Xenodrive on synth, drums, drone and SFX (no talk)

video upload by Richard DeHove

"First up: Erica Synths sent me the Xenodrive, so my thanks to the kind crew in Latvia. And did you know Latvia and Tasmania are almost identical in size? Not sure that fact will prove useful to you, but who knows.

The Xenodrive joins the Echolocator and Nightverb in Erica Synths' desktop range. Older members include the DB-01, LXR-02 and AcidboxIII. The Zen delay eats at a different table because of its slightly different case size. Perhaps we can speculate on what's next? I'm thinking of a sampler-looper thing. Thoughts?

Back to the alien-green Xenodrive. But before we get there it's interesting that alien stuff is associated with the colour green. If you read fairy tales in their original form then you'll know green was always the colour of witches and other evil folk.

So the Xeno: Stereo dirt, drive, waveshaping, distortion and tube screaming. Dial in just a touch or destroy everything. Lots of knobs plus presets. It's a rare beast.

Aggressive effects can lead to aggressive knob twiddling spinning from zero to ten looking for the big changes. Sometimes it's true: the parameter might be linear from not much to lots. I find the Darkglass B3K works like that: There's not much true variation as you wind up the knobs, you simply get more. But that's not how many parameters work here. If you rotate wildly from 1 to 10 you'll miss all the flavors. That's especially true of the rotate parameter, the drive tone, and the X and Y waves. With all these you'll find variations with tiny movements.

Another parameter I really appreciated was the noise gate threshold - one of the few things that doesn't get a dedicated knob. Dirt and distortion pedals are notoriously noisy so a noise gate at the end of the chain can save you from lingering hiss. You can hear this in the first drum demo here. It begins with long tails and then I wind back the gate. Fun also to use it as a hard release rather than just a noise killer.

I tried to give a variety of scenarios in this demo. My unexpected favorite was how good it was at simulating the details of shortwave heterodyne noise.

0:00 Synth demo
2:45 Drum demo 1
7:48 Throbbing Gristle
9:30 Shortwave
11:55 Drum demo 2
15:26 Feedback drone
17:19 Cheese demo
19:00 Drum demo 3

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My website: https://richarddehove.com/"