Molten Music Monthly January 2025 thumbnail

Molten Music Monthly January 2025 – NAMM Special

Molten Music Monthly
robinv

Here’s my pick of the most exciting products from the NAMM show and Buchla and Friends over in LA, plus a few more bits and pieces.

Potato Audio Choplifter – Multichannel gater that will chop up your audio in fun and exciting ways. It includes three gate sequencers that work across frequency bands on your audio tracks with filtering, amp curves and a classic DJ mixer. Ableton only at the moment, VST to come.

PWM Mantis Update – The new firmware secures four voice polyphony on this quirky Oscar-inspired hybrid synth.

Tracktion Biotek 3 – Totally bonkers environmental synthesizer gets a major update to suck in limitless sound design possibilities through organic and natural reimaginings. Much easier interface, dynamic controls and loads of new presets. It contains sample streams, granular, spinal saw, and regular waveforms in swarms of oscillators and deep parameter control.

Arturia Pigments 6 – Love Pigments. It’s one of those synths that always sounds good and if you invest some time will reward you with amazing interactivity. It looks similar to the previous version but we do have a new Modal engine, new filters, vocoder effect, new modulators, expanded granular section and some UI polishes.

Flat Six Seventh Summoner – Latest firmware for this little keyboard form. It’s super easy, quick and savable. I reckon it could replace the ASQ-1 or some other posh sequencers assuming that it’s not too complex and likes to evolve on the fly.

Korg Handy Traxx Play – Nifty scratch DJ turntable that’s very portable. It has a crossfader for scratchng, a looper for grabbing a loop while you change the record, some effects, pitch change, filter. It looks like a load of fun. Also a Multipoly desktop and smaller 700Sm with minikeys and a brand new Kronos 3 flagship live performance keyboard.

New Systems Instruments Discrete Map – Ooo it’s like a big Pebbles where things are triggered as an LFO passes a slider. The top section sets the voltage/pitch whereas the bottom section sets the position it gets triggered. It will also play itself and can set interesting competing note lengths. An Expander adds some CV control and more gate outputs.

Endorphin.es Cockpit X – 1U 4-channel stereo mixer with improved VCA and layout which is all well and good but the cool thing about the Cockpit X is the side-chain input – and for me this solves one of the biggest problems with side chaining in Eurorack. The idea of side chaining is to duck your mix to let a kick drum through. You can do this with a compressor but you have to create two mixes to separate out the kick and then recombine – it’s a major pain in the arse. Knobula cured this with the Kickain but only if you want to use their kick drum. So back to the Cockpit X what’s cool is that you can decide which of the four channels is involved in the side chain duck, so you can leave the kick unaffected and it’s all mixed together internally. LOVE IT!

Also Ground Control update of randomness and probability.

Arcana Instruments Strum – Fabulous interface designed to make music-making more accessible. The joystick is inspired by wheelchair controls and has interchangeable joysticks depending on what you need, even for feet. You move the joystick to strum the sounds. The chord buttons are also adaptable to almost any level of disability. They have whole bands playing with this marvellous machine.

Donner Essential L1 – Saw rumours of this but now we can a proper look. Great concept of splitting the synth in half, but otherwise it’s a bit like the SH-101 but with additional waveforms, external input and more sub options. Two envelopes! And a drone mode which is useful for external in. Audio rate mode on LFO. Simple digital sequencer for quick step recording – display telling you what’s going on plus an arpeggiator. Up to 64 steps and then chaining and you can save your patterns.

Dog Paw Music MPE Controller – Chunky grid controller with the feel of a weighted keyboard. No more squishy pads, this is very playable if you can cope with the grid system. Great expression, nicely dynamic, bold colours and an on-board sound engine. All sorts of scales and layouts. Heading to Kickstarter in March.

Behringer on the floor – Behringer return after 10 years of sneaking around with alternative shows and guerrilla releases like some sort of snotty teenager. They are a frustrating bunch but maybe, just maybe, they’ve grown up enough to just get on with making great recreations of old synths that everyone can enjoy. I imagine the reception has been great and you start to forget how petulant they can be able copying current products, rubbishing the music tech press and refusing to accept any criticism. It looks like they might have turned a corner and fair play to them and keep doing this.

So we have the BX1 a huge recreation of the Yamaha DX1 FM monster but with filters and modulation from the CS-80. Sounds a bit nuts but could be really interesting. Also on show they had prototypes of the Pro 16 as a polyphonic Sequential synth and the JT-16 that looks every bit like a Jupiter-8. I hope they follow through on those. At lot of promised products were not at the show and sometimes they can feel a bit old by the time they arrive. The LmDrum and Wave were also on show.

Bitwig Connect 4.12 – Great looking orange topped audio interface from Bitwig. 4 in 12 out CV and MIDI enabled box with a lovely big dial, top mounted patch points and transport controls. 2 DC coupled inputs and 4 outputs and they are factory calibrated so you don’t have to mess around with all that calibration nonsense in your software. Shame about the TRS MIDI, otherwise fabulous.

Melbourne Instruments RotoControl – Melbourne who probably bought a container load of those drone motors have found something else to put them into. Roto-Control is a rather fabulous motorised MIDI controller with 8 magic knobs and some nice displays and clacky keys. Proper MIDI yay! Save all your setups, really easy mapping, touch sensitive keys with or without haptic steps and lots of other goodies. Looks decent – good size.

Reloop KeyPad Pro – Mini master keyboard with inbuilt DAW and MIDI control – pads, knobs, faders, console controls like a channel strip, clip launching and stuff. Wired and Bluetooth, arp and chords, scales, USB hub, MIDI. It’s too deep for my desktop but they’ve packed a lot into it.

The Sound Stone String Armonica – Incredible synthesizer that uses strings instead of waveforms. The 12 chromatically tuned strings harmonically resonate through a custom internal synth. It works like the synthesizer projects the sound through the vibration of the strings. It sounds amazing, so rich and interesting and probably takes a lot of patience to setup and tune properly. You can also pluck the strings but something otherworldly goes on when you play them as intended. It has 48 voices, stereo tremolo and a felt damper for stacato sounds. They make them in batches of five.

Rain City Modular Sequencer Construction Set – A series of sequencing modules that can be combined to form complex networks of sequencing. There’s a behind the panel connection for transport and clock sharing. There are separate trigger and voltage modules, 16 steps on the trigger and 8 steps on the voltage. You can then use a switch module to cascade multiple modules into this massive sequencing thing. Very interesting.

Stylophone DF-8 and Gen X2 – Lots of more finished versions of things we’ve seen before like the CPM DS-2 drone synth and Theremin. But we also had the new CPM DF-8 analog multi filter machine. Similar to the DS-2 in form this gives you two filters, two envelopes in a standalone or modular box. There’s also Sample & Hold modulation, noise and a tape-style delay. Meanwhile the traditional expanded Stylophone Gen X-1 got an update to Gen X-2. It’s got a single oscillator a filter, LFO, envelope, LFO and analog delay like before but now has a 3-function touch strip for modulation control and CV/Gate inputs for control to release you from the stylus. Looks ace.

Molten Plasma – My fabulous new sampled instrument, yours for $10.