Moog Matriarch vs Moog Grandmother — Daniel Fisher

hi I'm Daniel Fisher here at Sweetwater sound and today I have both the grandmother semi modular analog synthesizer and the matriarch semi modular analog synthesizer both from mogh and with the matriarch now finally released we're getting a lot of questions from our customers about which one might be right for that and so today I'm not going to do a whole lot of sounds except just showing you certain differences it's more about just discussing why one might be better than the other if you really want to hear in-depth details about each of the parameters go to our existing videos and there's another deep dive video on the matriarch [Music] [Music] [Music] so first of all what makes them similar so they have the identical oscillators they're all 921 oscillators from the famous mode modular since and they both have this very cool feature in that their main modulation LFO is actually another mode full range oscillator so even though you have to uh Slater's here you can actually drive it from key tracking and have a third oscillator so you can hit one note and have three note chords very much like on a Model D now this one has four oscillators and you can still also drive the modulation LFO in two audio frequencies and have it track perfectly you can fine tune it and everything probably one of the main differences is that this is primarily a monophonic keyboard it's for one note at a time you can use two or three oscillators if you use the LFO to get big fat lead sounds big fat bass sounds lots of effects and everything else but you really can't do chords other than making a three note chord by setting the pitch differences on the matriarch you've got four oscillators that act much more independently if you want them to there's a voice mode that lets me go from one voice to two voice to four voice and that changes how it plays and to be clear this is not four voices of true polyphony in that each note is independent in each have their own filters and and like that it's not that but it does let you play four note chords and you can move the pitches around so what other differences are there well but the grandmother has a spring reverb and the matriarch instead of the reverb has a stereo delay and it's a true analog stereo delay and it's really two separate analog delays so it allows you to do things like ping pong but it also lets you do any kind of spacing between left and right because they are independent and so you can independently control feedback and their time it can be synced to clock it's really exciting stuff if you like delays this is definitely a plus so another thing to consider is for the grandmother is if you're just looking for a synth that you can quickly reach up and start doing things clearly the grandmother is easier to grasp at a first glance you know and the color scheme although some people you know have different opinions on the color scheme it really does force you to see via the colored buttons via the colors on the panels on the back and lets you see which buttons control which sections and it also just sort of helps you see this as individual sections of modules that really are truly modules so on the matriarch obviously there are more things even on things that sort of looked the same like the ARP and sequencer they're both similar in that they can have 256 note sequences and they're arpeggiators pretty much the same but this one can store four notes per sequence because you can have four separate oscillators this only stores one note per sequence and because of this for position sequence knob you can actually have twelve sequences and those are twelve sequences of 256 notes each each with four notes per step you've also got control over rest high and ratchet which just just helps you make your sequences a lot more interesting and there are just lots more utilities here where you can do your more moult's you have two sets of attenuators you obviously have more things on your mixer because you have more oscillators and the filters that's definitely a difference so on this filter you've got a low-pass filter with resonance and envelope control and you do have a static high pass filter in other words you could put something in and roll off the base but you can't move that high pass filter around via control voltages or on this one you've got your high pass built into this filter section here and it's really two filters so you can have a high pass and low pass either in parallel or in series or run um in stereo and have a low pass for one type of sound and an entirely different low pass for a different sound and you can move them independently via control voltages another thing that's different on the matriarch is that you have two envelope generators up on the grandmother you have one envelope generator and then by using the VCA mode like right I just can did a drone mm or I can just have a standard release that acts kind of the way you would expect it to and you're like oh the keyboard or do you want your volume to follow the same exact envelope that the filters following if it's really important to you this you have both envelopes then you got to go with the matriarch but I find you could do an awful lot this way and and I didn't often find myself wishing oh jeez I really wish I had two envelopes it really is a complete unit here and obviously on both of them the possibilities of what you can do when you string them up with cables and then when you start connecting them well the song I did on the opening I did a little cheat here I took the output of the grandmother and ran it into the second channel of the stereo delay because they can't act independently and then just to be insane I took the output of that and ran it into the spring reverb so I've actually got a feedback loop from the grandmother to the matriarch back to the grandmother and by adjusting these at to attenuators I was able to get a nice fat ambience without actually going into full oscillation feedback so I'm gonna take pair of sawtooth slightly detuned and go into the spring reverb and just let you hear some of the flavor of it it is not quite like any other spring reverb I've heard it has a very unique quality it has a certain fatness and it has a certain frequency response that's definitely different from any other spring reverb you've tried it is definitely sensitive to physical motions I mean you know if I hit it you can hear it and if you're live and it's very loud it's going to trigger that that should be a consideration for why you might want to may track if you're in more quiet controlled environments and you just love spring and a lot of people have been asking for a real spring for a long time then I get why you'd want it so I'm gonna bring the volume up on that [Music] [Music] and I'll play a little arpeggiation through it [Music] [Music] so now we're going to try this stereo delay on the matriarch and like I said it's two separate analog stereo delays they're each 700 milliseconds and they're fully controllable for their feedback their time and then there's a knob called spacing that lets you adjust the ratio of the left time versus right time and that gives you all kinds of rhythmic variations the way I like to use it though is I hit the ping-pong button which puts each of them in a ping pong mode but if both of them are getting the same signal in ping pong it actually doesn't sound stereo because they're crossing over each other so the little secret trick on the matriarch delay is put a blank plug into one of the two inputs and then you will get that standard delay that ping pong so now I'm gonna just mess with delay time and spacing and feedback [Applause] [Music] and if I hand adjust that to certain things I can create rhythms very interesting rhythms based on the arpeggiator and if I want it exact I can hit the sync button and now my time knob is actually unit of the beat against the clock that's driving the arpeggiator [Music] [Music] so another consideration is how much you're using the keyboard to control other things because while they both send out known information via MIDI via control voltages you're also getting after touch and velocity and gate and pitch and there's even like I said an expression in where you put a TRS quarter inch expression jack in and then you get those voltage is coming out via the 3.5 millimeter jack so this is definitely a much more serious controller than this one but honestly if you're just playing lead lines you're just playing bass notes or you're just doing our patient's or sequences to control something else you might not need all that and that's really one of the key differences is just how much complexity do you need you know a lot of people just want a simple synth that has really good oscillators into a mixer with some noise a really good low-pass filter you got that simple high-pass filter that you can just cut off as much bass as you want statically a single envelope that can either run the filters any amps or you throw the switch and on the amp now has a different release time or you could turn the amp to drone so the amp is always on you can do nice ambient stuff like that down here again this is more about I want the complexity I'm looking for how many possible ways can I do something so for example the you can divvy up on the modulation you can make it only do oscillators 1 & 3 or oscillators 2 & 4 or all of them why is that important well it really becomes important when you're doing sync and you can be sweeping some oscillators that are synced and you get that very cool oscillator sync sound but the main oscillators are standing stable so that's one of the many things and just again because there's 90 patch points versus 41 there's just so much more you can do there are more utilities such as the multi you have a pair of multi or you have the one here you have two attenuators where you have one here and again you get that extra simple LFO that's just a triangle or square out with voltage control of rate as well as manual control of rate okay so now I want to show you just quickly the two oscillators they are identical there may be some slight sonic differences because you line up a bunch of mugs they're all gonna sound slightly different but you'll hear they're really close so here are two oscillators slightly out of tune to us laters I tried my best to get them the same amount out of tune same volume and here we go and so depending on where I hit the key where the phasing wasn't might have started bright and gone dark or might have started dark and go bright but I hit him enough times I think you'll hear the same oscillator so now I'm going to the low-pass filter of the grandmother I'm gonna start high and sweet blow and that's with no resonance same here and now we'll sweep upward with will do residents and about nine o'clock and now I'm going to go to the matriarch and because that has two filters and one could be high-pass one could be Lopez I'm still in the mode where the boast low pass but I have the spacing knob so now I'm going to move the filter cutoff center slightly different for one side than the other and you'll hear kind of a Phase II difference and notice that that really affects the stereo field as well because one of the filters is hard lefty others hard right so you put an LFO or an envelope on that and you get this really nice natural phase sound that's just beautiful now I'll do the high pass low pass well which is definitely a different sound [Music] now they're in series so the high pass is doing its cutting the low pass is doing its cutting and as I turn resin its up you'll hear that even more Wow and now watch what happens as I play with the spacing now that's very very cool why would you not want that well if you're live and you just want to synthesizer that you know how to go and adjust the oscillators grab the filter have a good time when there's just the only one filter you don't have to be thinking about what mode it's in and what's going to lift and what's going on the right and how spacing works and everything else you just grab the filter and work it however if you're more complex in your performance techniques and you really want that sort of thing then obviously go for this so now I'm going to do parallel and you'll hear the high pass in one side and the low pass hard to the other side and again with even more resonance [Music] so of course the high pass low pass in parallel combination where you got one on one side one on the other sounds really good when you go into the true stereo analog delay because now each of the filter types is getting its own ping pong delay because I have the ping pong on so here we go that [Music] so those are some of the differences between the grandmother in the matriarch clearly they both sound really good they've got that big fat monstrous sound which is why you buy a mocha in the first place it's just that this one's bigger it has more panels it has more connection points it has two more oscillators it has a second filter it has a second envelope it has the true stereo delay but this has the reverb it's easier to place somewhere and of course it cost less if you have any further questions about either the grandmother or the matriarch please contact your Sweetwater sales engineer my name is Daniel Fisher thank you very much for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Sweetwater

Views: 59,625

Keywords: analog synthesizer, moog matriarch, moog grandmother, daniel fisher sweetwater, moog matriarch vs grandmother, moog, moog grandmother vs matriarch, matriarch, moog matriarch review, grandmother moog, moog matriarch demo, sweetwater, moog grandmother demo, grandmother, moog grandmother review, moog grandmother synth, moog grandmother sequencer, moog grandmother ambient

Id: X-XancYyXY0

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019