I feel that if EHX had a tuner, it would have to have something really bizarre to go with it.

Yeah, the oscillator’s more than a tuneable drone.

Musically, the ring thing can do quite a bit of the same things the Mothership can, but not really tonally. It can do harmonies, whammies, and sub octaves, but not with a fat synth tone. And while you can have the oscillator track your notes, I don’t think it will do tracking ring modulation (although if you had two ring things with one set to harmony and sent that into the carrier in of the 2nd ring thing, then yes you could)

Here’s a video of the Mothership: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faJq4BLI4_8

As far as DIY solutions, someone made a tuner with an arduino (a 20 dollar programming board that you can mount inside projects) that has a midi out that can track your pitch. Some modification of his code plus building a ring mod and an oscillator could produce a DIY version of a Mothership.

Back to portamento though. . . nothing will ever be as good as the real things. Even on synthesizers, it’s better to have a ribbon controller or an ondes martenot type controller to create portamento effects because otherwise the portamento has to be timed, which is never quite right.

The HOG also has portamento, but since you’re unwilling to go with a Mothership, you’d probably be unwilling to go for the HOG (even though it is packed full of features.)

The portamento on the hog is kind of quirky too, though that’s a large part of what’s fun about it.

You just made me look up the difference between glissando and portamento.

Because on a lot of synths they call portamento glide or gliss or glissando, I’ve taken to that term. I didn’t realize that portamento was a smooth slide between notes while glissando is a slide of discrete intervals.

I’m hoping maybe taking the portamento from the V256 and putting it into a small Little Big Muff size pedal with maybe an extra effect (pitch tracking filter maybe?) that’d be pretty cool.

Honestly, I’d say get just the microsynth for now and then see what else you think you need.

That’d make an awesome effectology

It almost sounds like a filter effect.

I’d get the HOG and Microsynth now- they’re the most versatile out of that group and you’ll be able to get the widest array of synth sounds out of them.

Then get the Frequency Analyzer and Vocoder later, since they’ve got less tricks up their sleeves.

Good deals depend on if you go new/used. I got my HOG slightly used for 320.

Yeah, that’s about the standard going rate for the EP2.

The Boss Expression pedals are humongous from what I hear. I don’t know anyone who uses them.