Gear review: Behringer Deepmind 12

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Joachip
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Gear review: Behringer Deepmind 12

Post by Joachip »

So finally I got to try the Behringer Deepmind 12, and I am not dissapointed. Okay, a slider came off despite being just 1 day old, but hey it's behringer, right? :lol: But the sound... wow. So here's a summary of my first impressions after one evening of toying around at a friend's place.

Pros:
  • It sounds really great. It has that "analog" sound (yup, I'm just soooo scientific today). It really has a lot of sonic depth.
  • It appears to be very versatile and all-round in terms of genre. I could imagine using this for house, trance, new-age ambient, dark gothic illbient, retro 80s synth pop and Warp records'ish electronica.
  • A ridiculous amount of features to choose from, and they can be controlled in so many ways because it has...
  • Matrix (stuff can control other stuff).
  • Vast amounts of internal effects which really have character and are worth using and getting to know.
  • Splendid non-weighted keys with both velocity sensitivity, note-off velocity sensitivity (very rare) and aftertouch.
  • The LFOs can be both synced across all 12 voices or independent (for that extra chaos. Chaos is good, yes?)
  • Impressive looking editor with a scalable UI which both sends and receives MIDI, so that the synth and editor are always in sync.
  • Great to see balanced outputs for a change, and a purely analog signal path (you would be able to record it and play it back at half speed and still have nice treble.)
  • All envelope generators can have their curve shape adjusted between log, linear and inv.log (-50 to +50).
  • It feels pretty hands-on even though it's probably too early to tell after just one evening of testing.
  • The arpeggiator and chord thingie are fun and inspiring to use.
Cons:
  • It feels somewhat flimsy and, yeah, one of the slider knobs actually came off. Fortunately it was easy to put back on, and it stayed on afterwards.
  • The many built-in reverbs are so-so, and their weak point is the really short reverbs. It works best for doing long reverbs. It has that TC sound. This is probably not really a problem because it's not a drum machine anyway.
  • The editor is not a VST but a stand-alone which may pose challenges in terms of usability and integration with your DAW, especially you may experience the editor allocating (stealing) a MIDI device if you wanna run the DAW and editor at the same time.
  • The decay curves aren't really well chosen, as the lowest value of -50 is the one that sounds the most natural (resembles an Arp Odyssey or an Oberheim SEM), so I think the range should have been something like -90 to 0 instead of -50 to +50. This is a result of the way the ear perceives volume and fade-outs.
My conclusion: It's a great synth and it's dirt cheap considering what you get.
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szaszhareen
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Re: Gear review: Behringer Deepmind 12

Post by szaszhareen »

It's rare to find a synth demo where someone actually makes music instead of just hitting a key while yammering on about some parameter or another, but this gent makes the synth look really fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkMi_8WKcNM

he also makes it look like there is a built in electribe-style sequencer, where he is creating layered sequences on the fly. however, I wasn't able to tell from the specs if this is actually the case, it looks like the sequencer is just for modulation.

does this thing have a cool electribe-style sequencer?
dnafrequency
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Apr 06, 2012 2:53 am

Re: Gear review: Behringer Deepmind 12

Post by dnafrequency »

@joachip How do you feel about this synth after having had it for more than a few minutes?
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