What I'm building now.
Mellt, Tant and Tonnau are out. These are the instruments I'm building now. They follow the same rules as the first three: proudly digital, exact, and nothing modelled on someone else's hardware. Everything here is planned rather than finished, so details will move; the Workbench says when they do.
Dwndwr
dwndwr · Welsh for uproar · said DOON-door, the second part as a Scot says "door"
A drum machine where the sequencer is the source of desire.
Every drum is two things: what hits and what rings. A stroke is committed at the moment of contact; everything after is physics. So Dwndwr models the stroke, not a circuit, and nothing in it is named after a machine.
- Twelve rows play drums. The thirteenth plays the kit.
- Six kinds of drum body, from an FM clang to a plucked skin to your own samples, each struck by a stick, a mallet or a sample.
- Velocity as a stroke: hit harder and five things change, each along a curve you can see. A pad that only gets louder feels like a volume knob.
- Sixteen versions of every drum, picked by a rule, not by dice. The one you liked is still number seven tomorrow.
- Chance, fills, ratchets, flams, gesture curves inside a step, scenes and a song mode.
- Load a break, chop it, and pick a slice for each step.
- Dwndwr MIDI FX: the same sequencer with no sound, to play your other drums.
Arweinydd
arweinydd · Welsh for a conductor · said ar-WAY-nith (th as in "the")
A step sequencer that teaches new tricks to old dogs.
The sequencers players love do one thing a DAW track doesn't: a value belongs to its step. Arweinydd brings that to any synth with a MIDI socket. It makes no sound of its own. It plays your synths, measures them, and tells you exactly what it sent.
- Parameter locks, in your synth's own words: Cutoff, not CC 74. Each one is sent before its note, so the synth is ready when the note sounds.
- Tracks with their own length and speed, conditional steps, Euclidean patterns, scenes, and songs built from patterns.
- A profile for each synth. Teach it the controls by turning the synth's knobs.
- It measures how long each synth takes to answer, then sends early, so the notes land on the beat.
- Turn the synth, not the mouse: record locks straight from the synth's own knobs.
- Honest lamps: what was sent, when the MIDI cable is full, and when a note is late.
Carn
carn · Welsh for a cairn, a pile of stones · said KARN, with a rolled r
Three great digital engines playing each other’s hearts out.
Digital instruments should do what digital does better: exact tuning, bounces that repeat exactly, modulation at any rate, randomness you can get back. Carn puts all three engines on one set of voices with one matrix across them, so a plucked string can drive an FM operator. And you can keep the way one sound moves and give it to another.
- One modulation matrix across all three engines and the effects.
- A sequencer built in: each track plays one engine or layers several.
- Effects that share one machine underneath: slide a chorus into an echo, or a flanger into a tuned string, and hear that they were always the same thing.
- Notes that keep ringing in their own effect tails, and a voice count that tells you the truth.
- New filters, including one that counts harmonics rather than hertz, so a sweep sounds the same on every key.
- Patches in sections: a Mellt, Tant or Tonnau patch comes in as one stone of the cairn.
Corwynt
corwynt · Welsh for a whirlwind · said KOR-wint
Draw the sound, spin it, fold it.
Timbre becomes something you can see and change with your hands. Pull a corner of a shape out and the sound gets sharper. A second oscillator brightens from a pure sine to a buzz without ever going out of tune, and the two can spin and stir each other. Then a wavefolder: a filter closing makes a sound smaller; a fold opening makes it bigger.
- A shape oscillator: place and drag the corners of any shape, or slice through a turning solid. The picture is the sound, left and right included.
- A loop oscillator: one knob from sine to buzz, and the pitch never moves.
- Whirl and Stir, so the two oscillators play each other.
- A two-stage wavefolder, with its curve drawn live on the panel.
- A gate that closes tone and loudness together. Play harder for brighter and snappier, softer for darker and longer.
- The family sequencer, with locks on the shape and the fold.
- Presets that teach: each says what to listen for and which knob to move.
Repeatable, too: the wildest setting on the panel is a setting.
Eirlaw
eirlaw · Welsh for sleet · said AYR-lau
Sewing patterns on the seam between beat chopping and texture.
The player who chops a break is the same person who, a bar later, wants it to dissolve into grains and come back on the downbeat. Eirlaw does both in one pattern, on one clock. Every step decides what the sample is today.
- Eight stereo tracks, each a loop, slices, a multisample or a grain track.
- Up to sixteen one-shot pads inside any track: a kit inside a track.
- Granular locked to the clock, so a grain cloud is a rhythm, and it swings when the track swings.
- Every sample split into hits, tone and air, and each step chooses which you hear.
- Lift the feel from a break and lend it to the other tracks.
- Every hit on its own sample.