Something New from Dave Smith Instruments in the Works?

Soviet Space Child spotted this one on the VSE forum:

"Pym has already stated it will be "large" and this is his post on the subject from the DSI forums

'I'll say this...

We learned a lot on the Tempest optimizing for drum sounds. The new voice will have some relation because we learned a lot, but it will not be the same. The DSP is not optimal for anything more than sample playback, which was fine for drums, but would not be for a synth. We have a lot of ideas building on the Evolver/Prophet lines, so both analog and hybrid options are on the table.

Multitimbral code has been done well in the Tempest and would not be hard to move into future products. This does not necessarily mean there will be a separate MIDI channel and/or individual outputs per voice, although that is an option. The real benefit of the new code is that I have granular control over a different program (or multiple programs) per voice. Think about this in terms of stack/split behavior and other interesting combinations. There's some really cool ideas I have related to this that may or may not make it into the next product, but I have no doubt we'll do at some point.

The sequencer code on the Tempest is something I plan on reusing as the backbone of both sequencers and arpeggiators in future products. There is a tremendous amount of flexibility with this that I've barely scratched the surface of in the Tempest. Swing, duration of notes, the Note FX (param locks), etc, etc. Think of that structure confined to an arp... really, really flexible. If we do a 5 (or more) voice synth it would have a big keyboard, as a keyboardist I find there's little value in having a small keyboard with a polyphonic synth. It's just plain annoying. The OLED is a great compromise between cost and functionality. However any type of visual display changes the way you interact with the instrument; I'm always looking at other options to streamline the workflow. I hate touchscreen interfaces for music as they have no tactile feedback. Until it gets to the point where it's cheap enough to have a dedicated touch screen for specific functions I doubt we'll go in that direction.

Scalable voices on the hardware is something we have talked about. There are pros and cons to this and nothing has been decided.'"

You might remember Pym hinting on something new that turned out to be the Tempest in this post.

Update via Pym on Gearslutz:

"Responses to random parts of this thread...

The Tempest is NOT the Evolver 2.0. That is ridiculous. It has no digital effects. Compared to the Evolver, it's a pretty straightforward synth.

We will not likely make a synth based on the Tempest voice... we made a lot of compromises to optimize it for drums while still being affordable (such as the simple sample playback) and would want a far more flexible architecture for a synth voice.

We love modulation (isn't it obvious?) and the limit of how many we add is only processor power... the Tempest has 8 per voice and it's pretty likely there will be at least that many in any forthcoming synths.

'Analog FM' is not realistically possible with the voice architecture. The first reason (the big one) is that there is a crossover point on the oscillators to go from the lower to upper ranges and the phase of the oscillator is not kept consistent while shifting which would cause really weird artifacts. The second reason is the precision of the Curtis chips is not enough to lock down the oscillator Hz precisely enough to avoid the annoying pulsing you get when doing FM with imprecise signals.

However... if you had a fast enough CV sample rate, you could do FM to the CV signals in the chip. The Tempest, for example, has LFOs that are usable up to the 2kHz range or so. As the chips get more powerful, you should have more range here.

The Tempest has a tweaked filter from the Prophet/Mopho lines which I prefer quite a bit, way more clarity in the high end. However this does lead to people who prefer the dark sound to ALWAYS have the filter on... so it's a give and take. We will probably have the new filter design in new synths but may offer a global switch to change the character of the filter from old to new styles or something like that. Most people won't notice too much of a difference but you know how it is.

I will say that we DO listen to a lot of the common criticisms and have investigated several solutions to many of the problems you guys bring up but I have no firm dates or ideas about when those will be fixed... we are easily distracted by new and cool ideas so often don't put enough energy into fixing the little things. That is changing slowly as we have hired a new hardware engineer who is looking into all sorts of things. This applies to the power supply being internal, the pops on the outputs during power up, and to several other things you guys have mentioned on this thread or others that I really shouldn't comment on because it would give away too much.

How's that for teasing?"