Studiologic Sledge v2.0

Reviews | Studiologic Sledge v2.0
92
T
he original Waldorf-engined
Sledge launched in 2012 and,
despite being pretty reasonably
priced and offering a very solid
synth engine, it has largely fallen under
the radar. However, v2.0 will get people
taking it a lot more seriously.
The Sledge is big, yellow, plastic
and adorned with 32 large knobs ready
for tweaking the onboard sounds. All the
knobs also transmit and receive MIDI,
so it makes a great controller for
plug-ins and other MIDI gear. It’s pretty
imposing size-wise and quite deep from
back to front. Build quality is good
despite this being a lightweight board
(you can pick it up under one arm) and
the knobs and switches feel pretty solid.
There’s a simple two-line blue
backlit display for displaying deeper
functionality (though reliance on the
screen is minimal which keeps this
board nicely performance-oriented) and
there’s a numeric keypad for direct
program access to the 1,000
user-rewritable program slots onboard.
The keyboard feels good under the
fi ngers and, whilst it’s not got the super-
fast high-end feel of a Moog Voyager (for
example), it doesn’t feel cheap either. It
also features that rare beast called
aftertouch, which is often missing from
even more expensive boards these days!
Basically, whatever you have assigned to
the mod wheel is what is triggered when
you use aftertouch. |t would be nice to
be able to send the mod wheel and
aftertouch to separate destinations (next
OS update perhaps?).
Spaceship Sledge
There’s no doubt that the Sledge’s front
panel has been largely infl uenced by the
Minimoog with its classic three
oscillator + fi lter + dual envelope layout.
It’s a great choice of front panel design
as it’s tried and tested and very familiar
to most people and it fl ows very nicely.
It’s certainly inspiring to tweak and
addictive too, and the oversized dials
make you feel like you’re fi rmly in
Studiologic
Sledge v2.0 | £799
Sledge v2.0 offers signifi cant improvements to the
yellow beastie! Dan ‘JD73’ Goldman checks it out…
WHAT IS IT?
Three oscillator VA
polysynth with multimode
fi lter and now splits/layers,
increased polyphony, user
samples and more!
CONTACT
Who: MSL Professional
Tel: [phone]
Web: www.studiologic-
music.com
HIGHLIGHTS
1 Though it’s lightweight,
it’s well put together and
stands out on stage
2 The Waldorf designed
sound engine sounds rich,
full and suitably
analogue-like
3 The new user sample
capability vastly
expands its appeal
and sound palette
INCLUDES AUDIO
l
When the pulse wave and
wavetable LEDs are lit,
you’re in sample mode
and, using the wavetable
dial, you can select a
sample from the 60MB
onboard sample memory.
This feature adds
hugely to the appeal of
the Sledge: you can load
up your own samples in
WAV format using the
Spectre utility over USB
(the same software utility
as the Blofeld but
re-skinned for the
Sledge); and, using the
new splitting/layering
function you can come
up with some fantastic
VA+sample/loop patches.
For splitting sounds,
select a patch, hold down
a note and that becomes
the split point/lower
sound. Keep holding the
note, select another
patch via the keypad and
that becomes the upper
sound. For layering,
select a patch, hold down
multiple notes and select
another patch using the
numeric keypad. Easy.
Samples And Splitting/Layering
FMU289.rev_studiologic.indd 92 1/29/15 9:52 AM