SYNTH- ELECTRO-HARMONIX Micro Synth ... 14 years old ...still relevant

ELECTRO-HARMONIX

MICRO SYNTH

$325.00 USD

In the 80's I worked for Ibanez as a product specialist. At NAMM they
called a big meeting to tell us that if sales of young guys choosing a Synth over learning a guitar kept up they planned to shut down. Yes, it was that bad and this really happened. Fortunately the new guys doing virtuoso Metal and the Floyd Rose changed all that. My reaction at the time was if it did happen I could beat becoming redundant by learning all about Synths. I did just that. 

I teamed up with a Roland product specialist as his free assistant and it got me a free pass to both Roland and Sequential Circuits R&D guys. All this is a lot of blah to let you know that I know how to program synths and when I look at the E-H it all makes sense. It is also good to know learning functional basis with analog synths is not hard to do. It is all very linear. Understanding tube amps is 10 times harder.

In plain old guitar pedal speak you get a auto Wah. In synth doublespeak it is an envelope filter follower. You get a swell-in effect like you get hitting your strings with your volume knob on zero then turning it up, in synth you are slowing the attack on the envelope filter. You get a gate ...in synth it would be cutting back  on your release time. You get an octave pedal effect in synth it would be tuning the frequency to a specific note. The voicing is square wave but for us it's a Fuzz, lol.

CONCLUSION 

It is very expressive and works very well. It is dynamically sensitive to triggering in a note or chord to do what you want takes a bit of practice to get a feel for it. You can play tunes with it so it it is not all shoegaze and Star Wars.