Today’s installment is a study in extremes, going from exceptionally clean digital designs to purposely noisy and distorted analog ones, ending with a nice new envelope generator plus upcoming dual VCO. I also editorialize about “tone.”
A few of those themes that emerged during this year’s NAMM show included CEM 3340-based VCOs (as there are now two sources for this classic, previously-unavailable chip), granular synthesis, semi-modulars, and multiple voices. I touched on that last one in the first installment, with 4ms’ Spherical Waveform Navigator being capable of 6-voice polyphony; in general, more companies are looking at configuring a modular to produce more than one sound at the same time – and we’ll look at a few of them here.
For the last couple of year I’ve written up my conversations with all of the modular manufacturers I could visit during the most recent NAMM show, starting on the first night of the show. This year, for personal reasons, I was on a different schedule, but I’m finally starting my manufacturer-by-manufacturer reports, to be spread out over several installments.
Welcome to Part 9 of 9 of Modular NAMM 2017. I’m going to wrap up this year’s marathon reports with a series of quick takes about what a number of other companies were showing this year, including 1010Music, Detachment 3, Division 6, Dreadbox, Erica Synths, Eventide, Koma, Moon, Roland, Synthrotek, and Waldorf.