What is The Vanilla Synthesizer? It's Ready, That's What

via the STG Soundlabs/muSonics Electronic Newsletter:

Is it The Vanilla Synthesizer or the muSonics TVS?

I started working on this project a year and a half ago.

Originally my thought process was to make a new American format synthesiser that could be sold as modules, kits, and bare boards. I was concerned about the future of the format, and I felt a new line of basic modules and infrastructure at a variety of price points was important. I still do.

STG Soundlabs was a failure because I made things that ultimately the eurorack market simply did not want. Yes, I sold some, and will continue to maintain the line as best as I can, but it's very hard to find photos of eurorack installations with STG Soundlabs modules in them, but rare to find a nice big man-sized synthesiser without my modules in it.

Another thing I wanted to do was teach myself how to do my own engineering. It didn't start that way, but it became that way. I'd been a hardware product developer since 2005 but never actually laid out a circuit board. That is no longer true, and I've done things beyond this project that I haven't even talked about.


muSonics VANILLA modular synthesizer Overview

video upload by manmade madman

"My reference for this project was my Oberheim Two Voice, for reasons that need a bit of a story for context.

[Pictured: Here's the owner of Bad Dog Antiques and my Oberheim Two Voice.]

At the 2018 winter NAMM convention, I tried to convince Tom Oberheim to make an American format version of the SEM, and he told me that was a great idea but he didn't want to do it because his focus was on SEMX, and that I should do it instead. I took this suggestion VERY seriously and spent years trying to figure out the best way to do this.

Later that year, in June of 2018, I found a Two Voice at an antique store in Gibbon MN the day after playing a psytrance party on a goat farm. I walked out of the store with a very nice Oberheim Two Voice in exchange for the $100 in cash I got paid for the gig and a promise to mail a $600 check when I got back to Chillicothe. This sort of thing can only be ascribed to divine providence.

Having this hammered into me again, in January of 2020 I drove up to San Francisco after the NAMM convention and visited CCRMA and several friends, including the Oberheims. During our lunch I told Tom and his wife the story of my Two Voice and he told me it was his favourite of all of his synthesisers. (He also told me about Lyle Mays giving him his own Four Voice because he heard Tom no longer owned one. What a nice couple of guys.)

There are reasons for this that go beyond what is visible: 2 voices and a sequencer. There is also an audio noise source, sample and hold with lag as a modulation source, and the left voice output can be fed into the filter mixer of the right voice. The mixer is basically a distortion pedal.

A Four Voice is four SEMs. An Eight Voice is eight SEMs. A Two Voice is significantly more than two SEMs. It's the most versatile Oberheim instrument for timbre authoring, and should be a reference point. It's an incredible synthesiser that I think most people don't understand.

I abstracted the Two Voice into a family of modules that cover every function of it and go no further. Critical circuits are derived from the SEM service manual and then optimised further. The noise is what I could figure out from the Mini-Sequencer schematic, and tweaked so that it's good for audio and control. The sample hold is based around an LF398 implementation from Richard Brewster's site. I should give him a module but haven't gotten around to it. I'm not perfect.

The VCO is the ASM-1 oscillator core with 901 pulse shaping, because my friend and mentor, the late Gene Stopp, wanted it that way, which is a story for a future newsletter. The pulse shaper is pure transistor energy, unlike the Electronotes concept. (I should mention Scott Rider AKA Old Crow helped me considerably with the VCO after Gene died. He was very helpful and has always been supportive of what I'm doing.)

[Pictured: These oscilators were written about in Electronotes issue 62 by Terry Mikulic and implemented in Gene's ASM-1.]

Am I going to tell you it's a SEM? Absolutely not. That would be rude, to you and to my friend Tom. After you take a thing like that and go this far with it, it's no longer that thing. However, it's important to explain where it comes from and what your motivation is. I want you to know why the feature set is limited in the same way and that the circuits do, for the most part, come from the same place.

It's a tone-forward, high gain, basic synthesiser with no esoteric components that is insulated against the supply chain problems that completely derailed me during the mass trauma experiment we have all been subjected to over the past few years. The only NLA component I used was the CA3080, but that can be replaced with the LM13700, which is basically exactly the same but in a different package.

[Pictured: I have no idea who actually designed this LFO originaly but it's a really cool circuit. Also why wouldn't you want 2 inputs into each of the pitch and gate busses?]

Along the way I incorporated the LFO from the Korg MS-20, mainly because I thought it was an interesting circuit but it turned out to be a fantastic fit to the instrument. It's also aggressively weird: when you adjust the shape in the upper register the rate changes, which is not expected behaviour. However this is part of the personality of the circuit and that's really cool. I also put output attenuators on it which is not really common in American format, it's more of a British synthesiser concept. This works well in the instrument because of how limited it is. I decided to call it Japanese Modulation because that makes sense.

Another usability feature is a control bus module so that you only have to patch pitch and gate CV into one place and they get distributed to the important places in the system to cut down on the patch cable jungle. It also gives you a passive multiple and a passive attenuator whose input is normalled to the pitch CV bus so it can be used as a keyboard tracking amount control for the filter, which I think is kind of important.

It's important to mention the cabinet. It's based on the Trumansburg cabinets but 10MU instead of 22MU. It's made of walnut grown in Illinois and CNC-milled and glued together near Effingham IL by a friend of someone who was a legit member of the 1990s midwestern rave scene and they have both been incredibly helpful to me. I finish them with 4 to 6 coats of organic tung oil and have aluminum rails identical to the originals that I have laser-cut with holes that I countersink and tap myself. This is nice stuff.

[Pictured: Why not put the VCAs in the envelope modules?]

Where I wound up was a complete instrument that is so good I used it for my last gig as the lead synth voice, replacing something that I'd used since 2014 and wrote a whole bank of factory patches for. This was an emotional decision.

Yes, it's "vanilla" ... but vanilla is fantastic. It's a fundamental flavour as important as salt or black pepper. It's also derived from something that is the same color as vanilla ice cream. So lean into it ... call it The Vanilla Synthesizer.

I'm in a place now where I want to completely focus on this instrument. It's in a beautiful walnut cabinet and has a universal power supply that plays nice all over the world. I will maintain my legacy modules but as far as the public-facing aspect of muSonics goes, this is the instrument for now.

[Pictured: Do you want it in purple? I'll make it in purple. I already shipped one. I'm calling it The Dreadnok, the dangerous version of the Vanilla Synthesizer. It's named after the 1% biker gang from GI Joe who were fatally addicted to grape soda and chocolate covered doughnuts. Larry Hama was a genius.]

The problem is that my concept requires that I move everything into SMD so that the kind of kits I want to offer and meeting the price point I think is appropriate for the complete system is practical.

I've shipped 6 of these systems, and everyone that has it tells me they love it. I did it through word of mouth alone and zero marketing. I think this is fairly impressive, especially considering this year and a half process includes the time I spent learning how to do my own engineering.

The last few months of this development, the final optimization, happened during an incredibly traumatic time of my life (which I'm not even comfortable typing about yet, even though I thought I could in this newsletter), and I'm not even sure how I pulled this off along with getting ready for Knobcon. There are things we are capable of as humans under incredible emotional stress that afterwards don't seem possible.

MuSONICS VANILLA Vintage-Inspired Modular Synthesizer Demo 🌌 #KNOBCON 2023 🌆

video upload by Vulture Culture

To wrap up all of this ...

I can make an absolutely kick-ass instrument with fully debugged circuits and PCBs, but it's through-hole, so I'm incredibly limited in how many of them I can make. I am by myself here with no employees, and the only way I've been able to be as materially productive as I've been over the past ten years is with SMD manufacturing.

At this point I can't afford the time or money to revise 8 modules from through-hole to SMD before I offer them for sale, but I can't meet the price point I want to without doing so.

In other words, if I were to charge what I should for how much labour is required for them, it would be a $4000 instrument, but I think it's a $2500 instrument.

But what I don't mind doing is taking a massive hit for a moment to get this going, but I need commitment and funds to live and buy parts while I do so.

What I want to do is build runs of a dozen or so and sell and promote them as available as a very limited edition instrument, somewhere between 20 and 40, as through-hole instruments while I get these circuits moved into SMD, at which time I can afford to make them for dealers and promotion, and offer the kind of SMD kits I want to, and bare board packages with the documentation required for such a thing. Then my concept will be finished.

Amos Gaynes and McDondal's vs muSonics at Knobcon 11

video upload by suitandtieguy

So here's what I'm offering:

I'll take orders now for about a dozen units to ship in March. I am only asking for a fifty percent deposit ($1250), with the balance to be paid right before shipment. If I sell these, I'll do another run that might be ready in May or June, and this will continue until I have the SMD aspect finished, at which point I will NEVER AGAIN build one of these things in through-hole.

It's a limited edition synthesiser, but unlike any you've seen before. I don't want to ever discontinue the instrument, I just only want to build 20 to 40 this way. How many total I'll build in through-hole is not set in stone, but it's not going to be a lot.

Will your limited edition Vanilla Synthesizer sound different than an SMD version? No. It will not. However, you'll have something that is special because the guy who designed the instrument also engineered it and completely assembled it.

To purchase this, you'll need to email me privately and I'll send you an invoice through Square or we can do a Zelle payment if you can do that. You can just reply to this email if you want.

I'm doing it this way because I need to make sure that I don't get ahead of myself. It's important to make sure this is not sold beyond the current run.

Thank you and Merry Christmas!

Watch this video from muSonics product specialist Matt Baxley and tell me you don't feel better!

A Merry Talkbox Christmas!

video upload by mootbooxle