Phase Plant revisited

November 16, 2021 2201

In January 2019 I did a review of the KiloHearts Phase Plant synthesizer.

Since then we have had a bit of a tumbleweed moment and it has all gone very quiet. The Phase Plant seems to have completely fallen off the radar. I’m not sure why that is, but it may be that it has been viewed as a sound designers tool and it’s complex appearance has put some people off. Another important point is that if you buy the complete package with all the modules it isn’t cheap. However, if you buy only the modules that you want, you get a great tool for the money.

I think it is fair to say that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts and plugging the different modules together will give you a great sounding, flexible synth.

Mark Barkan has made me aware of a very thorough, balanced, and fair review that he has recently made of the Phase Plant. It is a long video, but helpfully he gives timesteps in the video info section so you can jump to any part that interests you.

Also see: higherhz.com

Ton-Geraet 1 (SyS TG1) is now freeware!

June 1, 2020 2201

Ton-Geraet 1 (Sound Device) was a big hit 10 years ago because of its unconventional feature set. Now the VST plugin for Windows-based DAW’s is being given away completely free of charge.

The instrument features a dual-voice architecture and a beautiful wave-morph sequencing which draws inspiration from the legendary SID sound chip which was used in Commodore 64 home computers.Other features include a 12-bit low-pass filter inspired by the Akai S-1000 hardware sampler. A dual LFO unit is installed for handling modulation, along with per-voice DADSR envelopes. Things get even more interesting with the Kraftwerk inspired Stoerstrahlung (Interference or stray radiation) button (found on the Setup page) which emulates the unstable behaviour of analogue gear.

Kraftwerk used to leave their analogue synthesizer gear running whilst they went out to the cinema. After they returned to the studio, due to the slow internal heating of the analogue circuits, they found the sound to have changed, sometimes drastically.

More info: SyS TG1 (12.9 MB download, ZIP archive containing EXE installer, 32-bit & 64-bit VST plugin format for Windows)

VCV Rack reaches V1.0

June 20, 2019 2201

Software modular VCV Rack just hit a major milestone – it’s now officially version 1.0, with polyphony, full MIDI, module browsing, multi-core support, and more. And since it’s a free and open platform, you don’t want to sleep on this.

VCV Rack is an open-source software modular platform, featuring a Eurorack-inspired user interface. VCV Rack is available for Linux, Mac & Windows as a free download. Additional modules for the platform – both free and commercial – are also available.

Here are the features new to V1.0

Polyphony. Use up to 16 voices with the full flexibility of modular patching. Cables automatically turn polyphonic when requested by MIDI modules, sequencers, etc.
MIDI output. Control MIDI hardware with Rack modules. New modules include CV-GATE for drum machines, CV-MIDI for desktop synths, and CV-CC for Eurorack interfaces.
MIDI mapping. Control knobs, buttons, and sliders directly from a MIDI controller. Using the new MIDI-MAP module, click a virtual parameter and move a hardware control to create a mapping.
Module Browser. Search, filter, and view modules in your collection. Click and drag to directly place modules in the rack.
Multi-core engine. Use multiple CPU threads to maximize the number of modules. Accelerated polyphonic engines on many VCV and third-party modules.
Dozens of other new features and fixes, including manual parameter entry, module disabling, module “force” dragging, module expanders, easy zoom gestures, and more.

VCV Rack is available now as a free download

KiloHearts Phase Plant is sounding very good

January 19, 2019 2201

This is all sounding very nice. Coming soon! Phase Plant is the crowning achievement of the snapin eco-system that Kilohearts have been developing since the release of Multipass in 2015.

Phase Plant combines the power of or snapin effects with new modules for signal generation and modulation, creating a hybrid synthesizer capable of what has previously only been possible in classic modular setups. It does all this on a single screen and with surprising ease.

The way the different elements go together gives a lovely modular feel, and allows some spectacular sound generation ideas to be generated when you move the placement of the modules around. For me, possibly the most impressive aspect is the graphics, which are really well done and help to explain the effect of the different modules by giving visual feedback.

KiloHearts plan to have it ready for Spring 2019

Sadowick has done a nice job of explaining it here

Russian synthesis

June 30, 2015 2201

The ANS synthesizer

Arguably the first Russian synth, the ANS, was built and developed around 1938 and finished in 1958 by engineer Yevgeny Murzin (1914-1970).
Murzin was an engineer who worked in areas unrelated to music, and the development of the ANS synthesizer was a hobby which gave him many problems on a practical level. It was not until 1958 that Murzin was able to establish a laboratory and gather a group of engineers and musicians in order to design the ANS.

The ANS was fully polyphonic and generated pure tones from rotating glass discs with 144 optical phonograms. The synth had 5 similar discs rotating at different speeds to produce 720 pure tones, covering the whole range of audible frequencies.

The user interface is a glass plate covered in non-drying opaque black mastic, which creates a drawing surface upon which the user makes marks by scratching through the mastic which allows light to pass through onto photocells that send signals to 20 amplifiers and bandpass filters.

The glass plate can be scanned left or right across the photocell bank, the scan speed is adjustable down to zero giving a continuous held note.

With 720 pure tones it is possible to get a high density synthesized sound with a smooth variance of pitch - the minimum interval is 1/72 of an octave (16.67 cents), or 1/6 of a semitone, which is only just perceptible to the ear.

This precision means that it is possible to synthesize a greater number of sounds per octave than the Western musical scale's 12 semitones.You could, for example, use a scale with 24 quarter-tones like the Indian Sruti scale.

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872-1915)

Murzin named his invention in honour of the composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (ANS)

Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist who was influenced by Frederic Chopin and composed early works characterised by tonal language. Scriabin was influenced by synesthesia (a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway), and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his atonal scale.

Scriabin's work Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), includes a part for a machine known as a "clavier à lumières", which was a colour organ designed specifically for the performance of Scriabin's tone poem. It was played like a piano, but projected coloured light on a screen in the concert hall rather than sound.

Theosophist and composer Dane Rudhyar wrote that Scriabin was "the one great pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization, the father of the future musician", and an antidote to "the Latin reactionaries and their apostle, Stravinsky" and the "rule-ordained" music of "Schoenberg's group.

Eduard Nikolaevich Artemyev (1937-)

Eduard Nikolaevich Artemyev is an acknowledged leader of Russian electronic experimental music. In 1960 he met Yevgeny Murzin and used the ANS in his compositions for Andrei Tarkovsky's films Solaris, The Mirror and Stalker.

Artemyev found that the synthesiser is a possibility "to compose sound, timbre, to sculpt it, to lend form, colour, energy, duration. A most fascinating task for the musician with a creator's imagination, a colourist's talent and an inventor's intuition!"

The Virtual ANS - Spectral Synthesiser

Although there is only one example of the original ANS synthesiser, we are lucky that a free software simulator of the unique ANS synthesiser exists at warmplace.ru developed by Alexander Zolotov

The app is cross-platform and available for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and OSX. The illustration below shows how it works.

Interface description (main window; ANS sonogram editor):

The user interface - ANS sonogram editor

Here is a video that introduces the Virtual ANS

Virtual ANS is a software simulator of the unique Russian synthesizer ANS - photoelectronic microtonal/spectral musical instrument created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin from 1938 to 1958. The app is cross-platform and available for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and OSX. More info: http://warmplace.ru/soft/ans

Made in Virtual ANS Spectral Synthesizer: http://warmplace.ru/soft/ans 100% ANS, no additional effects/synths were used.