Thanks, Antoine, for clarifying that I'm not an Arturia employee. I think it's a measure of the damage Elhardt's complaints have done that people assume someone who speaks well of the MMV must be a company employee.
To recap, once again, Kenneth Elhardt has pontificated at great length about the shortcomings of the MMV as a substitute for the original hardware Mg modular, but it's been established at the Mg forums and elsewhere that he has no experience of the Mg modular whatsoever.
He's put great effort, as always, into listing what he regards as major issues, while being oblivious to the massive problems people had with the original Mg modular.
Yes, there are bugs, but most of them make little practical difference to playing this instrument. The ones that do, in common with some of the other Arturia products, tend to be interface problems with third party software. While I sympathise with Porfiry's problems, and would try to help if I was using the MMV in the same environment he's using it in, it's clear from his second post that the dropouts and so forth that he reports happen when the MMV is run in conjunction with other software. Regarding the statement that he didn't buy the MMV to only use as a standalone, I take the point being made - but I'd also point out that the original Mg modular was precisely a standalone in most instances.
What I'm getting at is that most of the bugs reported of the MMV are relatively minor and speaking as a musician I'd say they're not outlandish considering the complexity of the instrument and the shortcomings of the original. The more serious bugs tend to be interface issues with other software not written by Arturia. Some of that software may be quite widely used, so the problems do need to be sorted, but none of this amounts to the MMV being unuseable or severely limited.
I honestly wish there were a lot more Mg modulars around. Then people might realise you can't just walk up to one of these things and sound like Wendy Carlos or Keith Emerson. You can't usually run it with sequencing software, either.
The MMV is an instrument with a lot of potential and a few niggles. This topic would imply that it barely works at all and falls over at the slightest opportunity. That simply isn't true. As I've said before, the real test of whether it works is music made with it, and it definitely does make music. I've got music on my website to prove it. In all the time I've been using it, it's only crashed once - when someone who'd worked with Harald Bode told me how he'd configured a new design of hardware, and I tried to emulate that on the only instrument I had that was capable of the same kind of setup, the MMV, which crashed due to problems inherent in all software. Any software would have crashed at that point, but the MMV was the only software even capable of the experiment.
If the early synth pioneers who struggled with the Mg modular had expected easy results, we would never have had Switched on Bach, or Tarkus, or whatever.
The reason I keep stessing this is because I think it would be a tragic loss to music if instruments like the MMV got such an undeserved reputation that musicians didn't try to get to grips with them. The MMV is much easier to get to grips with than an early hardware synth, and rewards the musician much more readily. But it seems those of us who are making music with the MMV and similar instruments have to prove a point, just as the first wave of synth pioneers did.
Maybe if everyone started with a VCS3 and a totally baffling second-hand mixing desk, as I did many years ago, the beauties of the MMV would be more apparent.
