Synthfest 2017
We demo’d two new versions of our Zyra and Haydn Sequencers at this event and they went down very well. Both were essentially simplified versions of the original ZEIT Step Sequencer and featured just four sequences instead of eight on the basis that several of our customers rarely used more than four at once. We made sure that we used easy-to-find components and greatly simplified enclosures to made manufacturing a breeze.
However, we soon realised that, as good as these instruments were, they were well behind the competition. They didn’t have multiple MIDI interfaces and they didn’t have USB. A re-design was essential.
We also demonstrated The Destructor, a digital monosynth with a difference.
For years, I found myself getting very, very bored listening to synths that were all beautiful swirling pads and acres of reverb, pristine pulses and huge Moog basses so I designed a digital synth with as many errors and points of instability inside its algorithms as possible. At one end of the scale, you’d have a workable monophonic synth that sounded just about useable. At the other end of the scale, you’d have a beast that was barely controllable. And it worked.
The Destructor proved enormously popular mostly because those mad enough to give it a try really wanted to see if they could figure out why it sounded so gritty, so in-ya-face, so utterly deranged. [The key to getting the beast to work is to randomly drop bits in your calculations so instead of shifting right 16 times, you’d maybe shift right 15 times so that the input to the next stage deliberately overloads. Do the same with the flanger algorithm, and any other algorithm you can hack, and you have a sound design tool that is incomparable to any other synth. That said, it was just about impossible to predict what it would do next though.]
Destructor never became a full product but maybe it will, one day. The Beast lives on in the shape of our Plasma synthesiser. I had the Plasma front panel lying around and used that because it was convenient.
Maybe... one day...