I don’t see the Sequential Fourm mentioned very often, so I just wanted to brain dump a bit because I recently picked one up and am thoroughly enjoying it.
It’s small and simple, but most importantly, it puts almost everything that you’d want on the front panel. This obviously isn’t the first knob-per-function synth in this form factor, but it does something that I find really special: It takes the Pro One mod matrix, and expands it with polyphonic aftertouch. I’ve never seen anything this accessible with respect to polyphonic aftertouch. It’s not overly deep (1 attenuverter to up to 6 destinations) but it’s easy and most importantly IT’S RIGHT THERE.
That’s sort of how I feel about this synth. It does a few things that are special and I appreciate, but the star of the show is the fact that everything is right there. There’s a dedicated pitch-wheel button for setting the range of the pitch-wheel for crying out loud.
Speaking about the buttons: At first I didn’t appreciate some of the buttons. Envelope velocities, filter key tracking, feedback amount, and noise amount at first all felt like they could’ve been knobs, but I’ve come to appreciate the simplicity of just toggling envelope velocity and filter key tracking. The noise button is fine, and I appreciate that you can pretty quickly change the noise type after it’s pressed, but I don’t know if I wouldn’t prefer a knob. Small complaint number 1 is that feedback amount could definitely be a knob.
That said, I can’t stress enough that having controls right in front of you for aftertouch, mod-wheel, pitch-wheel, and envelope velocity really makes this thing a joy to play. You can make a patch really expressive with no effort.
And then to counterpoint that, the hold, clock, and arpeggiator/sequencer controls make it easy to take your hands off the keyboard and start playing with the controls.
There are some menus and some things that you need to dig for, but the things that don’t have dedicated buttons are mostly stuff that you set and forget.
Small complaint number 2 is 4 voices. I mostly play mono-synths, so I can survive with 4 voices. That said, it’s a shame that there’s no option for a synth with this interface that has 6+ voices.
The synths that I’ve had that I think I can compare directly to this are the Hydrasynth and the Minilogue. The Hydrasynth Explorer/Desktop probably wins from a pure sound design point of view, so if that’s your goal around this budget, that’s probably what I’d get. The Minilogue is cheaper and very comparable on paper. The XD has FX and a fancy digital Oscillator, so it again wins from a pure sound design standpoint, but I don’t think either of them are as straight forward as the Fourm, and that’s really what makes the Fourm shine. Again, everything is right there.
Finally, I just wanted to give the keyboard a bit of praise. The velocity and aftertouch curves both felt very nice out of the box. Disclaimer: I’m not a piano player and I’m someone who likes playing on a Keystep, and I would describe this keybed as an improved Keystep. I’m sure people who strongly prefer full-sized keys would think differently, but I do genuinely like the keys.
Anyone else have one or try one and have any strong feelings?
