Pittsburgh Modular Taiga Review 

Pittsburgh is amazing. There aren’t many people out there trying to invent something *new* in voltage. Lots of people remaking famous filters and such… but Pittsburgh is making crazy new sh*t! Like their recent module the Flamingo, which creates new harmonics through unprecedented analogue means. I had a semi-religious harmonic experience putting a slowly morphing wavetable oscillator through the Flamingo (also slowly morphing) and then thru their Crow filter. Outstanding work they’re doing… but for seriously i’m waiting for their DRUM MACHINE. Yes they are working on a drum machine. I want it. 😊

very nice piece of kit, and a quality review too, - as always much appreciated - also, great to finally see a synth that matches the colours of your exquisite shirt collection

Pittsburgh Modular does not disappoint. This thing looks and sounds amazing! I just ordered mine

Kudos for your enthusiastic and task-specific review of the features and interactions of the modules in the Taiga. I am very new to the modular world, and I have been turning the knobs of my new Taiga and scratching my head at the manual for about three days now. Your video both clarifies some of the workflow intricacies of this machine and celebrates the occasionally opaque technical and sonic mysteries that are built into the Taiga by design. I really hope you make more content with the Taiga for us to enjoy and learn from. Thank you.

This just seems awesome, and what a tempting price point.... a great run-through dude!!

Really great and quite unique sounding! Evocative to say the least! Great review!😊

I knew you would bring the poetry! Just lovely...

You know it's a Pittsburgh Synth when it has filter cutoff knob the size of a dinner plate. Seems like a cool synth but i would prefer a bigger cutoff knob, maybe on the galactic scale. It should be so large that it has its own gravitational field and when you get too close you are sucked into its orbit constantly adjusting the cutoff with the inertia of your fragile human form hurtling though space.

Good, thorough demo. Really helped me get my head around the "dynamics" module. And a very nice shirt to boot.

Really enjoyed the way you express your passion, merci

Awesome review and awesome machine! It’s on my buying list !

This is awesome. What a tool to have. Great review my friend!!!

Robin, that shirt is a triumph! Wonderful! The synth is pretty cool, too!

We having a party! :) cool explorations Robin!

Great review Robin, very intrigued by this one. I can hear a little beast in there 😁

What a great review and synth

Thank you for the wonderful exploration. I have a Taiga now. It's actually my first serious hardware synth, though I have experience with plugin synths. It really is a little bit amazing! I wanted something that could be playable in a regular way, but also invite me to interact with it in other ways directly rather than through my keyboard. It delivers in spades in both areas - and with a bit of sampling I can get some great polyphonic versions too.

Sounds pretty sweet to me. Nice review!

very nice demo - sounds amazing!

Seems like the Microvolt 3900 has grown up quite a bit. :D The Microvolt was like a fusion of a SH-101 and westcoast, the Taiga now is a Minimoog fused with Buchla essence. But the Microvolt has many of these things already. A folder on a sine wave, a halfwave clipper on the "regular" sine channel, a saw and a pulse. But only one osicalltor with a mixer. Then an earlier version of the Lowpass filter and the LPG/VCA (as it was called on the MV) which had the Pluck mode and the switching between VCA or LPG. Also the preamp was already present on the Microvolt. Ah... I just love my Microvolt. ^^' The Taiga now has multiple oscillators with waveshaping and a multimode filter and is just a way more grown synth. I wish they had put this halfwave clipper on the waveforms, perhaps as a shift function on the waveform button. On the Microvolt this circuit clips off the lower 25% of the wave cycle of the sine wave and makes it asymmetric which adds more even harmonics to the wave. This would've been cool to see for every of Taigas waveforms. Also i'd rather have the function generator of the Microvolt instead of that delay. The delay is, in my opinion, the one little sore spot on the Taiga. It's kinda nice to see this kind of evolution in the Pittsburgh synths and i'm excited to see, where they can take this in the future. Maybeee loose the semi-modular side of it, add a mod matrix and more LFOs and envelopes on the digital part of it and pack it into an poly synth? That would be kinda cool and would shake up the poly synth segment for sure. I'd really like to see an analog poly with this kind of waveshaping capabilities! There's currently only the PolyBrute which offers folding on its triangle wave. Now imagine the oscillators of the Taiga in a poly synth! I hope Pittsburgh considers this possibility.

Ahhhh you did the separate osc patching... please make another paraphonic video only playing around, with separate sequencing. I truly enjoyed the listening. Big Up Molten!

I just knew your take on this one was going to be entertaining!

Want one.Sounds lovely Robin

I tried the Pest and the Beast and they both had lovely sounds this sounds fab!!

Great starter synth for people who don't dare enter the modular world. Its has some nice features. Looks lovely and sounds great. LPG's rock as does wave folding. This should make a lot of people happy. Great job Pittsburgh.

Inspiring as a way into Eurorack or as a desktop unit. @ €799 a very reasonable price. Sounds very good too. And I watched yours first of the 3 reviews that are up👍

I've now had mine just over a month so time to dive back into this video to try to get my head around it. I keep getting these amazing sounds but I don't have a clue how

Nice synth, but I heard a really sad story about it. Dude had just bought one and was loving it. As he played, he got happier and happier, but also drunker and drunker. He ended up naked, falling asleep on top of it. When he woke up, the synth didn't work any more. The moral? Don't lie on your Taiga while bare.

Holy lord that sounds good. I just came here from their live stream about it... I have a West Pest.... Pittsburgh Modular is an amazing company. I want this. I think it is really fun to be able to see the oscilloscope waves of the sounds.

Mind blowing . I love it 🤯🔥🔥🔥❤

very helpful🙃💙thanks for sharing

When I started in Eurorack some years ago, they struck me as being the American Doepfer. Nothing against Doepfer but we have that so I like the direction they've taken.

Very smooth and powerful sounds

great in depth review! thank you very much. a pearl in the sea of flat look me open up the parcel videos on youtube... man i want this little machine

The IN jacks correspond to what is under the bottom row. Nice overview.

Awesome brother!!!!!

i loved the idea of this synth and its design but i hadnt heard it used once well enough to say, "i want to play with that" but this video made the taiga sound great.

Seems really nice and it could be a perfect module for the NiftyKEYZ *but* they should have put the patch bay on top especially Pittsburgh Modular and Cre8audio work together

Nice proggy-ish playing, great sounding bit of kit.

The Two IN jacks above the ADSR Envelopes are actually the GATE/TRIGGER inputs useful to know if you're Euroracking only with CV/Gate .

Very nice. Pittsburgh have upped their aesthetic game quite a bit over last-year’s East Beast & West Pest design fiascos. This Taiga is very attractive. And the sound is very sweat. Taiga seems like an SV-2. ie. the logical extension of the laudable SV-1/SV-1b. The poor usability of the SV-1’s digital module was a weak point of that unit. And the SV-1 lacked enough CV inputs IMO. I hope this version addresses those issues.

quite the achievement, very nice price all things being equal and sounds great

Looks very deep!

Might need to take a photo of the setup when you find a good patch! And keep a running record?

heartfelt review, thanks, tuning/calibration, does one need to open the unit frequently to tune/calibrate with Phillips screw driver or is Taiga good to go for months straight from the factory?

If this synth had patch recall I’d buy one for sure.

I have had it now for a few weeks and I love it, it is a living breathing organism. This is a synth like no other. I made the mistake in the beginning of not feeding it enough power for the first couple of days and that resulted in the synth not behaving correctly. Once I discovered that, happy with not having ruined it, it has been nothing short of amasing. I would not recomend it as a first instrument for a beginner though.

Do the knobs feel better on this machine than they do on say those smaller Beast and Pest units? (The SV-1 had gorgeous feeling potentiometers with gooey and even resistance)

Nice bit of kit - just need £750 to buy one. I stupidly sold a DX7 some years ago - I now think I might want another and a Roland 80.

21:51 very nice

Instinctualy I want to hate this synth, but my muse hears something hiding behind the work surface that’s quite appealing for experimenting. I’m gonna wait a bit, but it seems it’s a fit in my collection of original sounding synths.

7:14 when you say this, I can totally hear the similar character in that woody nasally knocking ( the lpg or folding or both), but it's hard to tell without hearing both side by side... my question: would you say one (West Pest vs Taiga) has a clearer sounding high end (high freqs)?

34:30 for the next 45 seconds or so... if someone has to bail early, at least check this part out

Hi there- really enjoyed your video. A bit of concern - the octave in paraphonic mode sounded really out of tune (flat). Hopefully due to oscillators being tuned differently? Care to check it out? Thanks again for the detailed video.

I think you maybe got it wrong in saying that you can play Taiga only with midi incorporated and not only with cv and gates (at circa 1:00:41)? The ADSR and Dynamic Modules do have gate/trigger in, that’s where those four ins are in the upper row. (see 37:04) Your review was passionate and great again. :)

For some reason when using my keystep pro it will only respond to pitch bend when no sequence is running or when other tracks are muted while a sequence is running

Hashtag - must Preorder

Wow, what a great sounding machine. Not since I first heard Vlads denos of the Pulsar 23 has a machine so instantly made me go I have to get one of those. Just wonderful. (Other than the molten meter obviously )

Total noob question; I can’t get the isolators to close ( to reach silence ) When I use a midi controller a note keeps on droning in the background, the pitch changes and even when the filter and the envelopes close, y can hear a note in the background.

what is the setup to see the wave frequency and shape?

its cool makes some great sound not sure if its worth the 800$ price tag

I wonder what happens if you have a long attack and the LPG pluck mode activated

Sick! I love their stuff!

Got my Taiga today. Really struggling with it! 😕 I thought it would be pretty easy to get going with it. Took me a while to get a sound out of it. Then the sound was very odd and hard to control. Tried to follow the quick start guide. Helped a little. But envelope behavior is really odd. Not like any ADSR I've used before! And the whole thing sounds a bit off. Pretty disappointment so far. Not really what I expected out of the box.

Be nice to see it patched right up.

This makes three units out for review now wherein the sine wave is distorted and has more harmonics than the triangle. On top of that, neither the filter or the lowpass gate close all the way, and the BBD circuit suffers from bleed. Key tracking has been consistently off as well. Interesting synth, but every unit exhibiting the same calibration issues is suspect. Cheers!

Probably be selling my 0 coast to fund this

It sounds good but if I’m correct. No on board sequencer? And you can’t control it completely via CV? So as a eurorack synth addition & wanting to use exclusively CV for control….. it’s useless without MIDI ….???

Just found your channel Love it, thanks for helping me empty my bank account indulging in my new semi modular habit. I ordered this within ten minutes of your video. When you are sequencing the three oscillators what sequencer are you using Ta

damm! i should buy i should buy🥵🥵

What app is that on the screen?

Some of your test patches sound like the weird world of the EMS VCS!

Wish I had 800bucks to spare. Peninsula or Cape Coast synthesis.

I wish they would have continued the graphic style of the animal modules. I think Taiga looks a bit boring. I don't know if they saved money with the knobs, but the look like something from aliexpress. Functionally the system seems inviting

Awful... It would have done better to stay in the taiga...