Minimojo - Free Moog Minimoog Emulation For Native Instruments Reaktor

ZooTooK has released Minimojo, a great sounding freeware Reaktor ensemble which emulates the sound and functionality of the legendary Moog Minimoog analogue synthesizer.

People have tried to imitate analog synthesizers for decades e.g. by sample a single wav cycle but failed badly. Not only should waveforms be non perfect from a mathematical point of view they should also vary over time, just like a violin. The key is to find the right balance of the modulation depth for each frequency. Minimojo is the first attempt to use this theory in practice.

Minimojo is available for free download via Native Instruments (2.3 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 1 virtual instrument in ENS format for Native Instruments Reaktor).

Please note that you’ll need to be logged in to your Native Instruments user account in order to download the instrument. The registration process is completely free and it only takes a couple of minutes.

You’ll also need the full version of NI Reaktor in order to use Minimojo without any limitations. The instrument will only work for 15 minutes in the freeware Reaktor Player, after which the output will go silent. I sometimes try to work around this limitation by rendering my work as a WAV file, however 15 minutes is a really short time for tweaking a synthesizer such as this one.

Being a huge fan of freeware emulations of analog hardware, I took Minimojo for a quick spin in the free version of Reaktor and my first impressions are fairly positive. Browsing through the included factory presets, I found several really great sounding ones. Some of the factory presets come really close to those well known Minimoog sounds, like the iconic bass patch with stacked saw waveforms. The instrument comes with a decent amount of presets and they are all neatly sorted into different categories, which is a nice bonus.

According to the developer, they’ve used something called Analog Legacy algorithms while building the Minimojo synthesizer. The idea behind this set of algorithms is to add movement to each component of the synthesizer, resulting in a lively and more analog-like sound. Perhaps this is why some of those bass patches sound so nice and fat.

I’ve also spent some time testing the filter. It definitely doesn’t sound like a generic Moog filter emulation and I really liked the sound of the resonance. The filter is usually my favorite part of a synthesizer and I’ll definitely spend some more time experimenting with this one.

What I didn’t like too much was the GUI. While it’s nice to have a realistic looking Minimoog interface in front of you, the image is kind of blurred and some of the labels are incredibly hard to read. There are several buttons on the GUI which are completely unreadable. On the other hand, the controls react well to the mouse movements and I didn’t encounter any bugs with the interface.

Another bad thing is that the CPU hit is a bit high. Since this is a monophonic instrument, it shouldn’t be much of a problem as long as you don’t use many instances of Minimojo in your project.

Overall though, I was more than pleasantly surprised with the sound and functionality of Minimojo. The instrument also features phaser and delay effects which were modeled after well known hardware devices (the delay emulates the Roland Space Echo). If this was released as a VSTi plugin, I’m practically sure that it would quickly become known as the best Minimoog emulation in the freeware world. This way, only the people who own Reaktor will be able to use Minimojo to its full potential.