Studio Update Feb 2015

Been a while since I posted. Hope you are doing well at this moment as I am. Many things happening here.

Synth demos in the works: Ultranova and VFX. Wavetable and transwave synths are becoming more interesting to me. And I narrowly missed a chance to get a Blofeld unit locally. Initially I balked at the Ultranova as simply a virtual analog with nothing new to offer. But I came into one recently for a fractional price and wanted to dig into the wavetables, of which there is absolutely no demos of this aspect. The Ultranova has really deep modulation capability, and an audio-slicer strangely titled Gator. My first patches are mind-bending. The VFX was the follow-up to the ESQ-1, and superseded by the SD-1 and Fizmo. I shudder to think I sold my Fizmo some years ago. The VFX came to me not being able to save sounds after turning it off. I went in and discovered a botched coin battery replacement job, the solder pads were destroyed and small blobs on the end of the coin-holder pins doing absolutely nothing. So I went in and took care of that by jumping the pins with wire. Anyway the VFX has both transwaves and one master wavetable containing all the waveforms. Transwaves are like wavetables, but with very smooth timbre changes between the waves. That doesn't stop you from choosing a modulator that will jump around in that transwave for more abrupt, albeit subtle yet, changes in sound. OMG and the strings sound very nice, too. The VFX can also have alternate pitch-tunings by employing a custom pitch table. The sonics I am getting from this cheap old synth is absolutely preposterous and I cannot wait to share.

New album under way. Currently working on my third, and so far, most-challenging track. Unlike Displays, I will not be releasing each track as they are completed (a la Dickens' Tale of Two Cities). I am going for something generally more analog and lo-fi. And as always pushing into new territory. The VFX being able to do alternate pitch-tunings will be very interesting to experiment.