The Crow Hill Company Introduces the THE SH*T SYNTH

The Sh*t Synth - Walkthrough video upload by CROW HILL XTRAS

Press release follows:


The Crow Hill Company turns to extensive and rare collection to turn out THE SH*T SYNTH as compendium of 48 circuit-, wave- and sample-bent instruments

EDINBURGH, UK: The Crow Hill Company is proud to turn to its own extensive and rare collection of hardware to turn out THE SH*T SYNTH — available as a compendium of 48 circuit-, wave- and sample-bent instruments inspired by some of the Edinburgh-based enterprise’s eclectic musical favourites (spanning the likes of Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada, Joe Maus, Jon Brion, Laurie Spiegel, Radiohead, Throbbing Gristle, and Yazoo) to create something that they collectively ask: is it just shit or ‘the shit’? — as of April 7…

Whatever way anyone chooses to read into the titling of THE SH*T SYNTH as the latest entry into The Crow Hill’s ongoing ORIGINS series of sample-based virtual instrument plug-ins, one thing is for sure: it readily represents a broad selection of three categories of 16 workhorse instruments each, effectively wrapped up into a single plug-in designed to bring a cohesive approach to making music more edgy, lo-fi, retro, and — swimming against the technological tide of so-called progress — decidedly AI (Artificial Intelligence) slop-free. From pianos to strings, plucks, beeps, bass, and pads, the compendium that is THE SH*T SYNTH has been lovingly sculpted by the Edinburgh-based enterprise’s media composer and ‘samplist-in-residence’ Christian Henson to take the hassle out of making existing sounds less refined, catering to those looking for an entirely new bank of Mellotron-style sounds as well as synths that have been long forgotten — for good reason, too!

That all being said, Christian Henson has not forgotten how THE SH*T SYNTH ultimately came to be — admittedly quite some considerable time after an adventurous sampling journey first got going: “About 20 years ago, I made a sample instrument that broke all the rules; it had bad tuning, bad playing — was badly recorded, and it changed my life. Since then, I’ve made hundreds of sample instruments, but none of them were as badly tuned, badly played, or badly recorded. What went wrong? I’d been listening to some of my favourite albums and realised that a lot of them have bad sounds, but with good notes put in a good order. So I thought: ‘Why don’t I go back to my roots and find another route with sounds that I make — actual instruments that start bad, have seen better days, or, indeed, go into the box already harmed, without the need of the contrivance of harming them digitally once they’re in there?’ So, as part of my ORIGINS series — building the sounds that I use, the tools of my trade, from scratch, I thought I’d make this, THE SH*T SYNTH! There are 16 instruments, but each of those is made up of three different sets of raw materials — one from an ANALOGUE source, one from a DIGITAL, and one from a SAMPLED.” Specifically, those 16 instruments are: 01 PIANO, 02 E PIANO, 03 BASS, 04 BEEPS, 05 PLUCKS, 06 PADS 1, 07 PADS 2, 08 ORGAN, 09 BELLS, 10 GUITAR, 11 STRINGS L (long), 12 STRINGS S (short), 13 BRASS L, 14 BRASS S, 15 REEDS L, and 16 REEDS S. And all can be immediately animated. Adds Christian Henson: “To manage expectations, analogue synths don’t make great piano sounds.” Speaking of which, synths sampled included the much-loved Roland JX-3P, a Programmable Preset Polyphonic Synthesizer — hence the three ‘Ps’ in its name — dating back to the dawn of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) in 1983, and a Sequential Circuits Prophet VS, famed for being the first to use Vector Synthesis in 1986, allowing users to mix four digital waveforms per voice via a joystick, combining that digital, overtone-rich sound with analogue Curtis filters.

Continues Christian Henson: “We’ve also captured some absolute rarities; I think one of the stars of the show is the [Seventies-vintage] Wersi String Orchestra; I do love this sound, but you do have to hold onto your fillings! I’m transported to a Werner Herzog film with Klaus Kinski, made for 15 Deutschmarks, shot on 16mm — maybe it means nothing for people born after a certain era, but this is the proof that sounds carry an emotive component to them. There’s some Bernie Worrell stuff in there as well. I think the spirit of the Wersi organ very much encapsulates what we were trying to do with the ANALOGUE sounds, whereas we were trying to make the DIGITAL stuff sound just a little bit like it’s a digital synth on its last legs. Where the SAMPLED stuff is concerned, I just love the Mellotron, but it’s a very limited sound bank that’s been knocking around various different sample platforms for decades now, so I saw this as an opportunity to refresh my palette of Mellotron-style sounds, so that’s what I was going for with these resampled sounds. So it is a real string band that we resampled, but they didn’t sound like this does when they played. Play all three categories together and it sounds positively gothic; I didn’t imagine it was going to sound so large, but I’m very pleased with the results.”

Spanning synths to stalwart electric pianos and acoustic instruments, many of the instruments sampled have that all too troubling sound of electronic relics teetering on the brink of failure — a little bit shit, but the good shit, so to speak. “Sampling is like pottery; when you load a thing in a kiln, you never quite know how it’s going to come out.” So says Christian Henson, adding: “And I really didn’t expect the brass part of this synth to be my absolute favourite — particularly the ANALOGUE BRASS.” But The Crow Hill Company’s creative pursuit of shitty sounds or, possibly, sounds that are ‘the shit’ also extended to slavishly wiring up a truly haunting elegiac signal path involving vintage Roberts radios, cassette machines, old channel mixers, and other outboard to give THE SH*T SYNTH users a new, fresh, and original approach to the old, dusty, and long forgotten relics of yesteryear. Yet the love does not stop there, though, with a front-end panel that takes all the hassle of breaking music out of the box. By featuring an innovative approach to side-chain compression, users are able to ‘pump’ any instrument live with their left hand using a series of ‘side-triggers’ that can be quantised and edited just like another MIDI note while adjusting the aggressiveness and strangulation of the sound concerned.

Christian Henson helpfully gives a guided GUI (Graphical User Interface) tour thusly: “The little knob [1] or dial — depending on what part of the world you’re from — is EXPRESSION, so just volume. With the big dial [2], we have LPF / HPF — a low-pass filter/high-pass filter, low-pass being the filter that chops off all the high stuff and allows low stuff to pass through at a frequency that depends on how high or low you’ve set it, and high-pass is the other way round; the reason we put it on the big knob is that I think it’s a really useful form of expression — particularly with very static sounds like that BRASS. Then — number 3 — we have TAPE, which is a tape effect, where the phase flips when you switch it on, but not in a contiguous manner — there’s all sorts of breakups, warbles, and wow-and-flutter. Then we have HAIR [4], which is a phrase I’ve nicked off somebody who worked with Tom Waits, who apparently has a fader on his mixing desk called hair; this gives quite a lot of welly, or a bit of bottom end, so where you’ve got sounds that are lacking in bottom end, it’s really useful as a way of dialling in some lower harmonics, but if you don't like the bottom end that it adds in, or it becomes overwhelming, that’s when you can nudge your filter dial forward into HPF-ville. For SPRING [5], we’ve convolution sampled one of our spring reverb tanks — not sure which one, but whichever one sounded the worst! It adds these incredible harmonics, and the reason why I find those harmonics useful — particularly as they fluctuate like a reverb would — is that a lot of these sounds are very pure sounding, so spring reverb is an excellent way of adding some organic energy, particularly to analogue sources. Saving the most fun bit until last, PUMP [6] is connected to these bottom five S- CHAIN TRIGS keys — five fingers, five notes starting at C; basically, they are a bunch of triggers that you’re never going to hear — different shapes that, instead of coming out of the output, go into a side-chain and that side-chain is fed into a compressor that reacts against those triggers to give you a ‘pumping’ sensation, so what dial number 6 does is control the amount — I guess it’s the threshold — that those triggers ‘pump’ your sound with via their different shapes.”

So is THE SH*T SYNTH truthfully ‘the shit’? Or, as Christian Henson himself semi-seriously infers, “… is it something that you’d close the door behind and warn your flatmates to give it 10 minutes!” It is fair to say that The Crow Hill Company has gone to a sonic place many would not dare to tread… time to wash hands while listeners clean out their ears, even!

THE SH*T SYNTH is available to buy for £29.00 GBP as a sample-based virtual instrument plug-in supporting AAX-, AU-, VST2-, and VST3 formats for macOS 11 through to 15 (Apple Silicon and Intel compatible) and Windows 10 through to 11 directly from The Crow Hill Company here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/tools/the-shit-synth/

For more in-depth information, including some superb-sounding audio demos from The Crow Hill Company co-founder Christian Henson himself, please visit the dedicated THE SH*T SYNTH webpage here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/tools/the-shit-synth/

THE SH*T SYNTH installation and activation requires installation of The Crow Hill App — an easy-to-use app designed by the best in the business to provide seamless download, installation, integration, calibration, and organisation of The Crow Hill Company tools — available for free from here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/crow-hill-app/

Become better acquainted with THE SH*T SYNTH while watching Christian Henson’s highly-illuminating walkthrough video [above]."