UDO’s DMNO is ingenious in ways that I have not seen before£2,599, udo-audio.com
“DMNO was not conceived as a successor to the Supers, but as a companion to them,” writes Director George Hearn in the introduction to the UDO DMNO’s 113-page ring-bound manual. Indeed, those synths have been the name of the game for UDO up to now, from the inaugural 12-voice Super 6 released in 2019, to the 16-voice Super 8, to the formidable 20-voice Super Gemini released in 2023. If you’re familiar with the Bristol-based developer’s range, you’ll know that they have built a well-deserved reputation for analogue-digital hybrid designs that deal rather brilliantly in stereo imaging as well. How well will the DMNO measure up?

READ MORE: “The Prophet-5 set the standard for how it’s done today… but there are other ways”: Why the UDO DMNO might just change the polyphonic landscape as we know it

The synth has its work cut out by virtue of its own forebears. Its eight-voice polyphony is four fewer than UDO’s previous minimum, its keyboard is the company’s smallest to date, and yet it is marginally more expensive than the Super 6. But the DMNO quickly shows that size and voice count aren’t the only criteria that matter. It’s two-part multitimbral, which the Super 6 is not. It features a raft of effects, including delay, reverb, chorus and delicious distortion. It boasts a brand-new per-voice analogue filter design, dubbed the Dynamic Multi-Core Stereo Filter, and its architecture all but tears up the rule book for a synth of its kind.
The DMNO is excellently built, even packed in a large drawstring canvas bag for shipping. It’s heavy, its buttons and knobs are firm to the touch, and its full-size keyboard is equipped with aftertouch. It’s finished in a lovely, vintage-style cream with dark knobs. If you feel like you’ve seen that finish before, it might be because you have, with the DMNO’s visual identity bearing a striking resemblance to that of vintage Oberheim synths, most notably the 2-Voice. This nod to Oberheim is, if nothing else, a confident statement of intent. But it also helps to explain what the DMNO is all about.
1975’s Oberheim 2-Voice, one of the earliest commercially available polysynths, comprised two identical Synthesiser Expansion Modules and a sequencer; Oberheim’s quasi-modular monophonic SEMs having been designed for possible cumulation into polyphonic instruments, from the 2-Voice to the 4-Voice to the 8-Voice.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
The DMNO’s own two modules are not monophonic, offering four voices apiece in dual mode (or eight in single mode). They are, however, essentially identical, simply delineated with a rather classy symbol of a domino — hence “DMNO” — with a single dot on the left and two dots on the right. Each of these offers two digital, FGPA-based oscillators (that’s Field-Programmable Gate Array, which simply means uber-stable, responsive and artefact-free), a voltage-controlled filter section, and controls for two envelopes and an LFO. There’s also an additional auxiliary envelope and a second LFO, which can ostensibly both be edited via the screen and encoders, but as for the fundamentals, these are upfront and available on each module to be tweaked by hand.
The phrase ‘more than the sum of its parts’ is often bandied around, but here we really will allow it. The DMNO’s Play Modes allow the two modules to be stacked up or switched between any which way via a knob orbited by domino-themed symbols. They can be played simultaneously, or the keyboard can be split between them. They can alternate with each note trigger, or they can be triggered at random. One can be fed into another.
My favourite Play Mode has to be the (excellently-named) Chaos Mode, where randomisation is further augmented with random pitch deviation in either fifth or octave intervals, and with configurable probability, too. It’s a truly brilliant way of squeezing the most from your sound sculpting of the two modules. Add to this a multimode arpeggiator, a sequencer (coming in an imminent update) —and a mixer section where each side can be independently levelled, panned and bussed to a highly flexible delay and reverb send—and you’ve got some serious capacity for dynamic movement.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Each individual module’s oscillators each offer a familiar array of waveforms (including sine and white noise, I’m happy to report), with the addition of six assignable single-cycle waveforms that really do give extra range. The DMNO ships with a range of these ready to go, from harmonically-rich organ-esque sounds to chiming FM-style waveforms, but you can also load your own into a possible 32 slots, which is a marvellous touch.
Another nice touch is the potential to detune the oscillators into ‘super’ versions of any of its waveforms. It does this with six ‘sister’ oscillators, meaning that each single oscillator can actually be seven. Add this to the fact that the Wave/PWM knob allows for interpolation between adjacent waveforms, not a million miles from a wavetable synth workflow, and it’s possible to create impressive complexity from this fundamental and relatively simple component of the DMNO alone.
The filter section of each module is similarly generous with functionality. Almost every filter type you can think of is on offer, from three types of low-pass to all-pass to a fully-fledged phase shifter. These can also be placed in pairs, and in a variety of configurations; in parallel, series or in stereo. Using the accompanying ∆-Cutoff knob to offset the cutoff frequencies of the two filters, I find it once again possible to create immersive, original-sounding results with the simplest of ingredients.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
The DMNO’s screen is a retro green-on-black glass vacuum fluorescent display, faintly reminiscent of the Fairlight CMI and pleasingly spacious and clear. This helpfully brings up readouts of pretty much every parameter on the panel as you move them. The workflow does, surprisingly, take some getting used to, considering how simple the interface is with just four push encoders, and it isn’t hugely clear which is the best way to get to a certain parameter— particularly since often there are multiple. But overall it does its job very well, and really does contribute to the overall feel of playing a classic instrument.
A note on the voice-count: as a keyboard player, I rarely find myself missing voices if the count is eight or over. The DMNO’s binaural mode (which, as you might imagine, uses moving phase relationships between left and right to enhance its sense of stereo spread and spatial positioning), however, in rendering its voices ‘super-voices’ reduces its overall voice count to four, which threatens to feel limiting at times.
But the DMNO is not a synth that trades in voice count, nor does it in physical size. What it does is deliver a tight package of functions that punches incredibly hard, using a choice array of components in some rather ingenious ways that I have not seen before. Its price is certainly at the premium end at £2,599, to the point where it’s not far off that of mammoth synths like the Moog Muse, but I daresay you won’t be left wanting.
It might hark back to Oberheim, but the DMNO’s focus is most certainly on the present— if not the future.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Key features

8-voice polyphonic synth
44-key keybed with aftertouch
2-part multitimbral with two independent synths
FPGA-powered oscillators
Dynamic multi-core stereo VCF per voice
Binaural analogue signal path
Onboard delay, reverb, distortion, chorus
Multi-mode arpeggiator

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