GLX BALSAM #1 | Winterdagen

video upload by Winterdagen

"Welcome BALSAM!

The first time I heard about BALSAM was when I was writing a review for a blog about an amazing record by an artist called Chorusing. On that record I heard absolutely gorgeous, slowly drifting synth tones, which I later found out had been made with the artist's home-built synthesiser, beautifully named BALSAM.

A little later (I think), I found out that the synth was being further developed for release, and I came across its website, which featured the most beautiful music. The warm tones, slowly gliding from note to note and moving through the stereo field, were absolutely mesmerising. I kept coming back to the website just to listen to this gorgeous music. That was the moment it became a dream of mine to play this synth, if it were ever actually released.

Fast forward a year or four, and here it is! I'm so happy to have this synth in my studio. It's been a constant source of inspiration from the moment I took it out of the box.

In a nutshell, BALSAM is an eight-voice hybrid synth (VA with analogue VCAs and an analogue stereo filter at the end of the signal chain), with eight buttons and sliders instead of a keyboard. You pick a tuning from eight banks of tunings and use the buttons to trigger the voices. The real superpower lies in the sliders and a unique feature called viscosity. Each voice is assigned a pair of notes, and the sliders let you glide between them. Viscosity acts a bit like a slew limiter, slowing down the movement of the sliders. What makes it truly special is that you can set different viscosity amounts for each of BALSAM's two oscillators, making them glide to their new notes at different rates. Hearing BALSAM slowly detune and gradually find its way back to target notes and intervals is unlike anything I've experienced with any other synth.

BALSAM's the perfect combination of familiar subtractive synthesis - so familiar that you don't even need presets - and a truly unique way of triggering and gliding between notes.

This first piece is full of slowly drifting sawtooth pads with stacked fifths in the oscillators, along with some LFO movement on the filters that speeds up over time because the LFO rate is controlled by the modulation envelope.

There's a lot more to explore with BALSAM, including its second superpower, which turns the sliders into an amazing polyrhythmic sequencer. I'll definitely be exploring that in future videos.

Find out more about BALSAM at: https://glx.ltd/"

Also see: Introducing the GLX BALSAM 8-VOICE MODAL SYNTHESIZER