Behringer MonoPoly

Reincarnation of a legend

The German company Behringer has long been known for its "unusual" approach to creating musical instruments. Unusual is a politically correct term, in fact Behringer borrows the concepts of popular microphones, speakers and synthesizers from other popular brands. And they sell them much cheaper than the originals, which pleases amateur musicians and upsets professionals. A couple of years ago, Behringer broke into the synthesizer market and re-released a whole layer of classic devices, many of which have long since been discontinued and sold by hand for exorbitant prices. That's exactly what happened with the 1980s replica Besseller, the Korg MonoPoly synthesizer.

Four-voice analogue synthesizer with cross modulation capabilities

Behringer's version is almost identical to the original: it's a four-voice analogue synth with cross-modulation capabilities, a 37-key velocity-sensitive keyboard, four analogue oscillators, a built-in arpeggiator, additional CV inputs (hello, modulars!) and, of course, the famous Chord Memory feature. , which in many ways brought him fame. With this function, the user can make one key play a multi-note chord at the same time. Thus, an inexperienced keyboard player could quite quickly and simply play some interesting progression of chords, around which one could build a composition in the future. Judging by the nature of the sound, the Germans almost perfectly copied the analogue path of the original, so when playing blindly, only the owner of a finely tuned engineering or musical ear can distinguish them.

A classic at an affordable price

Putting aside the moral question, there is no way to bypass the discussion about price. Replicas of other classic synthesizers from Behringer usually cost 200 – 300 euros, but MonoPoly is clearly out of this range - a price of under $ 700 in European stores (or slightly over a thousand in east european ones) puts MonoPoly in one company with much more modern and fancy synthesizers from the conventional Arturia, Modal Electronics, Polyend, Make Noise or Korg itself. It seems to us that it is of greatest interest to fans of classic analogue sound or people who are looking specifically for the iron MonoPoly. Because the price for the original model on ebay starts from 3K dollars. And this is a handy option because the guys from Korg did not dare to re-release MonoPoly.