The MikroElektronika BassBoy is a $29 minimal monophonic digital MIDI controlled bass synthesizer.
It’s designed to be the heart of a DIY project, generating monophonic bass lines from MIDI input.
The BassBoy offers full MIDI control over filter pre-gain, filter cutoff, resonance, envelope modulation, decay, accent, gain and master volume.
Here’s an audio preview of BassBoy:
Novation has officially announced a new minisynth & vocoder, the Novation MiniNova.
The Novation MiniNova is a compact synth with the same sound engine as its big brother; the UltraNova.
Key Features:
We’ve got photos, videos and specs below. Check it out and let us know what you think of the new Novation MiniNova!
This set of videos, from 1985, takes a look at The Secrets of Analog & Digital Synthesis.
It’s obviously dated, starting with the ”Listen to the sound coming from your VCR right now.” Nevertheless, there’s some solid coverage of synth basics and the videos also offer a vintage look at synths.
This video captures a Moog bass shoutout: Animoog vs Moog Little Phatty vs Arturia Minimoog V.
And $1 vs. $1300 vs. $200.
The settings are close, but the results have lots of tiny and not so tiny differences. While the analog and virtual analog synths don’t all sound the same – they do all sound pretty wicked – and very ‘Moog’.
To my ears, the Moog Little Phatty sounds the best, followed by Animoog and Arturia Minimoog V.
What do you think? Patch differences? Different synth architectures? Virtual analog vs real analog?
Technical details below.
Craig Anderton put together this M-Audio Venom synthesizer audio demo video.
The video may cause seizures, but the audio portion of it offers a good sampling of the sound of the Venom synth.
While M-Audio hypes the vintage audio angle in its promo materials for the Venom, to my ears its real strength is the character of its digital grittiness.
Check it out and let us know what you think!
Greg Surges’ tabulaRasa is a digital wavetable oscillator for modular synthesizers, with voltage control of frequency, waveform selection, and the amount of interpolation between waveforms.
A wavetable oscillator is a standard technique in computer music. The oscillator uses a counter (ramp wave) to read a memory array. The array is filled with pre-computed samples of the desired waveform. The memory index being read increases with the counter, and resets when it reaches the end of the array.
The tabulaRasa digital wavetable oscillator is currently under development and is a project at KickStarter. Continue reading