Robin in a square in front of an RYK Envy Machine with the text Molten Music Monthly December 2024

Molten Music Monthly December 2024 plus Best of Year Roundup

Molten Music Monthly
robinv

There were a handful of synths, modular and bits worth talking about this month before splurging into a roundup of my favourite things from 2024.

And the weirdly missing bit:

Ryk Modular Envy Machine – Quad channel modulation machine that can conjure up envelopes, LFOs, randoms and recordable knob movements.

Audiocube – Weird three-dimensional space for audio and music production. You can create planes and spaces, drop things, bounce things, mix audio sources and fly around inside it.

Bram Bos Solderbox – Cool little generative semi-modular synth from Jakob Haq which offers a decent little set of modular functions for making synth sounds in iOS.

Plinky Bib, Buzzrito and Blueberry – cute 1U tiles that offer a reverb/delay/drive, a swarm oscillator and a generative touch sequencer.

Cable Guys Midishaper – Drawable LFOs and shapes that you can fire at a MIDI parameter to give you some rather marvellous modulation.

Jolin Rosa – Infinite morpher – takes inputs and morphs them between the outputs and vice versa. It can take one input to many outputs and scan between them – four inputs to one output or just use it as VCAs. Very much like the Divkid Trace

Befaco Oneiroi on VCV Rack – Cool and weird ambient drone machine goes virtual with Befaco’s first premium VCV Rack plugin.

Futurephonic Rhythmizer – Generates all sorts of ideas, melodies and rhythms. It’s like a sort of uber-ARP within your DAW as a MIDI playground of grooviness.

Stochastic Instruments Strange-R Melodic Contour Sequencer – It’s a melody generator that uses a joystick to push towards melodic direction and deviation within a phrase loop. It has a music-theory-aware quantizer, chaotic LFOs, noise and a lot of CV control.

BEST OF YEAR

Jan – Lots of Korg stuff, cool things from Stylophone, and the 4MS catalyst modules but lets start off with the sublime Bastl Neo Trinity.

Feb – Really hard; nothing stands out particularly… I like the Winterbloom Neptune, and I bought a kit and haven’t made it yet. I like the Feedback VCOs for their stunning looks, and I also like the Geforce OB-EZ, which is a sumptuous synth that anyone can use.

March – It was more interesting. We had the Divkid Output Bus that I use a lot, the Glasgow Synth Guild Octone, the Body Synths Metal Fetishist, but the stand-out release was the Taiga Keyboard.

April – Brought us Waveform 13, introduced us to BlakNBlue, and Behringer released the tasty-looking MS-5. But the most interesting thing for me was the Cycle Instruments Tetrachord.

May – Superbooth and so lots of good stuff, including the Arturia Polybrute 12, the 4MS Meta module, Oberheim Teo-5 and Pittsburg Voltage Lab 2 – but the one for me that I’ve come to be totally thrilled by is the Knobula Echo Cinematic.

June – was an odder month of odd bits and pieces but the most interesting was the Etna from Patching Panda.

July – A lot more stuff going on with Moog Labyrinth, Luna coming to Windows, FL Studio 2024, Gforce OB-1, Korg Collection 5 and Simon the Magpie’s Round Robin. But the coolest thing for me was the Befaco Oneiroi.

August – Has to be the Moog Muse – despite being everything we’ve sort of seen before I love how it brings together all those beloved Moog-y elements into one workable, attainable instrument.

Sept – It was a bumper month with the Basilisk, Softube Model 77, Divkid DivSkip and Sound Machines t-series of lightstrip modules – but of course, the best of the best is the extraordinary Molten Bypass.

Oct – Is Bristronica and Synth Fest season so we have cool things like the Korg Multi/Poly, the FSS Cric, Disting NT and Digitone II but I like the Noodle Rider.

Nov – Some nice things here like the Kastle 2 FX Wizard, Audrey II, Scrooge, Stardust and Knob Technology VCO – but of course the coolest of cool is the Orchid from Telepathic Instruments.