Novation Nova Great Britian 1999


The only british synthesizer in the studio. It uses virtual analog synthesis called ASM or something. I think it was partly designed by the guy who made the old Oxford Synthesizer Company OSCar and EDP wasp synthesizers in the 80s.

It has three oscillators, a multi-mode multifilter (12,18 and 24 dB) lots of interesting modulation capabilities and  a lush grainy sound, like a Korg Poly 800 meets a Jupiter 8. And its multi-trimbal too. Jam packed with lots of nice extras such as arpeggiators and multi effects. Playfull, fun and extremely useable in the studio. They aren't build that strong though, knobs fly off easily (especially when your hands are sweaty in a live gig situation) and outputs stop working (fortunately it has some extra of those). This is a very powerfull synthesizer with a unique characteristic sound.

Here is an mp3 of some random playing on the Nova going through the patches and arpeggiating


I like the Nova so much I got two of them (and they are pretty cheap on the second hand market)
On top of a DX7 synthesizer.

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