Here’s how interfaces normally break down. You’ve got your conventional, tactile interfaces, like a knob. You’ve got your touch interfaces, which lack tactile feedback (you touch them, but they don’t push back). You’ve got your gestural interfaces, which have you waving your hands in the air without touching anything and without any tactile feedback. (They’re generally the most challenging, because your brain has no feedback for what it’s doing.)

Syntact creates an entirely new category. It’s a gestural interface, of the “waving your hands around in the air” sort. But while your hand is in mid-air and isn’t touching anything, it does provide tactile feedback. It pushes back as you move your hand around, giving you interactive feedback. The way it pulls it off: sound. 121 ultrasonic transducers beam sound at a particular point, so that you feel something as you move.

You can see a bit of what this means in the new video, above. I’m hoping to get a hands-on (erm, hands-off) demo soon from the designer. The basic specs:

• Optical analysis of gestures, using a USB camera built into the interface
• MIDI control, for use with any live performance or music making rig (or other media)
• A control panel for selecting different sonic images and adjusting scaling.
• A built-in music solution visualizes sound and makes it easier to map to your own MIDI files.

More information:
http://www.ultrasonic-audio.com/products/syntact.html

Also well worth checking out the directional speaker tech from these Slovenia-based developers – directional sound is another huge area of innovation.
http://www.ultrasonic-audio.com/products/acouspade.html

If you want to try this in person, it’ll be at the Beam Festival in London in late June.

Side note: Yes, I’m looking into that LEAP thing, for more gestures, albeit without tactile feedback. Stay tuned.

Composing the sounds of an animal’s life cycle and ultimate consumption into a musical portrait, Matthew Herbert’s “One Pig” is in turns grotesque and sentimental, rock and opera. I expected squeamishness and vegetarian conversions when I saw it on tour, but instead, the crowd eagerly devoured the creature at the end. (Make of that what you will.)

One Pig is in Manchester, UK tonight before continuing to Brighton and Portugal.

As my own incurable appetite is for musical instruments, for me a highlight of the show is Scotland-based, American artist Yann Seznec’s Sty Harp. (See also our coverage of his iPad music game development work.) Gut strings in historical instruments already make use of animal parts, so a stringed instruments seems appropriate. But by dissecting obsolete, forgotten technology – a bit of a theme in these parts lately – Yann is able to make an effective, expressive instrument.

Sadly, there’s not much video of the instrument in action, but seeing it is a highlight of the live show. Yann’s performance has its own theatricality, rocking out on these extended strings around the “pig pen” like a boxer swinging against the ropes of a ring. First, Yann shares some notes on the show itself:

The album is an elegy to a life lived for the benefit of humans and raises complex questions about our relationship to these often-maligned and misunderstood creatures.

The album is made entirely out of sounds from the pig and its surroundings – the first squeals, the sound of it being alone for the first time, and the dripping of its blood after being butchered. The result is a delicate, beautiful, and occasionally terrifying musical composition with a profundity rarely heard in electronic music.

The live show debuted at the Royal Opera House, London, in September 2011 and has since toured the world, performing at Berghain Berlin, STRP Eindhoven, Club Silencio Paris, Liquid Room Tokyo, Ancienne Belgique Brussels, and more. Future dates include headlining at Future Everything in Manchester, the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

The show explores and questions the life, death, and consumption of the pig. A chef cooking onstage brings the sound and smell of cooking pig, and the performance features a brand new custom instrument – the “Sty Harp”, built and performed by Edinburgh-based artist Yann Seznec. This representation of the pig’s home is used to trigger and control elements of music, forming an integral part of the 5 piece band. The rest of the band is comprised of Sam Beste on keyboards, Tom Skinner on SPDS, Hugh Jones on samplers, and Matthew on various keyboards and samples and things.

Yann explains how the instrument itself is constructed:

In terms of the Sty Harp, the instrument is built using hacked Gametraks, which were a failed proto-motion controller from around 2003. They were sold only in the UK, and worked by using two joysticks with strings attached that you clipped onto your hands. These could then sense the distance and vague location of your hands …a few terrible games were released on PS2, Xbox, and PC for the Gametrak before they were pulled from the market.

In any case, I took apart a whole load of these (I probably have owned more gametraks than anyone in the world, ever) and used their innards for the string/joystick controllers, which are totally great! I built a whole system with Jon (from Lucky Frame) to hook up twelve of these controllers into my computer at once. I’m using an Arduino with a mux shield to handle the 36 analog inputs (x/y/string for 12 controllers) at once, converting them into MIDI and sending them over to Ableton.

In Ableton the controllers are doing a number of different things, slightly different for each song. In the Max patch I made I can send out 5 individual MIDI notes from each string, one for general movement above a threshold, and one each for a push, pull, up, or down movement. These movements are also sending out CC values, as is the pulling of the string. So each string controller is sending a whole pile of MIDI data at all times, and I pick and choose for each song which gestures to use. So in some cases I’m just triggering individual sounds using the strings, but in others I am using some strings to trigger clips, others to control effects on those clips, and still other effects to do master play/stop/effects/etc.

The climax of the Sty Harp happens about 2/3rds of the way through the show, when the whole band joins me in the sty for the symbolic butchering of the pig. For that song each band member controls different strings, building a huge sound wall.

You can read more about my building of the sty harp here: http://theamazingrolo.net/styharp/

We’re playing in Manchester on Friday the 18th, Brighton on Monday the 21st, then in Lisbon on June 29th and Porto on June 30th.

http://www.matthewherbert.com/
Matthew Herbert – One Pig: exclusive album stream [The Guardian]

Tenori-On and iPad apps, hardware designs and visual creations: set against the beautifully-generative mind of Japanese/New York artist Yayoi Kusama, the flurries of dots and circles and patterns in musical interfaces take on a richer meaning. This video, from a workshop hosted at the Tate Modern alongside an exhibition of Kusama’s work, needs little introduction. Instead, the dizzying cuts of geometric abstraction, the array of visual ideas for musical interface begin to take on the same personality of her expansive creations. The galaxies produced out of the minds of musicians somehow overlap with this iconic artist. I hadn’t really made the connection before, even as a fan of her work, but with this workshop, the sympathetic vibrations – intentional or not – become clear. Description:

Sonic Kusama:
Workshop exploring connections between the work of Yayoi Kusama and creation and representation of new music & sound art through visual audio interfaces.
Presented by Simon Little and Kelvin Brown with Chase Lane.
Audio track by Capstone Music
Video production by Territory Studio

If you’re in London, Infinite Kusama is on view now at the Tate Modern.

Like the modulars themselves, an upcoming documentary on these analog synth beasts has been lurking behind closed doors. But that won’t be the case for long. “I Dream of Wires,” the crowd-funded documentary that probes artists’ fascination with making music by connecting patch cords, will see a public showcase at Montreal’s MUTEK Festival. This and an upcoming film release, atop a big get-together in New York, could make this a proper summer of modular.

In anticipation of their showcase, MUTEK has released two significant excerpts from the film. One talks to Carl Craig, Detroit techno legend, top. Craig describes how this tech has influenced his music, and what inspired him to look at modulars. The other clip – true to MUTEK’s Canadian home base and the origin country of the film itself – looks at Canada’s contribution to electronic music history. Detroit’s place in techno certainly needs no introduction, but it’s about time Canada got its role in synthesis recognized (below), having given the world pioneer Hugh Le Caine and the University of Toronto Electronic Music Lab, among other highlights. This excerpt turns the clock forward to modern-day synth goodness. We’re of course happy to know of a certain digital synth designed in Canada, but here the modular Renaissance gets the spotlight. As the film creators explain:

Recently, Canada has again come to play a significant role with the modern day resurgence of modular synthesizers; it is home to two highly respected manufacturers: Modcan, founded by Toronto’s Bruce Duncan, was the first company to reintroduce modular synthesizers to the post-MIDI marketplace, and Intellijel, founded by Vancouver’s Danjel Van Tijn, is one of the fastest growing and most respected lines of Eurorack synthesizer modules.

The MUTEK showcase will include live modular performances by Sealey/Greenspan/Lanza (Orphx/Junior Boys), Keith Fullerton Whitman (Kranky/Editions Mego), Solvent (Ghostly International/Suction Records), Clark (Warp Records), and Container (Spectrum Spools).

The film itself is a production of director Robert Fantinatto and Jason Amm (aka Ghostly International recording artist Solvent); Solvent is also composing the musical score. This isn’t simply a history of electronic music; instead, it focuses on the modern revival of the instruments. (The history is a subject of a future film, but we’ll let them finish this one first.)

It’s worth saying that modular synths aren’t all pleasure – they bring some pain, too. That’s why it’s worth watching the interviews excerpted in the November promo for the film. In that piece, even as they sing the praises of modular analog’s joys, musicians talk about challenges ranging from live performance setup to tuning. It’s impossible to understand the love for these instruments without grasping some of their idiosyncrasies. In the earlier clip, you see everyone from builder Lori Napoleon to pioneer and custodion of electronic music history Joel Chadabe to composers like the late Richard Lainhart and the legendary Morton Subotnick, as well as builders and the film’s own Solvent.

The filmmakers continue to raise funds from fans. A recent West Coast USA tour, funded by IndieGogo, added interviews with Trent Reznor, John Tejada, cEvin Key, Jack Dangers, Bernie Krause, Richard Devine, Make Noise, Cynthia, The Harvestman, SynthTech/MOTM, Metasonix, Intellijel, and others.

Round 3 funding: http://www.indiegogo.com/IDOW-round3

Keep tabs on the film on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/idreamofwiresdocumentary

If you’re dreaming of creating your own controller from scratch, there are certain basic elements you’ll need – and a strong case for reusing, not reinventing, the wheel. There are a range of products out there that cater to you DIYers; Livid’s Builder line is certainly one of the most comprehensive. It’s a line of hardware accessories that help you piece together MIDI controllers with all the requisite knobs and buttons and sensors you might like, and its brain just got an upgrade.

The soul of any controller is the electronics and microcontroller that read all of those inputs and let them talk to a computer. And it’s that “brain” that Livid recently upgraded, with their Builder Brain v2. Messages from controls go in, messages to devices like lights go out, all via a connection to your computer that’s USB powered, class-compliant MIDI. (That means you won’t need any drivers – not on Mac, not on Windows, and not on Linux. You could even plug this into one of those Raspberry Pi devices, if you’re lucky enough to have one!) They also operate standalone with a 5V power supply.

The Brain v2 is for some seriously large and complex controllers, with support for up to 64 analog inputs, 128 Buttons, and 192 LEDs. (Fortunately, a companion board called the Omni, and connections via ribbon cables, mean that you won’t create complete spaghetti trying to do that.) In fact, it’s so powerful I’d recommend considering something simpler for less-ambitious projects, but if you’re planning a big controller, it’s tough to beat Livid’s offerings.

New in v2:

• A Bus Board for easier control connections
• LED support up from 48 to 192, extra circuitry for ultra-brights.
• Encoders now work with LED encoder ring support, so you can make a big circle of ultra-bright lights to go around your encoder.
• RGB LED support.
• 5V standalone power is new.

Add those features to cool extras from the original, like accelerometer and velocity-sensitive surface support and programmable MIDI settings.

CDM asks Livid’ Jay Smith to tell us what this is all about.

CDM: Who is this for?

Jay: That’s kind of a loaded question! It’s really for anyone wanting to create a class-complaint MIDI device of their own. An artist, a maker of commercial products, a musician, a visualist? With Brain version 1 we’ve seen a MIDI controlled electric mandolin, Moldover’s Mojo, and The Choppertone to name a few. We’ve also powered some other pretty sophisticated commercial devices for other companies with it, so it’s not just a DIY solution.

With v2 we’ve really expanded the functionality by adding almost any kind of control you’d want to hook up to it, and made the process of doing that much easier. If you are talking about standard MIDI controller type controls, our Omni board support thousands of configurations with just one circuit board. This isn’t just for building “controllers” in terms of software controllers either. We’ve added external power so you can use it to control analog gear and other MIDI controlled devices.

Apart from those examples, what can you build with Builder and the Brain?

Anything that has a button, LEDs, potentiometer, encoder, FSRs, accelerometers, sensors, and more. Single LEDs, RGB LEDs, and “groups” of LEDs of 6,12, or 24 can be created and controlled with one MIDI note or CC or locally controlled with an encoder or pot. As a result, inventive, designs with interesting lighting feedback are possible. VU meters driven by CCs, or a clever array of LEDS that make glyphs or patterns can be arranged with your controls to provide novel, custom feedback that would never make it on Guitar Center’s shelves, but mean something special to you. The omni board provides enough physical limitation that you can think about a “chunk” of a controller and isolates parts of your project into digestible parts, and allows you to sensibly expand and modify your control surface with only 1 brain.

Why would you choose this over another platform?

Frankly there is no other platform for controller building that is this packed with features, well documented and supported, and easy to use. Since the release of Brain v1 three years ago we’ve spent a lot of time listening to our user’s requests, thinking about the features we’d like for our own use, and developing them into a platform for others to use. We didn’t spend much time looking at what else was out there, we looked for what wasn’t and tried to fill in those gaps. When it comes to building your own device, whether for creating music, controlling lights, or something else completely, there are really only other “solutions”, not platforms, which is what we intended to create.

Who is this not for?

If you are looking for an all-in-one solution for your dream controller but don’t want to do any of the labor, this is definitely not for you. We’ve really set out to create the most comprehensive platform that has the smallest learning curve. There are some other great solutions out there, but some of them either have a big learning curve or require programming to achieve results. If you have a smaller project and don’t care about MIDI, the ability to edit, expand, and have a long terms solution, there are certainly cheaper solutions out there. We tried to make the process more streamlined, feature packed, and have taken a lot of the guesswork out of it with Brain v2. With the addition of the Bus Board we’ve added things like resistors, transistors, and chips that make the building process much easier.

Quick start video:

Find out more:
http://lividinstruments.com/hardware_builder.php

Obsolescence: it seems inescapable, as generations of old gear are replaced with shiny, new ones. But one person’s discarded electronic trash can be an artist’s electronic treasure.

ReFunct Media is a collaborative to make something out of all that used junk. In parades of strange, twitching machines and orchestras of electronic noise, gear goes from landfill fodder to art stars. The collective effort has made its way from Ireland (Imoca, RuaRed) to France (Gaité Lyrique) to, most recently, Berlin and the LEAP gallery, where we catch up with it in the form of some raucous video documentation. The artists themselves are known experimental creators and musicians and hackers – known, at least, in these parts: Benjamin Gaulon (IE/FR), Niklas Roy (DE), Karl Klomp (NL), Tom Verbruggen (NL) and Gijs Gieskes (NL).

You can see the whole lineup at top, and in the video below – a procession of glitchy gear. The installation was joined in Berlin recently by a series of performances from these artists.

Here’s another view of the ReFunct Media installation.

These works can become performative. TokTek, aka Dutch visual and musical artist Tom Verbruggen, makes twitchy, spastic music, constructing collisions of sound and rhythm from rapid-fire gestures on repurposed joysticks. (I’ve also gotten to enjoy his work at STEIM. Somehow, in this video, it loses something – it’s a crowd-pleasure in person, something about sharing a room with all this nervous sonic energy.)

Tom’s art installation works take on a distinct, but related, character. The whimsical, engaging “Crackle Canvas” is described as part painting, part instrument. It seems something out of Willy Wonka’s studio, an interconnected sound toy that whistles and clicks and sucks up recorded sound, chattering and conversing with itself.

A crackle-canvas is a painting that produces sound. It contains a circuitboad, speaker, knobs, switches, wood and canvas. Each one makes sounds by itself but can be connected through cables (patchedd) with other crackle-canvasses. This way the paintings start to reach to each other.

The artists’ description:

“ReFunct Media” is a multimedia installation that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). These devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.

Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores
unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.

ReFunct Catalog [PDF]

Well, it certainly keeps the toxic e-waste out of the landfill — good — though I suppose you can’t call it quite green. LEAP tells me that when they switched on this giant assemblage of gear, it did suck up a lot of electricity. But while the artists claim they aren’t making a direct statement about e-waste, the revelation that things can be used and don’t have to be tossed is a profound one. “Awareness” is an overused words and doesn’t always solve problems, but it could transform this one.

Here’s another view of the installation and gallery opening:

And in another instance of repurposing gear, performances by “The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits” engaged in their own form of up-cycled musicality, a bit like the adventures of various Handmade Music evenings around the world – and many of the other artists we’ve written up here on CDM.

LEAP presents a performance evening from The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits (Alberto de Campo, Hannes Hoelzl, and students, alumni and associates of the class Generative Art / Computational Art at UdK Berlin, and others) explore the possibility of spaces of complex systems for experimental performance. They freely combine repurposed elements like analog synthesizers, game controllers, sensors and software with self-built/designed/written hard and soft components.

More from the artists – many with extensive galleries and showcases of work in which you could easily lose yourself…

http://karlklomp.nl/
http://www.toktek.org/
http://gieskes.nl/
http://www.niklasroy.com/
http://www.recyclism.com/ (Benjamin Gaulon)

Steve Reich had his Music for 18 Musicians.

Here’s a modular made of 18 Moogerfoogers.

And for those of you who complain that modulars can become large, expensive, hard to carry, and unwieldy…

This absolutely, positively … doesn’t help with that at all. (Happily, new desktop modular tools do, but… this is… also possible.)

And to those of you who say this seems impractical or silly, well, maybe you have five friends, and each of you has three Moogerfoogers, and you’ve wondered if you could ever form a band. Yes. Yes, you can.

This is the creation of Shout Out Out Out Out:
http://www.shoutoutoutoutout.com
http://www.auxgang.tumblr.com

After the jump, we’ll see some more practical work they’ve been up to in the studio.

First, here’s part 1 of 2…

Found via Kent Williams, on Google+.

There’s some great musical nerdery as Shout Out Out Out Out show their process tracking in the studio.

Part three of the Shout Out Out Out Out new album video diary. Winter finally drops down like a metric tonne of hammers! Gravy finds “The Button” and Will explains how recording works.

The upcoming record they’re working on here is Spanish Moss And Total Loss, due July 17th in North America from Normals Welcome Records (digital, vinyl, CD). Based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, they have … a lot of analog. So much analog. And for that, and their fresh, crisp songwriting and expansive imagination, we love them!

Big or small, talk to many music gear makers, and you’ll find they’re in the business largely for love. But it’s still amazing just how many gear makers choose to go it alone. They build equipment in their flats and garages, hand-packing their creations and shipping it to a world of fellow musicians. Koma Electronik is just one of those in the worldwide scene of boutique hardware makers. We’re especially fond of their interfaces and the company of musicians they keep. So, following up on the video that showed what it’s like getting a demo in a van from Koma, complete with champagne, here’s a more serious look at their process. Kristin Trethewey went to their studio to take a look around, and offers this profile – along with, in its entirety, a conversation she had about what it means to be in this business.

The young Berlin-based pedal producers combine effects and technology in sleek, black-and-white cases, with analog Control Voltage I/O. Inspired by the resurgent interest in modular synthesis, their effects combine multiple effects, as in the Gate/Gelay BD101 and the Filter/Sequencer, FT201.

One feature common to KOMA Elektronik is a patch bay that’s accessible on the face of the unit. This allows the user to directly input and output signals, playing with the possibility to generate new sounds easily. Ed.: Models like the Moogerfooger have similar ins and outs, but tucked away on the back of the unit, not on the top where they’re easier to get at. And, of course, lots of modular equipment has these sorts of ports, but not necessarily on a stomp-style effect. An infrared motion sensing system gives musicians the freedom to bypass the knobs, and control the sound with a hand, foot or any other object.

In 2010, the founders, Wouter Jaspers and Christian Zollner, took a pause from musical pursuits to work full-time on making KOMA a reality. Zollner, originally from Linz, Austria, studied social work at school, but consistently played in bands and had an inclination towards building modular gear. He still gets in a show or two with his band, Regolith. And somehow he also fits in an experimental online MIT course for circuits and electronics.

From age 17, Jaspers was dedicated to music. Although he also didn’t study anything related to music – instead working in Dutch and social science — he viewed his formal education as a means to expand his mind rather than his CV. He jumped into forming a record label, Vatican Analog, where he released his own records as well the work of as a growing community of other Dutch “anti-musicians”. This past-time became a full-time profession, taking Jaspers all over the world touring under his own name and different aliases. (Check out his music on SoundCloud.) In 2010, after five years of constant movement and music making, Jaspers decided to switch gears and focus on setting up a base. Soon after he met Zollner, the two decided to work together, and have been happily married to KOMA Elektronik ever since.

KOMA Elektronik’s mandate is to make “pedals for serious players,” but they also want to build a music community. They emphasize that this means more than receiving user feedback about their products. By hosting events and workshops, they seek to connect to a growing scene, playing along with musicians using KOMA pedals. They’ve moved to a larger and cleaner workspace in Berlin’s Neukölln neighberhood – a big step up from their previous home, living and working in a cramped, unfinished apartment. Bringing musicians to the space gives it a special, backstage kind of feeling. Here you could talk not only about gear, but also about music and travelling, common topics regardless of their various musical backgrounds.

This week the whole team made it to Musikmesse in Frankfurt am Main, the world’s largest music show. However, they skipped the booths. KOMA does things a bit differently, and as a young start-up, they often need to find creative solutions. This year they pimped out a rental car, dubbing it the “KOMA cab,” and offering free tours around the Musikmesse convention center. They followed up the tours with a big bash on March 22 at Silbergold. Celebrating their one-year anniversary, fellow KOMA friends Serena-Maneesh, Kaap De Goede Hoop and O Tannenbaum DJs played through the night, bringing a Berlin-style party to the generally-sleepy, buttoned-down Frankfurt trade show scene.

In the coming months, you can expect to see more growth from the small company. Aside from an expanding product line, they have further plans to substantiate their ties to both the Berlin and international music scene. In May they will travel to Poland to present workshops at the Asymmetry Festival.

Ed.: Indeed – the gear is great, but I look forward not only looking closer at that but also getting to know the Koma crew’s musical friends. After all, that’s what all this is about – and it’s the communities that form around all these makers, all you folks we’ve built relationships over the years, that’s why we keep doing it. Enjoy the weekend; go hear and play some live music, wherever you are. I know I will. -PK

Kristin has an extended interview she did for us with the Koma guys, on SoundCloud. (Some audio issue toward the end, but quite listenable.)

More photos inside the Neukölln studio. (All photographs: Kristin Trethewey.)

Koma’s stuff is good. Really good. So good, you might even want to watch a hands-on video where I’m juggling a camera in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. Their stompable, playable analog effects show well even in the back of a van circling Musikmesse.

How I came to see this hardware in the van is a story in itself. The trade show gig works like this: you pay an enormous amount of money for some sort of trade membership, then an enormous amount of money for a booth, an enormous amount of money to staff that booth in the form of hotels and travel, and then an enormous amount of money for obscure charges like wireless Internet that doesn’t work right and union staff to unpack your gear and so on. Exact details may vary, but you get the idea. For an independent maker, it often just doesn’t make sense.

Berlin-based Koma Electronik had another idea. “Carpet-bagging,” the term for using your badge to sell your product without a booth, is a strict no-no at these trade shows. But the trade show can’t tell you what you can or can’t do outside the convention. So, at Musikmesse, Koma promised demos in their “limousine” or “Koma Cab” – really a rented van outfitted with an amp for live demos of their gear. Since they’d saved some money, they could even offer free champagne and caviar. The system was easy: call them up, and they picked you up for a ride and some music.

Here, we get an in-depth look at two Koma effects, the FT201 filter/sequencer and BD101 gate/delay. On first glance, these may remind you of the superb Moog Music Moogerfoogers. But in usability and sound, the Koma boxes are very much their own beasts. I always loved on Star Trek: The Next Generation when someone would bark “disable safety protocols.” That’s the feeling of the sound here, whether controlled with your fingers, your feet, control voltage, or distance sensors – all appealing to modular synth lovers, computer users, and guitarists alike. In particular, the gate/delay is capable of some far-out effects, so if you’re bored with me and Koma’s Wouter Jaspers (come on, why?), uh, skip ahead a bit for some really wild sounds after a couple of minutes in the second video (below, bottom).

Kristin Trethewey has a separate look at the Koma crew for CDM, but for now, enjoy the videos.

Part one, above, shows the filter; the delay is below. We ask readers: which song fits this scenario better, Dragonette “Black Limousine,” or Ladytron “Back of the Van”?

http://www.koma-elektronik.com/ft201/

http://www.koma-elektronik.com/bd101/

Inside this compact white box lurks a lot of sonic power and technical prowess. Perhaps that explains why the newest version of the open source Shruthi-1 now sports a crazy-badass wolf dog cartoon with glowing eyes.

Since its launch, the Shruthi-1 has gradually evolved new features, with a fairly sophisticated combination of hardware and extensive software. At its core, it’s a “hybrid” synth with digital/virtual analog oscillators and real-analog filter. The digital oscillators allow it to change character, for classic virtual analog subtractive, or wavetable, FM, phase distortion, and vowel synthesis.

The big news with the filter is that the various flavors of filter board are now discontinued. Sadly, the wonderful CEM3379 filter chip is just too rare to have a long-term home in this synth; the Shruthi-1, like other synths (the Dark Energy being a recent example) has hit chip scarcity.

But in its place is something else new and wonderful. The SSM2164 (uh, that doesn’t roll of the tongue, but yes, that filter) combines 15 filter responses with four resonance models, for a total of 60 possible filter sounds. See also the Oberheim Matrix-12 and Xpander for pole-mixing techniques. You also get self-oscillation, and even a Korg DS-inspired diode waveshaper. (I won’t go into any more detail, as maker Mutable describes this in gory precision.)

In a way, the Shruthi-1 – despite its minimal knobs – really hides a semi-modular instrument, one with its own built-in arpeggiator, modulation matrix, duophony, rhythmical oscillator cycling, and lots of other features. If there’s a technical feature possible – just about any feature – the Shruthi-1 does it. Combined with that terrific filter and digital grunge, I think it’s a terrific deal in desktop synths.

In fact, my only real criticism is, it does so much, you’re likely to be stuck paging through menus – or should focus on MIDI programming – because of the minimal controls. I can see why members of the Shruthi-1 community have been building expansion controllers for it to get more hands-on control. But on the other hand, to me, it’s entirely worth the tradeoff going compact – even with a complex menu system. The result is a synth that’s far more affordable and portable. It’s a natural for MIDI users.

The new design is also unquestionably the best-looking Shruthi yet, thanks to translucent white plexiglass and white LED lighting. 130 € buys you the kit (plus another 20 € in parts), but I’d strongly recommend the pre-assembled version if you’re less familiar with bigger builds. There are a lot of parts and two boards, plus a pretty white circuit board that will look grimy if you don’t solder carefully. For experienced builders, it should be a great assembly process into which you’ll want to sink your teeth, wolf-like. But for less-experienced builders – or just people who want to get straight to making sound – I think 349 € is a small price to ask. (A carry bag and European wall wart are included.) Just grab the pre-built version fast; because they’re hand-assembled, they won’t last long.

Full details:
Shruthi-1, 4-Pole Mission edition

Be sure to have a listen to the way the new stuff sounds:

The other important thing to mention about the Shruthi-1 is that it’s a fully open source synth. (An earlier version prohibited commercial use, but it now uses a more permissive license.) The best way to see what lurks inside is to check out GitHub. Apart from being able to modify the Shruthi-1 hardware and software design, there’s a library you can use in your own projects:

https://github.com/pichenettes/shruthi-1

This also means the Shruthi-1 joins our own MeeBlip among open source synths. I’ve been a bit amused at people comparing the two, because what I like about the Shruthi is that it’s basically MeeBlip’s opposite. We kept the design of the MeeBlip as minimal as possible, both with an eye to keeping one-to-one hardware controls and making modification simpler. The Shruthi is lovely because it’s the reverse: it retains a small footprint, but packs lots of sonic options. It’s the maximal alternative.

I’m just happy that the hardware landscape in general offers loads of great choices for people wanting to augment their computer soft synths with hardware. Who says the synthesizer’s best days are in the past?