Category: Reviews

Emily Hopkins has designed a sort of ambient glitch machine pedal for messing with your audio. It’s fun, unexpected and more lo-fi than you’d think.

Ballista Blast is a hybrid synth voice with classic waveforms, wavetables and some funky FM with multiple algorithms. It has a great filter, useful envelope and lots of CV for modulation.

This perky little VCA/Envelope combo has found itself to be very useful in my rack. It’s a VCA with a Decay envelope built in that you can also feed out to a filtercutoff which saves you a bunch of modules.

It’s an Analog Resonant Phase Rotator, model of 1977, reworked to give a 4/6-stage phaser, three resonance feedback modes and an LFO. You can also pop an Allpass filter expansion board on the back for up to 22 stages.

Does this compact 4-voice analogue synth have what it takes to be a serious synth? The Fourm is neat, capable, sounds like a Sequential synth and has an elegant simplicity that really appeals to me.

My favourite all time MIDI and CV controller keyboard got an update. It’s taken onboard everything from the KeyStep Mk2 and sprinkled in some deeper levels of hands-on control.

Korg had the bonkers idea of putting the analogue filter from the miniKORG 700s into an audio interface.

We’ve had the TEO-5 analogue synthesizer on show at the last couple of Synth Picnic events and it’s consistently the synth people like the most.

I opened the box in the afternoon and by the evening I was using it at a gig – that’s how easy the Faderpunk is to use and configure

Bishop’s Miscellany Mk2 is a dual channel sequence recorder, melody generator, note processor and song-building engine that offers some fabulous real-time controls once you gel with the interface.