Melbourne Instruments NINA synthesiser

General

The Melbourne Instruments NINA is a synth with something out of the ordinary: motorised encoders. Normally, many synths with physical controllers are somewhat awkward; you're politely fine-tuning a sound with dials and encoders. You switch to another preset (or possibly another layer within your sound) and *hop* all your controller positions are no longer correct. With mixing consoles, motorised faders have been invented for that. And in digital mixing consoles and various synths, LED encoders have been invented for this, or encoders with the parameters on a separate screen. So the NINA solves it in a completely different way: motors in the knobs. And that experience is more direct than ever, especially if you're not a fan of reading parameters off a screen! In fact, this is how (vintage) synths should always have been, but the price always seemed to be a thing.

Features of the Melbourne Instruments NINA

Apart from those little motors, we have to look at the core of the NINA: a synthesiser. The sounds can be either conventional or experimental, somewhat depending on how you feel about it yourself, of course. There is quite a nice polyphony of twelve, with two analogue oscillators per voice and a digital wavetable oscillator, anointed by a 24 dB lowpass filter. In the photos, you can see a line of 16 buttons side by side, and then you really know: a step sequencer! There's even multi-timbrality: four tracks in your sequencer! The effects section with chorus, delay and reverb provides the familiar synthesiser sauce, making it all taste and sound better. The NINA is a complete synthesiser, with modulation matrix, patch morphing and elfs audio inputs (line and mic!). And yes: the moving dials make it a bit pricier than other synths, but we often have that pattern of thinking here. In the end, it's all about the pot and a fitting lid, or in this case: there's a sound designer behind every synth!