Hollow Sun's HEXXON

via Hollow Sun:

"Not so long ago, a spacecraft from a distant galaxy crash landed just outside Lympley Stoke, a small town not far from Bath, England. Given the significance of the event, the military moved in (as they do) and instructed to move the wreckage to Area 51 for extra terrestrial examination. However, owing to the typical ineptness of the British civil service, it was actually sent to Area 51 in Basingstoke, a tattoo and piercing parlour of some reknown in the area.

The owner wasn't quite sure what to make of it all and could get no sense from the the delivery chap ... he tried refusing delivery only to be greeted with "Sorry mate - more than my job's worth. Sign here, mate". So he was lumbered with it but knowing of our fondness for oddness, the owner contacted us and we hot footed it to the place where we retrieved one of the panels...

The rest of the wreckage was taken away by the local council by burly lads in hi-viz tabards, goggles and hard hats to satisfy Health & Safety regulations. Quite what the re-cycling department made of the harder than diamond metal is anyone's guess.

It took us a while to figure out the panel and recreate it but we managed it eventually.

It uses hex-cells for controls which are colour coded and the brighter they are, the higher the parameter value. At the core of the instrument are 64 waveforms that are derived from a variety of sources. Some are basic sawooths, squares, sines, PWMs, etc., from the Dotcom; others are long and textural and come from a variety of sources but fed through the Dotcom's ladder (Moog) filter, multimode (state variable) filter, Suit&Tie guy's 'Sea Devil' VCS3 filter clone and Dotcom's clipper, rectifier and fixed frequency filter...

There's a 64-wave oscillator with its own pitch env and LFO. This passes to a lo-fi processor and saturation unit before passing to a multi-mode LP/BP/HP filter with variable slopes. Not just that, the filter types aren't switched but continuously variable allowing a lot of tonal flexibility. And all this passes to the output with its own ADSR and LFOs for amplitude and pan modulation ... which then passes to a multi effects chain with flanger, phaser, echo and convolving reverb with a wide range of custom impulses.

The result is that Hexxon is capable of a wide range of textures. It's perferctly capable of 'traditional' synth noises but textural soundscapes is more its forté..."

This one in via Atomic Shadow.