Behringer D Mini: A Minimoog Sound That Fits in Your Pocket
Behringer has pulled the cover off the D Mini, a compact analog synthesizer that takes its name, its styling and a good part of its sound from the classic Moog Minimoog Model D. It was shown finished at NAMM 2026 and is now open for pre-order. The idea is simple: take the warm, fat character that made the Minimoog famous and shrink it down to something you can carry in a bag and power from a phone.
What's Inside
For such a small box, the D Mini is more capable than its size suggests. It's a three-voice paraphonic synth built around three VCOs, each offering five waveforms: sawtooth, triangle, sharktooth, square and pulse. A single master tuning knob handles all three oscillators at once, which keeps the panel simple but does cut down on the detuning tricks you'd get from a full Model D.
The heart of the Moog sound has always been its filter, and Behringer has given the D Mini a ladder-style lowpass filter with resonance. That's where those familiar sweeps and screams come from. A single ADS envelope drives the VCA, and you can dial in a variable amount of that envelope on the filter cutoff to shape the attack of every note. There's also an LFO with four waveforms for vibrato and filter movement, plus a white and pink noise generator with its own volume control for adding grit and texture.
Built for Playing Anywhere
The front panel carries 27 touch keys and 18 controls, so most of the important functions sit right under your fingers. The touch keyboard won't replace a proper controller for serious playing, but it's enough to sketch a line or trigger the sequencer while you're out.
That sequencer is one of the features the full-size Model D doesn't have. The D Mini includes a 16-step sequencer with eight memory slots and motion recording, so you can capture knob movements into a pattern and let the synth play itself back. It turns the little box into something closer to a self-contained groovebox than a plain keyboard module.
Power and Connections
The clever part is how it stays alive. The D Mini runs entirely over USB Type-C, which means a power bank, a laptop or even a smartphone can keep it playing for hours. The same port handles a full MIDI implementation, including parameter control and bulk save and load of your settings to a computer, so you can edit and back up patches in software.
Where It Sits
Behringer already makes a full-size Model D, and the D Mini isn't trying to replace it. The smaller machine drops one of the two envelopes and simplifies the oscillator tuning, but it gains the sequencer and the modern USB-C and MIDI features in return. It's a different trade: less depth in a couple of places, more portability and convenience everywhere else.
The result is a synth aimed squarely at people who want that vintage Moog flavour without the bench space or the weight. Whether the single tuning knob and one envelope feel like a fair compromise will come down to how you work, but as a grab-and-go analog synth, the D Mini looks like one of the more tempting small machines around right now.
