Once upon a time an American company called Ensoniq was the place for advanced and interesting equipment – like the ASR-10 Sampler, the FIZMO and an effects processor called the DP-4. You can tell that the latter has 4 Digital Processors which sound great for the era, although not quite the schmick you can get from today’s plugins. The killer feature of the DP-4 is that you can loop the effect out back to the effect in. If you are not careful all shit breaks loose. If you are careful it sings like an angel.
I loved mine but I needed to eat and it sold back in the early 2000s. I still miss it and every time I’m teaching I see the university’s DP-4 sitting in the studio unused and thinking of how I can liberate it. They’ll chuck it one day. I’ll hide in the skip.
But I pine no longer, because some complete sweetheart genius at Behringer put the loop in the effects section of the DeepMind 12. There is much to say about the synthesiser – but that loop already gives it four toilet rolls right there, God Bless. I only found out recently because somebody finally sold their DeepMind rack that had sat in the cupboard unloved for six years and I am a cheap-ass who reads up and waits.
You might want to read the Sensible Review.
What we have here is the 12D rack version with 12 dual DCOs and twelve little lights that come on for each voice as if to prove it. I’m happy with DCOs, I see no reason to have to tune the damn thing every minute like the Super Jupiter (or heaven help me my old Oberheim Xpander – just look at it and it went flat). You can adjust the oscillator drift if that really matters. Voices can team up in groups of 2, 3, 4, 6 or all at a time. Two at a time is the sweet spot for polyphony, 12 at once is wheeeeeeee.
Odd restrictions have been made. Oscillator one is a saw, a rectangle or both – on/off. Oscillator two is a square which can have bits squared off to make vaguely Nintendo noises. Synch or swim that’s your lot. The general theory is that it’s supposed to be like the old Juno-60, easy to use, and indeed the machine looks much like the Juno. But given there’s bonus controls hidden here, there and everywhere I’m still puzzled why. If you have to hold a button to adjust pitch you could easily do the same to set the volume of oscillator one. Don’t get it.
And being computer controlled it should really be possible to make some voices be one patch and some another, which would be EXCELLENT for fancy stacked sounds. But no. If MOOG doesn’t do it then pshaw!
The lowpass filter is 2 or 4 pole. It’s a bit Juno too – nothing that’s going to thrill your pants off, but useful. The two LFOs can be extremely naughty and go into the audible regions. Not a Kawai 100F but still cheerful. Behringer’s Boog is better at that sort of thing, maybe they lacked the skills back six years ago. A third envelope is available. Plenty of modulation is ready for patching – even to the effects, which is fuck yeah.
So onto the effects. Most belong to Behringer’s Music Group. Some are knocked off from Roland, Eventide and the rest. 33 of them all up – you can gang up any four of them at a time. Quite a lot of reverbs made by different people, too few modulators, a bit of grunge, a bit of pitch shifting. My DP-4 recipe goes like this – a resonating phaser, into a reverb which sustains the pitch resonations fed back through limiting into the phaser again. A digital pack of wolves howling. The DeepMind doesn’t have the same sound as the DP-4 but a cousin of it and pleasantly batshit.
It’s a real shame that there’s no audio into the rack but they probably don’t want to compete with effects boxes they also sell. UPDATE – there are audio inputs in the box, they are just not connected! If you are good with surgery you can have this feature. Video Here.
As well as the basic controls of the front panel you can use an iPad or computer to display a digital interface. The effects are much easier to use here, as are the hidden features that normally need mystical button pinches. I set up USB for the control and MIDI for the playback – couldn’t get both working on the same cable. I also got it working on the iPad but it drops out enough to be unappealing. The display on the machine isn’t that bad, especially as a partner to the computer – you can move back and forward between interfaces while crafting a sound. In actual performance the sliders are nice and firm.
The DeepMind does not seem particularly deep. It poses as a good ol’ fashioned no threat analogue synthesiser, tucking anything complex away from the Average User with a lot of gee golly aw shucks in the presentation. Any virtual analogue machine could beat it in an arm wrestle and some of the design decisions seem a little Roland Spend The Five Bucks.
In an era where everybody is analogue as apple pie I guess they’re selling a competitor to the Prophets and Oberheims of this world. Tucked away in this apparent simplicity is a unique personality. DeepMind has a sound, it has a style. It has that LOOP. And it it can be owned by the poorer classes. At least for the moment I hail it as a worthy thing.
Here’s a track I did with DP-4. ASR-10, XPander and MKS80.