A little late and a little light this month as I’ve been very busy with Synth East, but here are some nuggets for your consideration.
Bonboa Bacara – Mad acid-generating plugin sequencer that carefully crafts bass and melodic lines right within your DAW. You can roll the dice for random patterns or get your hands dirty in the editor. It has a nifty temperature gauge to dictate the level of diversity which you can then store and recall as patterns. It has modulation, automation lanes, scales and modes all help you manufacture the perfectly banging track. Sadly it’s Mac only.
- Website – https://bonboa.com/
Behringer – Lots more synth shinanegans from Behringer to add to their swirling pot of overdue products and lack of new ideas. This month we see actual stock of the Jupiter 8 inspired JT-Mini. It sounds pretty awesome but there’s something perverse about such a monster synth in a small packet. We saw the Behringer Waves, a clone of the Mutable Tides modulation source, waveshaper and oscillator. It actually looks pretty cool in an anime sci-fi kind of way. Next we have the Wasp VCF which is obviously a clone of the Doepfer A-124 which is a great value filter that you can have today. The Behringer Wasp is still a few months away. We’ve also had an update on the STX, a take on the Elka Synthex and the RD-78 drum machine is now available for preorder – it has the sounds if that’s your kind of thing, but none of the style of the original CR-78. The potentially original Vocoder VC16 pops up for some disco, using MIDI and a mic input for chords. But you can also use it in mono with CV and you can stick in an external carrier or use the internal banks.
- Website – https://www.behringer.com/
SYNSO TouchFLower – Curious touchplate based synthesizer that generates sound in response to your touch. It has various waveforms and a menu of chords, roots and keys to pull the synthesizer into musical happenings. The four pads give you root, 3rd, 5th and 7th notes. It sounds a bit janky but it’s also Eurorack and could make for an interesting interlude.
SYNSO has also come to market with a series of three similar looking Eurorack modules called the b. There’s a StepBass, a StepTone and a StepDrum. They all look the same, other than very cool colour reversals, but have slightly different functionality. The StepBass appears to be a bassline voice with filter, decay, the StepTone is an oscillator with tuning and FM, and the StepDrum is a percussion voice with noise. They all have four waveforms and a natty 8-step sequencer right there on the front panel. You can lock parameters to each step and potentially have different waveforms selected or probabilityised for each step. Although it only triggers (i think) not pitches – you’ll need to use the v/oct input for that.
Eternal Engine MARS – Funny looking tube-based polyphonic synthesizer. Sort of weirdly lop-sided with the four vacuum tubes on the right and those fabulous nixie tubes on the left that show the patch number. It’s ace, but weird. The front panel has a bit of a Studio Electronics look with a lot of buttons and glowy lights. The audio path goes through the tubes and then into the tube driven filter and tube opto compressors. It has triode asymmetric overdrive, two envelopes, an LFO, vibrato and up to 4 voice polyphony. It has 4 channels of CV, presumably one per voice and full software control via an app. Sounds pretty darn epic – just thick and gooey as heck.
Spitfire Audio BBC Radiophonic Workshop – Many years ago the Radiophonic Workshop was the place I wanted to work. I had vinyl records of sound effects and themes made in those little studios and I dreamed of a life spent making weird noises – funny how things end up. Anyway, Spitfire has sampled the heck out of the Radiophonic archives to bring us the sounds of vintage synths, tape loops and bits of old rubbish they used to use for making soundtracks. They’ve reanimated some of the people who worked there and pulled off some brand new performances to feed into the library. There’s nearly 30GB of crazy sounds that you access via the Spitfire Solar plugin where you can mix, blend, filter and modulate the library into whole new ideas.
AAS Multiphonics CV-3 – The often ignored other software modular system from AAS has got an update for version 3. It does have a quite basic and standardised look about it which is where Softube Modular and VCV Rack stands out. But Multiphonics is very capable and keeps the bafflement to a minimum by having a unified workflow. It now has over 65 modules, can be polyphonic and MPE compatible, and now includes FM synthesis. As it’s by Applied Acoustics it has a lot of physical modelling built in which gives it quite a unique sound. It is…. Different, and that’s good.
MOK Waverazor 2.8 – Waverazor is a bonkers synth of torn apart waveforms and angry collisions of sound in virtual space. It has an interface like no other and is still kicking arse 8 years later. It’s just had a rare and substantial update which delivers 31 new waveforms, new soundbanks and patches, a pitch shifting delay, harmonic tuning for audio modulation and segment modulation. The front end is fantastic but behind the scenes is a very detailed editor where you can lose yourself in the minutiae of the engine. Whatever you do, don’t listen to the 2.8 update video, it’s just awful (sorry) and not at all what I remember about Waverazor. It might have to do my own demo…. I’ll add it to my list.
Synthux Academy Spotykach – Back in November I covered the Audrey II Horrorscape synth and the Synthux Academy were good enough to send me one to build. Sadly it’s been sitting on my desk for weeks, but I do have every intention of giving it a go. Meanwhile they’ve revealed another synth on the same platform called Spotykach. This is a dual looper and it’s far from finished, but Synthux Academy wanted to show where they are with it and get feedback on what to add or change. Spotykach can loop, slice or delay audio and resequence it with a Euclidean algorithm. There are two decks with controls for sound-on-sound, position and size. Then there’s an envelope, pitch or speed control and envelope followers or modulators. You then play with the two decks, set to loop, slice or delay and feed audio between them. It’s covered on touch controls for interactive changes and can be pushed into all sorts of generative directions. Currently it’s very academic because there’s little in the way of sound demos, even the sound demo is mostly talking (and I like to talk) so it’s difficult to get completely excited about. However, it does look interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing more of it in action. I’ve have the Audrey II done soon, I promise!
Erica Synths Hexinverter – Erica Synths has reissued all the Mutants from the Hexinverter percussion range. We get a Mutant Bassdrum, snare, clap and hihats to add to the rim shot we saw a few months back. They all follow the same layout and give a ridiculous amount of control over the crafting of each sound. The circuits are drawn from the 808 and 909 drum machines and are full of originality and deeper control.
Make Noise Multimod – The Multimod is one of those modules that makes you think haven’t they dont this before? Apparently not. This a different approach to complex modulations, although it is very much on-trend. It seems the ability to control many things from one things is all the rage at the moment. Make Noise of course do it in the finest and most incomprehensible way possible. You have a single input and 8 simultaneous possible outcomes. Stick in an LFO and Phase sets them adrift to lap at us in waves, or turn up Spread to lean into the frequency so that each is faster than the last. And then Time controls how much of the input is being sampled and so manipulated. There’s a scattering of other controls and if there’s no input it will generate an LFO all of its own. Multimod is based on a new Universal Synthesizer System DSP platform which perhaps hints that Make Noise are about to release a whole bunch of stuff based on it which I think will take us all by surprise. I reckon this could be phenomenally useful to infect your modular with modulations – check out Sarah Belle Reid’s video on it, particularly when she sings into it.
Kaona Sisyphus – Ignoring the fact that this sounds a lot like an unpleasant disease the Kaona Sisyphus looks pretty extraordinary. It’s a big fat filter playground with all the filters but built into a granular system. So your input is sampled, segmented, filtered and then extracted as a grain. Each grain takes on the character of the chosen filter and then you can mess around with density, length, intervals, patterns and probability. It’s quite interesting to read about but what does it sound like? Sounds a bit odd to me. There are interesting things going on but the demo video is a bit distorted – definitely some moments of beauty. Dazzling to look at but a lot of lights and real estate for something that’s unclear as to what it’s doing. Needs a proper review I think.
PPG W2.2×4 – PPG appear to be back in the hardware game just as the Behringer Wave arrives to revitalise interest in the old blue wavetable machine. But what we have here is a PPG Eurorack dual wavetable oscillator – fun! It comes with all the waves from the original PPG Wave 2.2 and has a main and sub oscillator. I’m slightly confused over whether they mean “dual” in that it has two main oscillators, or whether the main and sub are independent – Ahhh I think the Sub is not a sub in the usual eurorack terms of being a lower octave wave derived from the main – it means it’s the second subordinate oscillator to the main. Anyway, it also has a drive circuit and a neat display. This is being made by Liquid Sky D-vices but there are no demos that I can find as yet but preorders are open.
Momo Muller Universal Synth Editor – While we’re still waiting for MIDI 2.0 to solve all our MIDI control connections, Momo has come up with a cool editor that will let you map and save any controller to any software or hardware synth. It’s not particularly beautiful to look at but it is highly functional and extremely useful. It’s usefulness comes in its ability to learn not just the controller input but the destination as well so you’ll never have to look up another CC number. Turn the knob on your controller and the Editor learns it, then turn the knob on your synth and it learns that too – bingo it’s connected and you’re in control. The simplicity is awesome and I wish my setup stayed the same long enough to find this useful.
VSL Synchron Smart Orchestra 2.0 – The Vienna Symphonic Library make these huge sample libraries. Back in the day I would sell studios multiple computers to run the whole library across a network. All a bit intense. Anyway, VSL has come up with something a bit simpler for those of us who want fast orchestral results without all the drama of knowing what we’re doing. The idea, i think, is that the orchestral is mapped across your keyboard to let you realise your symphonic ambitions simply by playing your keyboard. Keyswitches swap solo instruments and you can control the mix of strings, woodwinds, brass and choir. It has a bunch of new solo instruments plus weirder stuff like Smart Spheres and Smart Hits, new velocity based articulations and a much better interface within VSLs Flow Instrument. Its’ pretty nifty.
And Finally – I have another gig – This is on the 6th of April, late afternoon at The Green Room in Epic Studios. It’s called, fittingly, PATCHED and is hosted by Casa Del Ritmo and features some Synth East and EMOM alumni including Abominable, A Vector in Hilbert Space, Hardwired and myself along with Chris Adanté and Craig Billingham. It’s from 4:30pm until 7pm and a perfect way to spend a Sunday evening bathing in electronic sounds – entry is free.