The Quasimidi Raven is often sneered at by synth purists, but it's a solid performance orientated keyboard workstation drawing on Quasimidi's previous and big selling product line & delivers a wide palette of sounds including TR style drums, classic synth, leads, pads, strings, washes & bass sounds as well as pianos & more. With it's built-in 16 part multi-timbrel sequencer you can compose entire songs in any electronic flavour using a Raven.
The sequencer can store up to 10 songs, each composed of up to 10 patterns & 99 steps, which sounds restrictive but these can be widely altered in the performance mode & each track type (kicks, snare, bass, lead, chords etc) has hundreds of preset motif patterns to choose from as building blocks for compositions. You can therefore think of the Raven as almost a 'Dance music' modern take on the early home-organ & accompanying drum-machine setups of the 1970's, and perhaps for that reason the Raven is sometimes mocked as not being a serious synth; but while it is clearly marketed as an all-in-one performance tool for the end user to make & perform dance music tunes, it can obviously function as a synth in its own right, providing one or more sounds within a composition & MIDI setup using other items of gear & then it's extensive palette of very much dance music orientated sounds really scores. Plenty of sounds and very good sounds they are too, complete with decent FX, an extremely advanced arpeggiator & the aforementioned 16 part sequencer.
Quasimidi's MASS sample waveform based synthesis differs from the DSP calculated waveform creation of other 'Virtual Analog' offerings of the late 90's, blending traditional S&S sample synthesis with FM & Additive wavetable techniques, but the results are really very good. SoS magazine in their review of the Raven opined: "The Quasimidi sound has lost none of its bass end, which remains unnervingly full when compared to other digital synths. You could be forgiven for thinking that some of these sounds are actually analogue."
Old Dancetech listing text
The Raven came along towards the end of Quasimidi's lifespan and was an all in one wunderkeyboard with sequencer, sounds, arpegiator, fx etc... You could bang out tunes on it with ease, and it was geared to work in a pattern based way with typical dancey, banging, euro styles. Not that it can't do more, but you will often hear it talked of as 'not a proper synth', with people knocking the unit for it's building-block approach to making music... but it was quite clever.
To sequence step stuff like drums for example, it has a 16-step grid like a Roland TR grid, but as you can see in the image, it's mapped with a graphic on the casing above the keys so that each key is a grid-step - The the keys become the 'steps' you press to input notes at those steps... quite nifty, you can see some of that in the video on this page.
So, dismissed as a toy by some and yet with hidden depths - The fact is tho, when teamed up with a typical home-studio computer studio it can yeild great results, and is a great unit for live gigging to rpoved your meat and potatoes sounds... I think the whole way to look at this synth is that they wanted to gratify a growing band of dance fans who desired to make the style of music in a fairly simple 'all in one' solution... and theres nothing wrong with that, but underneath lurkes an ability to be used with a pc rig, clocked and working as a multi-timbrel sound device.
It's got 512 3-osc sounds as standard which are based on waves stored in 6mb of sample ROM. Quasimidi released the RavenMAX card soon after, which came with tons of new sounds, expanding the unit's wave sample memory to 14mb in total. In essense it's got an 8 track sequencer which puts together songs from 'patterns' - 'patterns' being like a group of midi-parts in a software sequencer arrangement... drums, bass, synth etc 'parts' all go to make a 'pattern'. Patterns can then be strung into songs, transposed, etc. There's alot of emphasis in terms of fucntionality on playing parts & sequencing them & quantising etc.
Also it's more than a synth cos it's also a drumbox with a drum sequencer (and even more drums and percussion sounds if you can get the rarer exansion card) The Raven has all the usual classic dance/urban drumboxes sounds included and some old-skool box sounds too). The Raven also does a pallette of synth, basses, organs, etc, and arranges sounds into such groups for selection. It's also got that very comprehensive arpeggiator... Combine all that with 2 fx units and some creativity, and yes, it can do some great stuff!
Anyways, not to be overlooked. They arent too expensive due to them not having a 'real synth' old school appeal; built pretty well, wooden end cheeks etc, lol, nice fat sound, 2 mod wheels and all euro dance/trance sounds.. check it out.
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