For those in the UK next weekend, you may wish to attend Synthfest UK 2023 in Sheffield, Yorkshire. It is run by our lovely, favourite music magazine, Sound On Sound and has lots of exhibitors including me!!!
I will be showing a prototype of my new polyphonic, cordless modular system. It is an open source project that allows users to build a full modular system using Eurorack sized control panels but all the processing occurs within a Raspberry Pi. It is lower cost than a similar modular system and has that lovely polyphony that is so difficult to attain with traditional CV & Gate. It uses buttons to route between panels rather than patch cords.
I will also have a Zynthian V5 on display so you can get a chance to play with one which I hope tempts you to parting with some cash and sending it to our friend @jofemodo.
You also have the opportunity to meet a couple of the community including me and @wyleu.
We look forward to seeing any of you who can attend and will report back on our experience. Let’s hope there is lots of interest in both of these products from a serious crowd of music industry people.
Yes, I will be there too, at what is my old College.
Should be fun and it’s nice to be able to guest simple Southern sorts into the North of the country where it is generally regarded as grim.
I will be taking the zyncajon, and one or two other toys…
Synthfest UK 2023 was a lot of fun. We had a steady flow of people interested in both my prototype digital polyphonic modular system and the Zynthian V5. Some even humoured @wyleu with his cajonthian (which demonstrated the use of audio effects processing - although some of the subtley was lost in the very noisy envoronment).
Some were familiar with Zynthian and interested to see the V5 whilst others were impressed with its wide range of features. We even saw a V4 on another table!
The feedback on the digital modular was universally positive with a lot of interest in it. The implementation was praised as intutitive and innovative and this has given me confidence to take it to the next stage which is a crowd funding exercise to validate its appeal to a wider audience and if successful, fund tooling-up for production. I know this is a bit (lot) off topic for the wider forum but it was why I was at Synthfest so worth mentioning. (And some of you have voiced interest in the project.) I will launch something on another website soon and link to it.
I knew already about this unfathomable starship of a physical modelling synthesiser. Going from what I heard/saw on the Internet, it is one of the most well-built, original and interesting new kids on the electronic musical instruments block. A bit expensive, if I am not wrong…
Ohhh! I see they allowed you to have some kind of speakers!!
Not like the super-silenced Sonar+D, where you only eared people voices and no music or real noize in the expo! I don’t think i repeat Sonar in 2024. A good synth-fest would be a better choice, ohhh yes!!
As far as volume was concerned there were guidance notes that boiled down to don’t take the piss… I used the cajon which has a hifiberry amp in it with a couple of audio excites,but the background noise level meant the subtleties of the reinforced audio were a little lost (thou apparent to me}. In truth I would say that discerning ears tended to listen on headphones whilst most visitors were content to look at functioning equipment ratcher than listen to it…
Yes indeed! I think only one or two people used the headphones I had plugged into the Zynthian and I rarely needed to demonstrate the sound in the modular. A description of what it did was enough to impress most. The sound level inside the hall made it difficult to discern each instrument and by the end of the day, the audio feed from the Zynthian to the cajon (we were using its amp and speakers for the Zynthian) had got drowned in reverb so was pretty useless. My assistant seemed unable (or unwilling) to fix the front of house sound issue!!!
Due to the incomplete state of the modular, I wasn’t able to connect MIDI keyboard or Zynthian (as a sequencer) as I had intended so was limited to driving and oscillator and filter from a low frequency oscillator to give a sweep and opening filter sound. It demonstrated the thing worked but was not something that I wanted going all day!
The difficulties with the cajon were mostly related to the Android VNC browser client which seemed to ignore fader changes and back button presses at it’s own whim. OF course when I treid to demonstrate that to my learned colleague things worked and being the ever jealous radio hound he is, he decided that was an opportunity to mock his obviously far more impressive television based companion.
Never been a reliable mechanism and I tend to use vnc read only with a mouse but even that seemed ineffective and I was so tired by that stage I couldn’t think straight . . .
Meanwhile: Riban ordering a pizza wearing a zynthian T-shirt . . .
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