"The bassline from @nineinchnails The Becoming has always haunted me. Originally done on a borrowed 'OberMoog' prototype [matrix note: see prior posts here], the original synth underwent massive engineering changes, management, and versioning until it finally became the OB-Mx, which was a "better" synth, but didn't quite sound the same. I know this, because I owned an OB-Mx.
Anyways, our Ober-Moog VST gets pretty close, and goes beyond. Plus, it's got 500+ presets, an EZ button for randomization, and Hand Of God for impossible automated modulation. Available now at store.denversynth.com
How close does this get?
I guess only TR can say for sure.
The synth that wasn't.
A 1:1 recreation of the Oberheim OB-Mx panel, voiced as the ‘Ober-Moog’ — the pre-production prototype Trent Reznor borrowed from Richard Bugg and used for the bassline of Nine Inch Nails’ The Becoming. Never officially released, barely documented, and rebuilt here from every source that exists, contested claims included.
- Full OB-Mx architecture: dual VCO per voice, MM-VCF and SEM-VCF in series or parallel, four-stage envelopes with free-run and repeat
- Voiced specifically as the Ober-Moog prototype, not a stock OB-Mx — the one unit with its own name, its own history, and no official spec sheet
- Unison/spread/detune matching the OB-Mx's card-based voice architecture, mono or up to full polyphony
- Modulation matrix covering breath, pressure, velocity, note number, wheel, and pedal across twelve assignable destinations
- Built from every documented source on the instrument, with the honest gaps left as gaps rather than guessed at
EZ button gets you into a usable patch in seconds; the panel underneath goes as deep as the original hardware did
"In this video, I explore the Beetlecrab Vector, vector synthesis and why this unusual synth is so interesting for industrial music and sound design. From the Prophet VS and Korg Wavestation to Trent Reznor, Skinny Puppy, and Front 242, we’ll look at the history of Vector Synthesis and see what makes the Vector such a different way to create sounds. If you’re into synthesizers, industrial music, experimental sound design and weird synths...this one’s for you!"
"This is the first preset/patch I have made on the Whimsical Raps - Atrium, and it was made in the first hour or so of getting it home.
I wanted to show it here, as I feel like a lot of the stuff I've heard online so far is in the pretty/beautiful category. But the Form engine in particular is wonderfully chaotic and capable of getting into much gnarlier territory. The patch itself tonally reminds me of some of the feedback patches i've done with the Serge.
Many many thank yous to Trent + Dani and everyone at Whimsical Raps. Atrium is incredibly inspiring, immediate and interactive. A true musical instrument.
Lightly processed in Ableton with delay from Echoboy."
five voices of analogue synthesis, controlled and modulated polytimbrally. we’ve taken ideas from our decade of modular exploration, and rethought how we reach into polyphony.
each voice is shaped by its harmonic energy while three core timbre modes push into richer territory. from simple suboctave and noise waves, through frequency modulation, and landing in formant synthesis reimagined. all squeezed through a lowpass/gate combination, providing balance and occasionally emphasis.
no digital multi-effects here, just spectres in the machine. a novel configuration of three filters, two delays, and feedback. front and almost centre — this resonant body is meant to be played. sequenceable, modulatable, while feeding back not just sound, but shape for unfolding cybernetics.
and to modulate! everything mappable to everything else, tactile input extended on the fly, mapping as a performance in itself. sources are dynamically phased across voices, and stretched in relative duration. gestures captured into five recorders, extending play rather than overriding it, all twisted in time at your whim.
Atrium is deeply learnable, and for those moments of quick change, instantly recallable. extensible with usb and midi and cv input.
//
a series of improvisations, exploring but a few edges of this new instrument.
performed by Trent Gill recorded by Dani Derks projections from Sean Hellfritsch"
"Ever wondered what a Jupiter-4 sounds like through a Ring Modulator and a Spring Reverb?
Well I did and made some cool, fun sounds ranging from subtle to outrageous.
The Roland Jupiter-4 is connected to a Warm Audio Ringer Bringer, an Echo Fix Spring Reverb and that passes through a Franklin Audio DI-20 before hitting my Universal Audio Apollo Twin.
This video is part of my Sunday Sessions Series where I create improvised Jams that will form the basis for future tracks."
This appears to be the first post to feature the Warm Audio Ringer Bringer. Some info below.
"REVIVING AN AVANT-GARDE PEDAL FOR MUSIC’S TRAILBLAZERS
From light Lo-Fi modulation all the way to the piercing sound of infinity ring-modulation, the Warm Audio RingerBringer accurately recreates the ultimate all-analog ring modulation effect used for experimental tones. Like the original, loved by artists like Jeff Beck, Radiohead, Omar Rodríguez-López, Trent Reznor, and many more, RingerBringer delivers the original distinct set of controls, extensive in/out options, and rich sonic textures to inspire boundless sonic experimentation.
DON’T JUST PLAY, CREATE
The ideal platform for the sonic tinkerer, RingerBringer inspires you to generate layered frequencies and harmonics, explore a wide range of sonic possibilities for guitar, bass, synthesizers & beyond, and design your own sounds from the ground up. Extensive controls including LFO, MOD, FREQ (FREQUENCY) & RATE open up sonic possibilities that range from subtle overdriven textures all the way to wobbling, warped leads soaked in texture and tone. RingerBringer is 100% analog and sports premium components including hand-selected op-amps and transistors. RingerBringer is no emulation or 'patch', instead it delivers true-to-spec performance of the boutique, analog original."
"During the Digiscore Workshop at the Central Conservatory of Music, where I was invited by Professor Ken Fields, I engaged in a conversation with everyone about musical scores and instruments. We explored the relationship between musical instruments and people, as well as the dual-natured thinking that Trent and I condensed in our musical instrument work, "Horizon." The students at the Conservatory posed many constructive questions, and I truly enjoyed the intellectual exchange with everyone. Here is the lecture transcript, and I hope it is useful to many others."
"A stroll through the new SIlhouette module, describing functionality & the use cases that I've had in mind while creating the module. A little bit of description of some technical details, and other novelty items.
Preceded by a 20ish minute performance trying to dig into the radical timbral transformations possible with the module, driven by a pair of simple arpeggios."
"Trent of Whimsical Raps gives us a tour of the Horizon, a collaboration between Whimsical Raps and Meng Qi. It has an intriguing interface and contains a wide variety of features including arpeggiators, pinged filters, resonant filter banks, and delays."
ContinuuCon Electronic Music Conference Scheduled for Paris, IRCAM
ContinuuCon 2025, the seventh international Haken Continuum Conference, is returning to France in March 26–28. This year’s event will take place in Paris, and will be hosted by the IRCAM Forum. It will be fully integrated in the IRCAM event with a room dedicated to ContinuuCon every morning.
Musicians, sound designers, software developers, and music enthusiasts are invited to explore the world’s most uniquely expressive electronic musical instruments through presentations, performances, and hands-on experiences. As always, ContinuuCon will focus on every instrument that features the Haken Continuum’s internal sound engine the EaganMatrix, including the Continuum Fingerboard, ContinuuMini, EaganMatrix Module for Eurorack, and Expressive E Osmose synthesizer.
ContinuuCon 2025 will also include a ContinuuCon Dinner (date still to be defined). Over these 3 days, Continuum inventor and EaganMatrix developers Lippold Haken, Edmund Eagan and Christophe Duquesne will join other authorities and some of the world’s most skilful Continuum players to share their expertise and technical knowledge. The integration in the IRCAM Forum will allow attendees to also benefit all the other conferences of the Forum to discover or go into IRCAM ‘s sonic research world in depth.
Haken Continuum players include film composer A.R. Rahman (who participated in last year’s ContinuuCon), Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor, and The Who’s Pete Townshend, who said, “I absolutely adore it. The Continuum is already inspiring me to new ideas.” You may also hear the Continuum featured in the scores to Game of Thrones, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and the recent Dune: Part Two.
"The 2023 redesign of MANGROVE brought a full rework of the module, introducing a number of new integrated circuits. While most behavior stays the same as the original design, there are some notable differences which are all outlined in its web documentation ( https://www.whimsicalraps.com/pages/s... ).
This video focuses on the accompanying module, PPM, which breaks out many of MANGROVE's internal signals & connections to patch points, so you can reconfigure MANGROVE into a wide range of complex oscillators.
00:00 intro
01:03 new core outputs: PWM, SAW and SINE
03:04 mode switch
06:13 TRIGGER input
07:50 TO AIR input
09:35 HOLLOW output
11:27 HOLLOW and AIR
12:52 outro"
"GForce’s M-Tron Pro IV delves into the iconic Mellotron M400, a tape-based keyboard famous for its use in recordings by renowned artists like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, Oasis, Trent Reznor, Trentemøller, AIR, Nils Frahm, and many others. Its distinct sounds are widely utilised in genres such as progressive rock and indie rock but also lo-fi and hip hop.
Find out more: www.gforcesoftware.com/products/m-tron-pro-iv/
"At Superbooth 2024, Sonic State got a sneak peek at the Horizon*, a new collaborative instrument by *Trent from Timeless Garden *and the developer of the Wing Pinger. The Horizon* features a resonator system built around the Wing Pinger device, with delays, a filter bank, and a touch sequencer/play surface to tie it all together. The unique design of the Horizon allows for exploration and inspiration, offering both melodic and experimental sound possibilities.
Trent demonstrated the capabilities of the Horizon, showcasing its ability to create strange and interesting sounds through feedback, FM modulation, and stepped modulation effects. The touch sequencer enables users to create melodies with variable step lengths and pitch quantization controlled by sliders. With analog signal processing and rich bucket brigade delay sound, the Horizon offers a unique sonic experience for musicians looking to push the boundaries of traditional synthesis. Stay tuned for the release of the Horizon in 2024, with an estimated price range between one and two thousand US dollars. For more information on the Horizon visit the link below:
"Horizon celebrates a world of ambiguous dualities~~ harmony/chaos, smooth/stepped, intuitive/practiced, manual/automatic. Built around an invertible heirarchy of pinged-filter cores, and a resonant garden of delays and filters. A rapid and responsive playing surface, smoothly blurring between textures or precisely sculpting a spectral landscape. Honed musicians and freeform experimentalists alike will find their own personal expressions within.
At centre, two Mountains of pinged filters, cross-coupled with smooth and stepped frequency modulation. These pings flow into a resonant filterbank and stereo delays, guided and recirculated by Tide sliders. The filterbank follows the path of 5 Bird sliders, collecting resonances from a playful just-intoned scale generator. Between these worlds flow Currents controlled by the touch surface, capable of wrangling chaos into pure tones or latching into sequences for otherwise busy hands. As the Tides ebb and flow, sequence & delay times are modulated in rhythmic/harmonic steps transforming relationships and shifting priorities.
Sitting proudly at the centre of a performance, or nestled into a larger setup with Eurorack CV i/o. Process external sounds, or use global feedback for an added layer of unpredictability."
Sequential Circuits Prophet VS – All the Best Sounds
Here's a very cool keyboard from Sequential. Notice the joystick for controlling your sound modeling.
The Prophet VS uses Vector Synthesis as its revolutionary new means of sound creation. It uses a total of four oscillators per voice with 127 waveforms (32 user) and dynamic waveform crossfading via the joystick. This was Sequential's first digital synth, and it was also their final synth unfortunately. But after Sequential was gone, Vector Synthesis technology went into the popular Korg Wavestation and Yamaha's SY-22 and TG-33.
The Prophet VS is still a very sought after instrument because it has an incredible range of sounds! Its only problem is that there's practically nobody left that can fix it if something went wrong. It is used by Brian Eno, Trent Reznor, Apollo 440, Depeche Mode, Vince Clarke, Kraftwerk, Vangelis, Erasure and filmmaker/composer John Carpenter."
"Here's the Swarmatron and its creators Brian and Leon Dewan, talking to Detroit Public TV about 10 years ago.
I posted about the Swarmatron about a year ago. It's an analogue synth that creates a tone using eight oscillators all playing slightly different frequencies. The pitch is controlled with a ribbon at the front. The difference between the 8 oscillators is controlled with a span control, from tightly aligned to woozily detuned. It's designed to produce a sort of cacophony, almost like multiple voices singing at once.
It's best known for its use by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor on their soundtrack to "The Social Network", which won an Oscar and changed a lot of minds about the sort of movies that could use electronic scores.
Leon and Brian Dewan are cousins and together they run Dewanatron, which makes a family of instruments like the Swarmatron, the Novitiate – a one-off they made for the Bob Moog Foundation. Their instruments are unique, expensive, beautiful and very unusual. In the video you see another of their machines, which has two keyboards that face each other so two people play it at the same time.
I also found some great footage of the Novitiate they made for the Bob Moog Foundation on the YouTube channel AutomaticGainsay, which is a great resource for synth reviews and videos. I've posted more videos of the Swarmatron, the Novitiate and other Dewanatron instruments on my YouTube and on the subscriber section of this channel.
The Dewans, whose family is originally from Syria, spoke to a Detroit Public TV show about Arab Americans."
These became really popular after this video of Trent Reznor using a similar instrument by Folktek [posted here] I'd say you can get the same sort of results from the Resonant Garden as Trent is getting in this video.
Disclaimer: I have used this instrument and while I thought it was very cool I didn't really understand it. From what I can tell, it works as intended, but it basically makes strange and unpredictable sounds so I can't say if it is working 'right'. I doubt it's very complex internally so if there was a problem it wouldnt take much to tweak it. I don't think there is anything wrong with it, its just that since it's basically a chaos device I can't vouch for what it's supposed to do."
Here it is. The OB-X8 Desktop Module. Be sure to click the pics for the full size shots.
Press release follows:
Oberheim Announces OB-X8 Desktop Analog Synth Module Fits Perfectly into Your Studio, Your Music, Your Life
San Francisco, CA — Oberheim today announced the much-anticipated desktop version of their highly acclaimed OB-X8 eight-voice analog synthesizer, which faithfully recreates sounds from the classic Oberheim OB-X, OB-Xa and OB-8 synthesizers of the eighties. And now all its presets, synthesis features, and sound editing controls are available in a compact package that fits everyone’s creative space.
“The original OB synths were jam-packed with components and took up a lot of space. There was no way you could contemplate getting even a four-voice version of that sound out of a desktop or rack-mount unit,” mused Tom Oberheim. “Well, here we are in 2023: eight voices of our amazing OB-X8 three-in-one synthesizer now comes in a size that fits your studio.”
The new OB-X8 desktop version does not include the 61-note Fatar keyboard and expression levers found in the original, but don’t let that stop you from experiencing all the sonic power of these monster synths in a footprint that’s compact enough for studios of any size, and convenient enough to take on the road.
Just like the keyboard version, the desktop OB-X8 boasts an identical sound engine, featuring an all-analog signal path with discrete VCOs, VCAs, and filters. And it still manages to provide the same knob-per-function front panel sound designing experience, with immediate access to virtually all the synth’s parameters.
“Bringing back the Oberheim brand has been a joy,” said David Gibbons, CEO. “And since the introduction of the OB-X8 keyboard in May 2022, we’ve heard an overwhelming desire for a desktop module version catering to those whose free studio space doesn’t quite match their enthusiasm for unique synth sounds.”
In the hands of such luminaries as Prince, Van Halen, and Herbie Hancock, Oberheim synths were more than just instruments, they provided the soundtrack of an era. Now a whole new generation of artists are discovering their voices through OB-X8. “When I was shown the new OB-X8, I was immediately impressed with the forensic level of detail that went into its design and the respect for its lineage,” said Trent Reznor, the creative force behind Nine Inch Nails, and an Academy Award-winning composer. “I’m excited more people will be able to experience this classic instrument.”
OB-X8 desktop module weighs approximately 9 lbs. 9 oz. (4.34 kg) and measures 22.00” L x 8.50” W x 4” H (55.88 cm x 21.59 cm x 10.16 cm).
The OB-X8 desktop module is available for pre-order now, with a US MAP price of $3,499. Shipping worldwide in June.
For more information about the OB-X8 desktop module, visit us at:
"In this tutorial, take a tour through MiniFreak's features, hidden talents, and wild sounds, as Matt Pike gives you the lowdown on the 6-voice hybrid #polysynth that's out to break all the rules.
_CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
01:03 Presets Playing
02:27 Oscillators
03:40 Virtual Analog Engine
04:41 FM Engine
05:50 FM Modulation
07:04 Analog Filter
07:35 Modulation Matrix
10:13 Digital Effects
12:02 Sliders
13:30 Sequencer & Arpeggiator
14:51 Sound Edit & Utilities"
Arturia MiniFreak: 5 things you need to know (+ no-talking sound demo)
video upload by MusicRadar Tech
Review: Arturia MiniFreak // vs MicroFreak // Everything covered, including almost all 256 presets
"Today's the day for the big Arturia announcements - and the one we have most experience of is the new MiniFreak which is an expanded MicroFreak - (the Algorithmic Synthesizer with multiple oscillator types).
The MiniFreak doubles up the Oscillators to two - with 20 oscillator types on board, keeps the multi-mode analog filter and adds 3, quality, digital FX. It also has a physical 37 key keybed (short travel) with aftertouch. There's two control strips which can do pitch/mod or macro 1/2, each with four destinations or a sequencer/gate control for the on board sequencer.
It also comes with a free VST version MiniFreak V
We fully confess that we didn't get the time to do the full review in time for this deadline, but first impressions are pretty positive."
"first time performing with the arturia minifreak. this is the patch 'Trent's Pno' I made for the factory presets. this is also the last patch in my current house, as i will be moving. see you in november!"
@Arturia MiniFreak Introduction, Unboxing & Demo | No Talking
video upload by DKS SYNTH LAB
Arturia expands wild hybrid synth range with 6-voice MiniFreak
MiniFreak is a polyphonic hybrid keyboard that combines two digital sound engines with warm analog filters, playful modulation, spontaneous sequencing, and rich stereo effects for sounds that are immediately curious, beautiful, and chaotic in equal measure.
Hybrid polysynth power
MiniFreak’s twin digital sound engines feature over 20 modes, and can be used individually, stacked, or to process each other’s output for unique compound sonic behavior. Its digital voices then collide with analog filters, balancing digital crispness with a rich analog response, complete with 6-voice polyphony, 12-voice paraphony, monophonic, and unison configurations.
Customizable & experimental sound design
MiniFreak’s expanded modulation matrix gives users even more control over shaping, transforming, and evolving their sound, with features like polyphonic ADSR envelopes, customizable multi-segment LFO shapes, FM & Ring Modulation, and the familiar Spice & Dice randomization.
Mix-ready stereo sound
With stereo outputs and 3 digital FX slots with 10 FX types to choose from, users will have everything they need to push their sound over the edge while keeping it mix-ready, from stereo-enhancing chorus, to surgical 3-band EQ, to gritty distortion.
Expression, meet chaos
Despite its penchant for wild & exploratory sound design, MiniFreak is an instrument of expression. Its velocity-sensitive 37-note keybed with aftertouch and spontaneous Seq/Arp functionality makes it a dream to perform with, while its randomization features put playfulness first.
MiniFreak V
MiniFreak comes with a dedicated VST counterpart, letting users totally integrate its unique hybrid sound and presets into their DAW productions and vice versa. Using identical sound engines, modeled filters, presets, and totally synchronized controls, users can enjoy an identical experience in hardware or software form.
