few questions, I am not a rep for Open Labs (although they could donate me a Miko LX for this review lol) the machine is very nice, and i barely scratched the surface...
At first glance, the board looks complicated, but if you look a little closer you're familiar with everything going on. Navigation was simple, you can have a beat up and going in seconds. It moves rediculously fast, and everything opens as soon as you click it.
Karsyn: This bascially organizes all of your vsts and becomes a rack module. It looks like Xpand! from Pro Tools but on steroids. You can easily layer sounds that you open up to make endless patches from or just use them to sequence. If you have thousands of sounds in your Miko no need to worry. Your stuff will still be separated by sound (strings, brass, guitars, drums etc) no matter which VST it comes from. From the Karsyn you can open up the VST for tweaking or to navigate through the soundbank on the VST.
Stock Sounds: I believe it was called Real Pianos? Well, they sounded very nice, all the sounds that came on board were decent, and the effects onboard are a real real plus.
Sylenth: This was the definite stock surprise. This thing is a monster!! I've never heard a soft synth have such an analog sound. Very warm, very fat over 700 presets, you can easily tweak every sound and save the patch for limitless sounds. You can purchase all of the vst's separate, if you never have intentions of getting the Miko or Neko, make sure you buy Sylenth its a sick synth.
Other notes, I opened sampletank, kontakt, b4 organ and about 60 other vsts at the same time and was still able to record with no latency. The sound card that comes in the Miko is that presonus firebox soundcard or whatever its called. Thats why it comes with Cubase and Sonar as opposed to Pro Tools. When you are getting this thing built YOU choose which soundcard you want in there. You can get whatever you want installed, you just have to ask when its being installed. They can easily install an M-Audio soundcard and you can run M-Powered pro tools on the board. The NEKO board comes with the Delta 1010 soundcard which is already compatible with Pro Tools.
Tech Support: If you install a bad program, or have any problems with the board, you just plug the board up to the internet contact tech support and they can see whats going on in your board and fix the problem, you'll see on the screen the mouse moving around and them troubleshooting your machine.
Mimik: Im sure this is one of the major features everyone wanted to know about. Can you really clone sounds from other keyboards/synths and have them sound the way they sounded on the other board. Well, the answer is yes, and no. While you can clone a sound (completely, aftertouch, all that) the playback engine that plays back these sounds do not compare at all. HOWEVER the files that Mimik turn these sounds into play back in KONTAKT. which is great b/c Kontakt plays the sounds back as they were cloned in. The rep told me, he sold Lil jon his, and he replaced tons and tons of racks that he was trying to rent everytime he was working away from his lab. He's also good friends with jesse carmichael from Maroon 5. His biggest issue was when trying to Mimik his Moog Voyager he didnt like the way it sounded b/c they were playing back from the Mimik play engine, when simply moving the files into a folder and opening them in Kontakt...he was thrilled by it and has cloned tons of vintage keyboards and synths into his.
Bottom Line: THe board has tons of Pros and very few cons if any. Its big and small at the same time, and extremely powerful. I wouldnt say its a must have for everybody, but if you are a tourning, or traveling musician or producer it is a must have. You will appreciate how portable this thing is. Its like taking your entire studio with you in a small bag. I'd prefer this over a souped up laptop, midi controller and interface bc thats simply more pieces to worry about when you can have the whole thing in one piece. Mimik turned out to be legit and with new keyboards always coming out, you're an hour from cloning any new board that drops in the future. FL Studio users..they had FL Studio on there and were running it with tons of plug ins, however you work you can work that way in here. Reason users, you can work reason in here, rewire it and use reason with tons of other soft synths or sounds from the motif, fantom etc. Like i said before im here to answer a few questions, I am not a rep for Open Labs (although they could donate me a Miko LX for this review lol) the machine is very nice, and i barely scratched the surface...
