Alesis Fusion 6HD

I have OS 1.22, but there is an new OS 1.23 just released today that says it will fix alot of MIDI related problems that I have yet to experience.

The S&S presets compare very well with the Yamaha Motif that my wife uses. The virtual analog are as good or better than everything that I have heard, except the Ion. The physical modeling is not up to spec for some, i find it wonderful for making unusual sounds. That is a great strength of this keyboard. It is easy to wander off into Synthworld.
There are a slew of sounds avaiable from Hollow Sun that are simply the best.
Editing programs is a breeze if you know about synthesis. Even the FM is much easier than on the DX-7 for example.

There has been alot of complaining about the manual. It could be better, I have seen worse. It is more of a push-this-button-when-you-want-to-do-this sort of manual. Not step by step. Alesis have put some tutorials up on their website and there is a users forum where most of the natives are friendly and helpful.
So factoring in the manual I am giving it an eight in this rating.

The polyphony is limited only by the complexity of the program. The effects are very usable and some are excellent, all are pretty easy to use.
It is capable of being expanded with software updates. No expensive little boards to buy extra. There is a sample converting program that will load WAV, Soundfonts and Akai format straight in. You may use the effects and synthesis engines to torture them further as you choose.

They keyboard is pretty good, my wife said it felt OK and she is an actual piano player. It is velocity sensitive and it has the bonus of aftertouch.

The sequencer is more of a linear affair and not a pattern based thing. This has caused some complaining in certain circles, but not from me. Top to bottom sequencing is fine, there really isn't a memory restriction with the hard drive, so I think it is easy to use.

I think that this instrument is good for anyone needing some great sounds right out of the box. Where it really kills is when you start making your own sounds. It is easy to get results that are great sounding and fun. There are so many options and you can go so deep. Expect a learning curve and dig in and explore.

I love the way this thing sounds. Some of the Hollow Sun sounds that are samples of analog machines just sound alive on the Fusion. There are tons of ways to make sounds react to your playing. Plus the sample and analog programs can have up to 8 LFO's per program. You really can't have too many LFO's.
You have modular synth connectivity. Almost anything can modulate something else. And you don't get bogged into alot of submenus.

You can program sounds that would work for any type of music.

I have had no problems with it in my studio. I would gig it without a backup. In fact I think my wife has her eyes on it

I have only had to contact Alesis about this board one time, the person who answered my question went out of his way to help me.

Thanks Jim Norman!

Right now the Fusion is an incredible value when you look at all of the options it puts at your finger tips. There is only one other product on the market right now that directly compares and it costs many thousands more than Fusion. If it were stolen I would go mad!

I chose this product because it has 4 sound generating engines and 8 tracks of hard disk recording built in. There is the ability to add new sysnthesis types, effects, and samples later.

It has helped me make music so far and I like the way the controls are laid out. It is all very logical to my way of thinking. Some may disagree, but I also think it is quite beautiful. Sleek and silver!

I wish it had wavetable synthesis or wave sequencing, but they can always add that later on.

I'm using the latest OS (1.22). It works as it should, but it's a lot of work to get used to it. It is very powerfull. I didn?t find any bugs, even when programing it extensively for hours and hours.
However, this is a sinth for those musicians( it's a professional instrument, not a toy) who like to get their hands dirty in the deeps of the machine. For those of you who just want to use nice factory presets, you might find something more suitable in the tradicional big three(or four) brands for this kind of products. But none can come close to the sonic power of fusion. I even dare comparing it, if not surpassing, the most powerfull dedicated samplers, virtual modeling sinths and even stand alone audio recorders out there. It?s that powerfull! For live use, however, you have to organize your banks first, because the amount of sounds it can hold in its 80 GB hard drive it's so huge! It's deep. It's powerfull. It shure isn't easy. Like my wife. And I love them both.

No match out there for polyphony, hardware or software. Outstanding built in efects : 2 bus plus four inserts per program at the same time, 8 inserts in mix mode.
Holds compactflash memory and can store up to 80 GB in it?s HD of what you want. Plenty enouph for me. Poly aftertouch (ouuch!)
Powerfull midi sequencer plus 8 tracks audio recorder.

The rom sounds are it's weekest point. As said before, if you want to take it out of the box, press a button or two to get the sound you want, look the other way. However, Hollow Sun is releasing special programs and samples via internet, for free, especially for the fusion and these are serious sounds, that excells any other hardware sounds outthere, so now the poor rom sounds doesn't bother me any more, I simply don't use them, except for the piano sound. Although not a gigasample, it is quite playable and expressive if you tweek it a litle. And the rom Electr?nica is also quite espectacular. I give it a ten not beacause of it's factory sounds, but for it's sonic power and its generaly high quality sound coming for it, now that I have my own selection of sounds in it, and for the Hollow Sun releases.

So far, no problems.
I'done a dozen gigs with it.

The best spent 1000? of my life. Half the price of its competitors with much more then double the power, and features, at all levels.

OS 1.22. Never used a previous OS. The presets are OK. The free sounds offered on the Alesis website is top notch programming by Hollow Sun.

As previously mentioned, I don't know what the polyphony is, Have not run out. I read that the sample memory can be quadupled.

The on board sequencer is pretty easy to use especially with the tutorial offered on the Alesis site.

Good for all kinds of music. With the 40 gig HD, it can accomodate any kind of music styles

Can't afford a backup.

The forum for the Fusion is one of the reasons I bought this keyboard. New dowloadable sounds almost monthly.

I would definately buy again. I've been sequencing since the Roland MC-500 days.
A sampler with a hard drive built in!! No one thought of that before? $899 for a fantastic sounding keyboard, sequencer and sampler!
With an OS update in the near future, I'm hoping Alesis will include step recording and a better pattern based sequencer.

I sold my Alesis QS8.1 and ?upgraded? to the Alesis Fusion 6HD. The Fusion is supposed to be a revolutionary keyboard offering unlimited potential for new sounds, and a built-in hard-disk recorder. There?s ?fusion? here alright: a lousy mix of bad software with a healthy dose of user un-friendly hardware.

The keyboard chassis itself actually feels sturdy and makes more use of metal that I expected. The real-time knobs are great, but the various buttons (and their locations) are a bit ridiculous. The keyboard has buttons for numbers 1-8 (but no 0 or 9) and only A-P. It apparently never occurred to Alesis to give users buttons for 0-9 and the full alphabet to type in things easier (programs, songs, banks, etc.).

The screen size is decent but navigating is a nightmare without a set of directional buttons. Alesis decided to give users a half-moon pattern of ?prev?, ?next?, ?inc? and ?dec? buttons around a jog wheel. This is about the stupidest thing I?ve ever seen on any human-machine interface. It?s totally counter-intuitive and difficult to use.

The Fusion takes a significant amount of time to load or ?boot up? when you first turn it on. You feel like you?re waiting for the thing to load Windows 98 on an old 486. After using the keyboard for the first time, it becomes quite obvious that the Fusion is more of a slow computer (with attached black and white keys) than an actual musical instrument. Sometimes you?ll select a sound and have to wait a few seconds for it to actually load off of the hard drive. While it?s loading, there are often loud and unexpected sounds (twitches, pops, and random noise). This isn?t a keyboard where you could subtly change programs in the middle of a live song.

Alesis continues to use an intensely retarded system of banks that don?t make any sense. What good is having 10,000 sounds on your keyboard when you have nearly no way to find them or organize them all!? I tried to create and organize a few new banks for about an hour and gave up in frustration.

When using headphones, the keyboard really never gets loud enough. I?m not deaf, and I?ve got some pro headphones, but the Fusion still doesn?t sound like it should with the volume maxed out.

The Fusion is insanely buggy/glitchy. I had to purchase a Compact Flash card immediately after receiving the keyboard in order to upgrade the firmware (another $30 purchase). There is no way to upgrade the firmware directly with a USB cable and a computer. The media that Alesis decided to use for backups/storage is also totally outdated and in three to five years will likely not be available. Even now CF cards are getting hard to find.

The manual is terrible. I know a lot of half-baked musicians always complain about manuals because they can?t read. But this one really is bad. The worst part is that the manual was printed before it was even complete. You need to go to the Alesis website to download about four or five supplements and print about 200 pages of new stuff. I have a three-ring binder (that?s twice as thick as the original manual) for ?supplements.?

See above.

See above.

Emailed Alesis. They tried to help, but this thing is such junk there's not much they can do.

Don?t buy this keyboard. Run the other direction. I will be returning mine. Alesis should really be ashamed of their lack of R&D. Who deigns and sells a car where you need to download wheels and parts to the engine? Or since when did you buy a microwave oven that needed four hours of programming before it could cook some nachos? I?m not being sarcastic. The Fusion really is that bad. As I write this, I?ve been waiting over three hours for the keyboard to finish loading sounds off a flash card. I feel like I bought more of a kit computer with downloadable software than a real complete instrument. Buy a Korg, Yahama, or even a Casio. Alesis needs to learn to put out a better product. This is totally unacceptable.

New OS 1.22 is much better and great tutorials are now posted on the alesis web site. Considering whats under the lid here (power!), easy to use.

Ease of use figure given based on how how easy it is to access this much power and flexability!

No fixed limited on poly
Great effects, sounds are updated for free frequently (to the hard drive via USB) and other sounds/samples can bve converted for free and played back via the sampler (AKAI, KONTACT, HALION, GIGA can all be played back on the Fusion!)
Midi, velocity, aftertouch.
Nice on board sequencer with 8 audio tracks, mix mode is like a groove box/pattern sequencer.
Synth, Sampler, Virtual Analogue (from the ION), FM (lots of FM power) and Physical Modeling! Only thing that comes closes is the Korg Oasis for 6 times as much money!

The new OS 1.22 has an amazing amount and quality of soiunds and new sounds are given away free and frequently (check the FUSION forum if you don't believe me, sometimes lately we have several banks a week of pro samples!!)

Very easy to use real time buttoms, arp and expression matrix + the cool blue mod wheels ;-)

Seems very solid. I have hgad no probles and moved it around in a car a couple of times.

Alesis are playing a blinder on this unit, frequent OS updates with new features, free tutorials and they have paid a sound designer to prodce free sound banks that are just 'given free' to fuson users!

The best synth I have owned, so good in fact that I sold my 6HD (that I planed to use along with my Virus, Micron, Korg Triton and 88 note master keyboard) and all my other keyboards and now only use a FUSION 8HD for everything.

Yes, it is that good, and amazingly it's getting better all the time.

See the fusion forum http://www.promusicproducts.com/forum/phpBB2/index.php
for real user experiances rather than reviews from people who just played a few presets in early OS versions!

I'm using OS 1.22 right now and everything is operating great. The presets sounds very nice, especially compared to my previous setup which was a Yamaha CS2x, QY70, DJX and DJX-II and a DD-55. All of this was being recorded on a Boss BR-532. Editing the patches is a breaze using the control knobs but I haven't tried to edit them in depth to come up with my own sounds just yet. Editing the samples is a little hard for me but I don't use my Fusion as often as I'd like so I just need a little more time to figure it out. I still have to learn how to do this but the tutorials on the website are great. The owners manual kind of bland. It explains what everything does but does not explain how to use it. It has no examples or TRY THIS sections.

Only God knows what the polyphony is on this workstation. I've tried running out of notes on this workstation but I CAN NOT DO IT. Keyboard action is great. It's very different than I older boards but I'm enjoying the feel of the keys very much. The only thing I'm a little iffy about is the noise from the keys. I'm not used to hearing the keys being played. But, again the Fusion keys are very nice to me. I like them better than the the BIG 3. This workstation has plenty of effects and they are all awesome and very easy to use. There are no expansion capabilities but there are free sounds you can download off the the internet from the Alesis website. I'm sure about about all of the MIDI capabilities. It does have an onboard sequencer which I'm enjoying very much so far but I wish that it had a pattern sequencer like my QY70. It is very easy to use and advanced but I just wish it had that one thing.

For the most part the instuments are very realistic and since they've hooked up with HOLLOW SUN, they have gotten even better. The only thing I don't like is I wish that there were more drum kits. But I think theyre very easy to use, but I don't know about extensive editing. I think the sounds work well for all types of music. The onboard effects are very good. Velocity and aftertouch is very nice and it reacts very well to my playing.

I can depend on this board but I would be nervous had traveling with it only because of the hard drive feature and because It's too darn heavy FOR ME to carry for long periods of time. It does have some bugs in it every once in a while. It will have trouble loading sounds or booting up but like I said, it is VERY RARE. It used to happen very often with the old OS from what I've heard. Now, like the manual says, if you use a lot of effects during recording on the hard drive, sometimes this will cause problems trying to locate what you've recorded later on. I used to have this problem quite frequently, but since I upgraded to the current OS, I have had no problems. And I stopped recording with the effects so heavy. You can flatten the tracks you've recorded on and this will help the sound quality. Time can only tell if I'd use this without a backup.

Customer support is great. I wouldn't try to email them with requests or questions. You'd be better off calling them during their office hours.

I'f it were lost or stolen I would be very upset, to put it kindly. I don't think I'd buy anything else, especially with the way Alesis is updating the sounds and OS. It keeps getting better and very frequently. I did consider the Roland Fantom X6 because I wanted an all in one machine. Synth, sampler, sequencer and recorder. The only workstations that have all of these features that I know of are the Fusion, Fantom X and the Oasys. The Oasys is way out of my budget right now but I think it's very interesting. I like the Fantom X too, but I didn't want to pay that much money, either. I'm very pleased with my choice. I was questioning my decision when I first bought this but not any more. I've been playing along side my dad since I was a child. I got my first keyboard when I was 9 years old. It was the Yamaha PS-2 which I still have. So it's about 22 years old now. I like having something different than everybody else. I don't want to be a ME TOO person. I know everyone thinks that this board is Casio like because of the way it looks and therefore it must sound cheap too. I'll let them keep thinking that and blow them away with the sounds of the workstation. When they get the drum sounds added or when I learn how to tweak them, I'll be overjoyed. I've already mentioned my other gear but I plan on keeping the BR-532 and the DJX or CS2x. I haven't made up my mind on which keyboard to keep. It does help me to make music but I wish it had the pattern sequencer like I mentioned earlier because right now I have to drag and paste my music to the way I want it. And like I said earlier, I wish it had tighter acoustic drum kits. I don't regret my purchase one bit. I'm glad that there's a user group for this workstation. You can go to the Alesis website to find it if you're interested. I hope this review helps somebody.

The Keyboard presets are pretty good and just like all alesis keyboards there are a lot of them. Editing is pretty simple, Patch editor???LOL alesis doesn't have one yet. The Manual for this keyboard is BAD!!!! I mean Really Bad, I thought rolands old stuff had bad manuals, but this is the worst. You have to learn the keyboard yourself for the most part. There has been a toon of updates since the manuel was writen anyhow.

This keyboard has the most features to offer excet for the Oaisys but it's about $4000 less, The only problem is alesis rushed to get this keyboard out,, and it's been out for a while now and they are just making some basic things work. The keyboard is ALMOST great. 32 track sequencer, 8 tracks for audio, usb updates for sound set, 40 GB hard drive,

This keyboard sounds good, The sound are pretty good, but for some reason they don't sound as good as my motif or my fantom as far as "real" sounds but for leads and synth basses I think it's great. There have been about 5 updates to the soundset since I've had my keyboard, about 2 months now, free of charge, so this is great.

The only problem I see is when I load a large ammount of samples into the keyboard they "get lost" on the hard drive and the keyboard is unable to load them

Prety good, called one day to get an answer, they answer my question in about 2 mins.

Worth the money, if they get the OS working as it should this would be a great, great keyboard,

Software Version 1.21

The newest OS fixes all the serious bugs and adds a new soundset which is certainly passable, at least on my monitor system - though nothing I would use un-tweaked (I find that true of ALL synths though). The newest OS also adds Loop-based recording.

Hollow Sun just released their third batch of extremely tasty samples/patches for the Fusion a few days ago - they are astounding...really nice PPG and electromechanical timbres with a few suprises...I'm really loving this board more and more as i play it.

The editing system is open-ended - if you want another envelope or LFO, just add one then attach it to a destination in the mod matrix. Really nice! The PM engine(s) is(are) much more capable than I had hoped and the FM engine's implementation is easier to program than I had hoped - back in the day I used to hate programming the DX synths. The featureset is pretty damn deep but the navigation and editing system is fairly intuitive and easy to get around on. One niggle - why aren't the assignable knobs implemented in a useful way for the edit pages? (ADSR on envelope pages for example)

The User manual is pretty dense but thank goodness for the "Quickstart" guide thats included. Once you dive in though, everything becomes clear fairly quickly...

I haven't hit the polyphony roof yet, even with very dense mixes! From what I can tell, polyphony is extremely high but is dependant on which synth engines are being used at once and how many instances of each...

I personally like the keyboard action though it may be light for some people...its not as spongy-light as a Korg Karma but its not as heavily weighted as a Kurzweil SP76. Velocity, release velocity and mono aftertouch are standard.

Expansion is easy...there's a huge hard drive in there - put what you want on it! I used the Fusion Converter program to dump a quarter gig of Akai-format Waldorf Wave samples into the Fusion last night. I just got through "fine tuning" them this afternoon...tweaking velocity settings and envelopes. Four banks of pure Wave! Sounds better than out of my S2000 and I can load all the programs at once instead of one at a time from a ultra-slow CD Rom drive. Unreal!!! O_O

I haven't touched the onboard hard disk recorder yet but it looks fairly capable - 8 tracks of simultaneous audio recording and room for lots of MIDI tracks. I'll probably use it as a "song scratchpad" when I don't feel like firing up my PT TDM rig.

Some observations about the Fusion's overall "sound" and the Piano in particular:

Some people have been asking how I like the Fusion's Piano and, more specifically, how it stacks up against the Korg and Yamaha offerings...

Well, It kind of depends on what you like personally.
Let me explain; the Piano on my Motif Rack was a brittle piece of crap to my ears. The piano on the Fusion is a lot more realistic. Personal taste varies on piano sounds quite a bit though - I've got an old Baldwin Acrosonic Spinet in the studio that I love!

I needed at least one "workstation" type rompler in my studio. I started with a Korg Karma but its sounds were overhyped plus it had the absolute worst keybed I have ever felt. Later I added a Motif rack to the setup - besides its too-bright sound it had awful MIDI timing slop...I sold it to help fund the Fusion.

Through my ADAMs, the Fusion has a nicely flat, unhyped sound. In my opinion, the Fusion's patches sit in a mix a little nicer than Korg and Yamaha - I had to compress and EQ them a bit to get them to "play nice".

I'm playing the Fusion along with a Serge Modular, Nord Modular, Yamaha VL-1, E-mu Planet Earth, Waldorf MicrowaveXT and a DSI Polyevolver Keyboard and I tell you, the Fusion can certainly hold its own, even with a disparate bunch of "weird guys". LOL! It really has a unique voice of its own thats different enough to be a very welcome addition :)

The unique sound engines in the Fusion are just a blast to program and I love their sound...thats where I think it really shines though Its obviously no slouch as a sampler either - now I can finally trash my old S2000.

If I want Piano, usually I'll just put a ribbon mic next to the Acrosonic but I can see myself actually using the Fusion's Piano once in a while.

If the Fusion's Piano sound is of paramount importance to you, by all means go listen to it but that's no reason to buy a synth...you can always load one more suited to your personal taste ;)

Seems fairly solid. I'm not planning on gigging with it - if I was, I would certainly buy a decent case, but I would do that for any synth I planned on transporting ;) I haven't had any lockups or software crashes yet...I've been digging pretty hard and deep into the beast since I got it and it seems very reliable so far. This is a much more mature OS version though...If you're looking into a Fusion, make sure the most recent OS is loaded - some of the earlier ones were rather buggy.

Rarely ever dealt with them. Had a flakey ION a while back and they fixed it up good as new for no charge at all. Warranty seems solid on the Fusion.

Some notes about programming the different sound engines:

I recently programmed a VA sound, a "reed" PM sound and a FM sound from scratch (not just tweaking existing sounds) and while the editing seemed a little fiddly at first, I soon fell into the Fusion editing paradigm - there are lots of nice shortcuts implemented to speed up things as well...individual mod pages have shortcuts to related sources and destinations.

The VA engine is very nice! The "RP" filter in particular is especially warm and squelchy. While my result wasn't quite as warm as some of the sounds I've heard from the Ion, it certainly is at least the equivalent of the Waldorf Q, if maybe a bit warmer. Certainly theres none of that brittle digital "fizz" I've noticed from my Nord gear, but its certainly not "dull" or "muted" sounding. All in all, I really like the VA engine.

The PM engine is bizarre! The trick here is to use the mod matrix extensively with multiple envelopes affecting things like "breath pressure" and "bore frequency", "reed threshold", ect... I was able to get a very dynamic Reedy Flute sound going in no time that I could actually "overblow" by using high key velocity. Nice stuff!

The FM engine is really powerfull in its being flexible without adding complexity! You can make up your routing scheme as you go, you're not locked into specific "algorhythms". I've managed to get a depth and subtlety of modulation I could never get from DX style FM. I created a patch that could easily be mistaken for a rather nice real analog string pad - and that was before even adding any filters! The FM engine can still do the "ringy" DX thing but can take it a bit farther. There's a FM preset called "Oxide" that I'm dieing to inspect - an ethereal scrapey bellish resonant thing that is astounding - it sounds like its rusting as you play it!

1.20 the update

For all the features it gives you it's a no brainer this is the new technology everything before this is old and obsolete.

Sounds? boy o boy does this thing blow away a triton, motif, and fantom x for sound possibilities that you never heard of! Some people may think the presets supposed to be the best ever created but forget that they may not, but the user must understand that this the best overall synth invention ever created and this will be around many decades after the current tired old synths sounds expire.

No problems yet.

never had to deal with it

Complete 10! Think of this as a one of a kind synth invention when this technology currently cost $8,000 in an Korg Oasys.

I didn't keep it long enough to check it out due to the issues I mention in the feature section.

My big complaint is that they advertised this as having semi-weighted keys and the keys are no different than my synth weighted Triton classic 61 key, or my Motif 6. This is the real reason I bought this, I could deal with a board that may not sound as good as my triton if it had semi-weighted keys. Big advertising error.

The analog sounds are better than the motif or Triton, everything else was not. Of course I had the early software version and I guess they fixed presets and problems.

I wouldn't buy, seemed cheap and plastic and too expensive for what you get.