mustakl

And there goes another DIY synth

By Marc Nostromo

Just as I wrote yesterday’s post on MidiVox, CDM unveils a new arduino ATMega328p-based synth – the shruti-1 – developped by Olivier Gillet, the maker of Bhajis loop for Palm devices a while ago.

Now this baby is getting VERY close to being perfect: on top of matching the “let’s have a a re-programmable synth” pattern close to, for example, arduino based units, it adds a nice LCD screen AND an analog VCF/VCA borrowed from prestigious old school synth like the Ensoniq ESQ-1, Waldorf Microwave and Prophet VS.

I’ve always been a great believer of the Digital Oscillator/VCF combo since it allows you both to generate freaky harmonics using heavy aliasing in the oscillator and “warm up” the result using VCF’s so in term of architecture, this is damn hot.

Let’s not hide from the fact this is one of the most exciting news from the music making scene for me in a long time, certainly beats anything announced last week’s at the Music Messe. At this point I have still no clue how many of the parameters are addressable by MIDI but even so, it’s a pretty groovey item !