Vermona PERfourMER MkII

The PERFourMER Mk II is an excellent synthesiser and capable of some very unique things due to its 4 voice architecture and options. It has a feature that (as far as i know) was only available on the Korg MONO/POLY synth from the 80's whereby you an assign the voices in varying modes from Monophonic to Polyphonic and best of all, have each new incoming midi note trigger the NEXT voice in a rotating sequence. so essentially each note cycles through the 4 voices allowing you to do things that are either impossible or a lot of work to achieve elsewhere.

The sound of the individual voices themselves is quite good. very solid and present. Its good for your expected sounds that you could create with such a monosynth.. i would compare it loosely to a Roland SH101.. but fatter, with less of a sharp resonant filter.. and whilst the individual voice architecture is limited and conventional, its components are all high quality and what you can do with it via the previosuly mentioned voice swapping add a new dimension to this instrument, more than justifying its existence.

I was looking forward to buying the MK-I Vermona Perfourmer, when they went along and discontinued the item! I was very dissappointed when i found i couldn't get one, just as got the funds together to have one. 6 months later or so there was news bubbling on the net that there was a MK-II in the pipeline! Great news, then from the ashes of my dissappointment the first images appeared online!!! With a new look and style that was appealing in black with those creamy vintage knobs! Quite a change from the previous silver outing.

They made some changes for setting the midi and other functions, which to be honest looked to me more difficult to set on the MK-I. They made it alittle bigger and provide the rack mount rails plus the screws to fit them. Power switch is on the back of this unit this time, with midi in / thru plus your main stereo outputs, also depending which one you go for has CV / Gate pluged holes on mine, but there is a CV / Gated version available too!! It's laid out as VCO / VCF / LFO / EG / VCA, with EXT In / VCO Out and an Individual Output / Insert Point per the four synth channels. You get Sine, Tri-angle, Pusle / Square, Sawtooth Up, White Noise and finally Externalinput for processing other sounds though the oscillators, fitlers, l.f.o's, eg [A.D.S.R.] and amp.

It sounds absolutely fantastic!!! Warm inviting and creamy. Whether using it as four mono parts via seperate midi channels or a mono stack of four channels. in duo phonic mode or even as a four voice polyphonic synth, there is plenty of ways to get great sounds out of this machine, just try it for yourself! I'm glad Vermona made this MK-II version, and as with all there other products expect high quality!

I fell in love with this synth from day one! And then relizes i should have gone all out and got the CV/Gate adition (but vermona will ad the cv gate for around 150e if you cover all postage costs.

Sit back and listen to the sound demos for yourself on: have been nice to have some midi cc controll, but what the hell!

Also would have been nice to have another adsr filter and switchs to assigning the voices to that filter. You can still have fun with this thing with your moduler gear even without the CV/GATE eddition!

Very well built!

:loveley knobs - nicly spaced appart, very easy to use, a real time burner (is that good or bad?) What the hell!

If you like expert knob twiddling and can afford one, get one!

Cheers Vermona!

This is one of the more unique synths out there. Four voices that you can operate independently of one another as four mono synths, or together in a four-voice poly mode (round robin) where you can have each voice sound different than the others. This allows for some truly unique performance opportunities, particularly when triggering each voice via its own MIDI channel. Plus the sound of the oscillators is truly beautiful — somewhere in the vicinity of a MiniMoog (clean and smooth, with the ability to generate some deep, rich bass tones), but uniquely Vermona.

It's not an easy synth to work with — no patch memory and you have to dial in the settings for four voices, which can be time consuming and fiddly. But the results are worth it, especially if you're into experimenting on the fly.