Here’s the new TAKE 5 synthesizer from Dave Smith and the guys at Sequential. It’s a five voice polyphonic analog keyboard with all of the cool features of the Prophet 6 and the filter circuitry of the Prophet 5 Rev 4, but it’s housed in a smaller chassis with a smaller keyboard. Personally I’m pretty surprised about how nice this instrument sounds. It has the all of the “bread and butter” features of an analog poly, but it plays like one of the T5’s bigger cousins.

Pictured above is the prototype T5 used by us who voice the unit and beta test. It’s missing the end caps and the layout is slightly different than production unit. It has similar profile to the Sequential Pro3 and the knobs and buttons are identical.

The general layout of the panel is pretty intuitive, and in some ways it has the vibe of a Roland Juno-106. It’s really easy to navigate and program and dial up a sound quickly. While there can be some menu diving to get deeper into mod routings, you don’t need to go down that path to get some very satisfying results. The T5 has far less program memory than other Sequential instruments, so users may need to learn how to perform sysex dumps to archive program banks.

Those of you who are familiar with the Sequential modulation routing environment will find that features have been changed to accommodate the reduction in features. For example there are two LFO modulation sources. One is per voice while the other is global. Some of the modulation targets are polyphonic per voice, however some targets are monophonic. Sources and Targets are noted with a [P] for polyphonic or an [M] for monophonic. Depending on how modulations are routed between Poly and Mono points, the voicing may result in sounds that have paraphonic characteristics.

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