AKAI MINIAK REVIEW

This review kindly written by Paul Syers

If you ever wondered what the offspring of the Sequential Circuits SixTrak and an alien craft from the original 1953 version of War of the Worlds would be doing today, and let's face it who hasn't, then wonder no longer - To see the MiniAk glowing blue and orange in the dark with it's gooseneck vocoder mic stretching out for you is to know that it all worked out just fine. And one could do worse in terms of potential parents if one were an analogue modelling synth looking to cover a range of sounds from the 50's through to the now and beyond.

Out of the box the MiniAk sports a really responsive three-octave C-to-C keyboard that runs the width of the case, with performance wheels and controls moved up on to the top panel. I've always liked three octave keyboards on performance synths - they worked for classics such as the ARP Odyssey and Pro-One and always seemed to be just the right size - and it feels fast...I'll see shortly how that translates to actual performance.

The mic is sturdy enough, and easily positionable when locked into place. I'm not sure the socket would survive if you fell off a stage and grabbed the mic as you went, but apart from that, it looks capable enough.

The control wheels are pretty cool - The rubber compound on the outside gives just enough slippery friction to ensure some decent pitchbend control, whilst the combination of the internal amber lighting and the detent on each keeps you clued in as to what position your controls are set to, even in subdued lighting.

Other real-time changes to the synths patches are made via the X-Y-Z continuous controller knobs, which can be assigned to different controls on a patch-by-patch basis. Unfortunately these don't score quite as highly, with Akai having opted not to use touch-sensitive knobs (like those on the Novation Nocturn for example), forcing you to actually twiddle a knob to get the display to show you what it does, and potentially changing the sounds you are using in the process - less than ideal if you are playing a live set. The good news is that the MiniAk offers a sort of SSL style recall, where the patch store light goes on when you've moved a knob away from where it started, and goes off again when you adjust it so that the sound is the same as the one in memory. Although this works well with one knob, if you moved all of the knobs you'd have to be some kind of evil-genius safecracker to be able twiddle all three and manage to return them to where they started to put the light out.

For an 'edit-thru-the-keyhole' synth where front panel knobs are kept to a minimum, Akai have made the display quite hard work. Winding the display contast down to 30% gives you what seemed to be a more readable white-on-blue, rather than blue-on-white. Unfortunately, the two line readout is recessed so deeply into the case that you have to peer vertically down on it to see both lines, which can get a little old after a while. Luckily you can jump to different edit parameters using a combination of buttons and keyboard keys which makes life easier, and in truth it doesn't take a huge amount of getting used to, but you will still feel yourself doing a noticable amount of 'leaning-over' during editing.

About now if you've gotten one of these machines you're probably still ignoring the manual whilst trying to work out how to get around it, and on a lot of gear it's fair to say that 5 minutes of twiddling is worth 50 minutes of yawnful manual reading time...yup, not with this feller...If you do nothing else, grab a cuppa and read the 3 page FAQ in the manual. It'll take about 30 seconds of your time and save you a lot more.

So: The Keyboard. It is quick. As a test, retriggering the same note at speed using a fast-attack brass patch shows it to produce results that are natural and responsive, and some playing via midi showed it to be a more than capable controller keyboard. The preset programs (patches) are categorised and accessible conveniently by sound type, plus there is a useful 'all' category that lets you go through alphabetically in case, like me, you can suddenly only remember that must-use patch as "Dunno, Ambi something"...

So what sounds do you get? You get some groovy clavs and organs, and stereo EP that you can wind up with a bit of the internal drive effect to get you a good driven wurli, Supertramp style; You get some amazingly close versions of old-school Moog, Oberheim, Prophet and Jupiter sounds, with some entertaining signature sounds that'll cover everything you'd want to do from early Depeche Mode thru Prog Rock to 80's synth pop and 90’s dance. And the vocoder works well but you need to get up close and give it some welly into the mic. The only thing notably lacking from the presets is a good straightforward piano patch, but a quick look on youtube shows that someone's done a pretty good one, so it's entirely doable, though unfortunately they haven’t made the patch available for downloading, so for now you’d need to create the patch yourself.

What you do also get though is a whole lot of new and inspiring sounds, which is a key part of what you want when you get a new synth. You want to be able to go routing around in the programs and find brand new sounds that when you start playing them you suddenly realise you've been playing them for a few minutes, when you'd actually just intended to spend a few minutes nipping through the program patches to see what was there. And the MiniAk did that for me on more than a few occasions.

In fact, a tour through the presets shows not just the number of different sounds this beast can make, but the scope of the sounds. And it's scope that keeps a synth being interesting and relevant, especially when you've got more than one in your setup. The scope is huge, producing anything from old-school analog synths and beats, through acidic 303 basslines, through PPG-sounding glassy percussives, to more FM sounds still. And what that really means of course is that you can not only get all of those sounds but anything that you can think of that lies between, all from the the engine that's in this synth.

Internally, the MiniAk has three oscillators per note, with 8 voice polyphony (I never found myself running out). The oscillators can be configured to allow you sync them to produce some cool changing-pulse-width sounds, plus it has a huge array of filter configurations, from 2-pole filters though the 3-pole stylings of the TB303, to the 4-pole approach of the Moogs, so you're pretty sure to be able to shape an oscillator most every which way you'd like. And sound-wise, it does as much as you’d hope – The bottom end can do ‘fat’, and the mids and highs are clean and devoid of fog, which is a great place to start. It doesn't have quite the top end sizzle of the high-end analogue gear it proportes to emulate, but hey, give the little feller his due, it's pretty darned close - Live you'd be unlikely to notice, and tracking would need little more than something to liven up the very top end to have it sound at home in a mix.

It was about this time when I was playing with the patch configs that I figured I'd take a break and go check on the web to see if there were any computer-based editors available at all for the MiniAk, since it would be a travesty for there not to be. And it seems there are. I found two, though neither sadly were made by Akai. Its also worth mentioning when talking about editing using a computer that data only travels to and from the MiniAk via midi, so for those with only USB rather than midi connections (possibly a good proportion of the target market) that makes things a little difficult. It's probably cold comfort to say that a USB/Midi converter can be had for £30 when Akai could just have stuck a USB socket in the back and added £3 to the cost.

For information only then, the editors I looked at were at hypersynth.com and bizune.com, and I spent probably under ten minutes with a demo copy of each just to see whether having a visual editor makes as much of a difference as I'd imagined...and for me it does. The ability to change for example the octave and waveform of an oscillator just by moving a mouse gets you back in touch with the engine inside the box. That said, I'd say looking back that for the majority of changes I made during my time with the MiniAk, I probably did 80% of them using the shortcut keys on the keyboard, so the system that's there works, it's just not as visually intuitive as a GUI editor.

As I say, each editor has a downloadable demo, and strengths and weaknesses, so try them both before you decide; for my money, in a software product which is largely just a GUI sending and receiving midi information behind the scenes, the easier user interface wins, but you may find hidden depths in one or the other that make the decision easier for you, or even decide that the hard-knocks school of front-panel programming is the way you want to go.

Back to the MiniAk then...Beyond 'Programs', the MiniAk offers you 'Multis', where the ‘Ak’ wheels out its multi-timbral guns. These can be a mix of different patch sounds and a couple of things I haven't mentioned yet, rhythms and sequences. It's here that the MiniAk shows who it's aimed to best please, with a wide array of mostly dance, garage, rave and some hip-hop style rhythms and sequences, with a helping of electro-pop thrown in for good measure. Actually, the multis are a lot of fun, with beats, leads and sequences zoned across the keyboard giving interesting places to start your own composition.

The rhythm section has a goodly number of beats to get you going along with (320!), with the drum sounds again biased more toward the dance/rave/hip-hop/electro styles of music. The sequences offer some useful inspiration, and will play in whatever key you choose by selecting the root key on the keyboard. Plus there's a quick enter ARP sequence mode that'll let you enter your own bunch of notes, and will then free run. Lastly but not leastly (is that a word? it is now!) the MiniAk will also let you feed audio in via either the back panel or the mic, and send it through the internal filters and effects to create some real-time mayhem...which is nice!

So where does that leave things? Well, in today's marketing-driven world, there's so much 'product' out there that more and more often we reduce the scope of what we look at, and only notice the things that specifically seem to fit our purposefully narrowed requirement. Marketers know this, and so pitch product with a specific audience in mind, and sure enough the MiniAk seems to have been designed and pitched as a live keyboard with great presets and real-time audio effects for dance and DJ applications. But it's actually a whole lot more, and to dismiss it by thinking of it in such narrow terms would be to miss out.

All of which brings me back to one of it's spiritual parents. The SCI SixTrak was hugely under-rated in it's day. It had the same Sequential Circuits oscillators that people had come to love, and despite being great-sounding and hugely competent, it's 'thru-the-keyhole' programming always made it less popular. And it's clear that despite what lies beneath the surface, the MiniAk suffers a little from this too. But In a modern world where more often than not what you see is all you get, the MiniAk was a rare surprise, something with more rather than less to it than I'd expected. I'm not saying it's necessarily going to be the next MiniMoog, but it really does do such a huge amount for such little money, especially since the price drop, that if you can forgive it it's few foibles you'd be mad not to buy one.

YOU CAN BUY THE MINIAK HERE