GLX BALSAM #4 | Winterdagen

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"New one on the super special GLX BALSAM synthesizer. With its unconventional slider interface, as opposed to a keyboard, this synth lends itself so wel for ambient explorations!

I absolutely love turning BALSAM on and completely forgetting about the concept of time. Playing this beautiful synth really is a meditative experience."

GLX BALSAM & piano | solar eclipse improv | Winterdagen

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"An improvised piece of synthesizer & piano music recorded during today’s solar eclipse ❤️"

GLX BALSAM #2 | Winterdagen

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"Here's another on on the amazing GLX BALSAM! This dark and moody patch and the note glides somehow remind me of Mica Levi's score for Under the Skin which is a very very good thing :-)

I love that BALSAM has a dedicated bipolar slider to route the mod envelope to the LFO time. In this case it makes the LFO - which is modulating the filter - start very fast and slow down over time. I'm using the 2-pole lowpass filter here, I absolutely love its character. It leaves in a little more high frequencies than a 4-pole filter, making the patch sound nice and buzzy. I've quite heavily detuned the oscillators from each other and I'm again using BALSAM's special power viscosity to make each oscillator glide to the next note at its own rate when using the pitch sliders. This makes the sound feel so alive!

I did use some external fx in this piece, Strymon El Capistan and Nightsky. BALSAM sounds gorgeous completely dry as well, but I love a little space in a piece like this one.

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

See the GLX label below for additional posts.

GLX BALSAM #1 | Winterdagen

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"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

Genki Instruments Katla #8 (MPE update!) | Winterdagen

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"Can a perfect synthesizer be made any better? Well yes, apparently it can :) The amazing people at Genki Instruments just made Katla even more expressive by adding MPE capabilities in a firmware update.

I have to say I always thought MPE was a bit gimmicky. I even had a Roli Seaboard Rise in my studio which I'd never properly used. The new Katla update was the perfect reason to change that. And oh boy have I missing out! I absolutely love being able to slide between notes and add expression with pressure and slides. I thought it'd be too complicated to play, but it actually really isn't.

It seems the team at Genki Instruments have hit a home run again. Without any real setup I got the MPE controller hooked up, and in no time I came up with this patch, which feels so expressive to play! I'm looking forward to exploring more MPE patches on Katla ❤️

A second batch of Katlas is available now at https://genki.is/"

Dreadbox Artemis #3 | Winterdagen

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"New one on the Dreadbox Artemis synthesizer! As I've said before I'm a huge sucker for sawtooth lfos plucking filters, so I naturally had to make one of these patches on Artemis. Artemis absolutely delivers, I think it sounds beautiful. For this patch I've been making extensive use of the new mod matrix, which was recently added in a feature update. I love adding movement all over the place and spreading lfo times per voice by adding keytracking.

For this patch I'm also modulating the filter with noise, which gives the patch some lovely grit, and I'm modulating the bitrate of the bitcrusher, which ads some digital texture from time to time. I also love that you have a dedicated slider for reverb size, which detunes the reverb when you move it.

Hope you like the patch!"

Morphor ECHON 6 #5 | Winterdagen

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"Time for a new one on on the beautiful ECHON 6! I got some questions on if ECHON 6 can do 'regular' synth sounds as well, it sure can:)

One of the many cool things about ECHON 6 is that its exciter section on its own is already a very nice sounding single oscillator poly synth, with morphable waveforms on its fat sounding oscillators. And you can use all of ECHON's extensive modulation capabilities for sound design as well. The only thing missing would be filter resonance, but to be honest I'm usually not a big fan of filter resonance anyway.

The real fun naturally starts when you start combining the exciter's synth voice with the resonator section, which is exactly what I did here. In this case the resonator ads a bit of a chewy sound, which I really like."

Dreadbox Artemis #2 | Winterdagen

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"A brassy melody on the lovely Dreadbox Artemis synthesizer.

When I make a simple patch like the one here, I can really hear if I like a synth or not, and oh boy do I like the Artemis. For this patch I've made use of the lovely internal large reverb and BBD delay algorithms by Sinevibes, and towards the end the piece I slowly fade in the detuned second oscillator. I noticed I really love detuning the oscillators from each other on Artemis, which is not something I like doing on every synth, but on Artemis it just sounds sooo good!"

Part 1 here

Morphor ECHON 6 & Erica Synths Hexdrums | Winterdagen

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"What a magical combination! The other day I tried to run my current favourite drum machine the Erica Synths Hexdrums trough the audio input of the Morphor ECHON 6 and I was blown away by the result.

In this piece, Hexdrums is being used as an exciter for ECHON's six analogue BBD resonators, which are playing a chord progression coming via a midi cable from Ableton Live. I'm using both the knobs on Hexdrums as well as ECHON 6 to create movement and build-ups, and in the second build-up I'm also feeding in some of ECHON's amazing noise generator. Such an amazing sound!"

Dreadbox Artemis #1 | Winterdagen

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"I'm a huge fan of Dreadbox synths, and lately I've been lucky enough to get my hands on their newest poly synth Artemis, which just got a really great update. To me, Artemis feels a bit like the best of their Murmux Adept and Typhon combined, but with its own character and unique synthesis possibilities.

For this droney piece, I used lots of the amazing (and newly updated) Sinevibes effects, mainly the super lush reverbs and BBD Playground. Both pretty heavily modulated, which adds to the detuned character of this patch.

Artemis is another incredible synth from Dreadbox and I cant wait to show you more patches and pieces I've been making with it!"

Morphor ECHON 6 #4 | Winterdagen

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"New one on the amazing ECHON 6 :)! This piece starts with a gentle sine wave melody, before I slowly introduce the resonator section. I love synths that have extensive control over the envelope times and shapes and ECHON 6 does exactly that, you can chose 3 different modes for the envelopes, making sure you can make from very plucky sounds to long evolving ones. I love the click in this sound and it sounds great with the resonator section as well.

In the buildup of the piece I introduce some noise into the resonator, you can downsample the noise, and feeding that into the resonator reminds me of one of my favourite synth plugins, Tela from Fors. I never thought I'd be able to make those kind of sounds on an analogue hardware synth, but here we are!

This is such a rewarding synth to play around with, every time I find new sounds and new ways to combine the exciter and resonator sections. Hats off to Morphor!"

Genki Instruments Katla #7 | Winterdagen

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"I'm a huge fan of sawtooth lfos on the filter cutoff. Sometimes for proper rhythmic stuff, sometimes for more freely timed plucks like in this patch.

On Katla it's so easy to add some extra movement to otherwise simply repeating lfo modulation! I turned up the keytracking a bit on the lfos, making each note have their own lfo speed, and I've routed the envelope to the lfo speeds making them go faster as the pad swells in. It's so easy to dial in sounds like this on Katla because every modulation destination has its own bipolar slider, and keytracking has dedicated knobs per parameter you can apply it to. To top the patch off I added a healthy dose of Katla's incredible reverb and added some Katla modulation params."

Morphor ECHON 6 #3 | Winterdagen

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"Huge congratulations to Morphor for having their ECHON 6 win the Innovation Award from Sonic State during Superbooth last week! It's such a special synth and it fully deserves the recognition ❤️

Time for another patch! For this one I made use of ECHON 6's looping envelopes and I dialed in a lot of movement in the mod matrix. One of the four polyphonic lfos is changing the decay times of the envelopes per voice. The decay times, lfo speeds and lfos that I routed to panning are keytracked, which results in unique rhythms and stereo movement for each voice. Sounds quite complex, but it really is so easy to dial in modulation like this on the super intuitive mod matrix.

Hope you like the patch and the music!"

Morphor ECHON 6 #2 | Winterdagen

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"This is one of the most beautiful synth sounds I've ever heard.

For this patch on the amazing ECHON 6 synthesizer by Morphor, I'm not using its exciter/synth section at all. The sound comes from its 6 BBD delay lines feedbacking indefinitely. The fact that the people at Morphor got to make BBD delay chips track pitch this well is already wild, but how they also managed to implement the super special glide you're hearing in this patch is beyond me. It sounds so alive!

I made use of ECHON 6's super intuitive and extensive mod section to give this patch some movement; with some LFOs I'm slowly opening and closing the filter in the feedback path and moving the voices in the stereo field. I applied keytracking to the LFO speeds making sure that each voice has different movements and a different place in the stereo field. I love that you can route keytracking to anything on ECHON 6.

I did use a fair bit of Valhalla Vintage Verb for this patch as the synth doesn't have an internal reverb. A gliding patch like this really benefits from some time based effects.

Every time I sit down with ECHON 6 for a bit, a new sound that I've never made on any other synth arises, it's so cool! I've made a lot more music with it and I'm super exited to show you.

I'm off to Superbooth now, I''ll be back with a new video next week! If you happen to be at Superbooth as well and want to say hi, feel free to shoot me a message on Instagram."

Genki Instruments Katla #6 | Winterdagen

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"With a sound like this, melodies just come pouring out! ❤️ The movement in this patch comes from routing the LFO to the phase distortion, which sounds different than modulating the filter. So many on panel options to create moving and characterful sounds! I named this little piece 'Closing Credits', hope you like it."

Morphor ECHON 6 #1 | Winterdagen

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"I feel like I'm in synth heaven these days. I was lucky enough to get my hands on the new ECHON 6 from Morphor, which is a gorgeous sounding, super unique synth: a 6 voice polyphonic analogue BBD resonator synthesizer. Yep, that's quite the mouth full. In a nutshell it's one part analogue poly synth, one part analogue BBD chip physical modeling synth.

I've been a big fan of physical modeling kind of synths for some time, and Morphor's take on this concept is the most special one I've come across so far. I know this type of synthesis mostly from either quite complex plugins, or Eurorack stuff such as Rings and Surface. Morphor has managed to take this concept into an analogue desktop format and it's super special. In this little sketch I'm exploring quite typical karplus-strong like plucks, but feeding in some sine wave oscillator, having full ADSR control over the the exciter, and having BBD chips as resonators, makes for a super expressive sound.

Apart from its amazing sound, ECHON 6 is also beautifully built. One of the most sturdy, smooth and well built synths I have ever come across. One of its superpowers is that it also has an absolutely amazing and intuitive modulation section, which I'll tell you more about in some following videos (I've been making a lot!). Thanks so much for letting me explore this beauty, Morphor!

Find out more about ECHON 6 at: https://echon6.com/"

Genki Instruments Katla #5 | Winterdagen

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"Time for a new video on the mighty Genki Instruments Katla lava synthesizer! While last rays of a setting sun were hitting my living room window, I was playing around with Katla's stereo CMOS distortion, and this beautiful gloomy pad emerged. You can drive Katla in no less than four different places. This took a little getting used to for me, but it makes for a super flexible synth engine. I've never heard internal drive sound this good on a synthesizer.

As always, thanks for having me Genki! I'm not getting payed to say nice things about Katla, and I think its beautiful sound speaks for itself:)"

Genki Instruments Katla #4 | Winterdagen

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I can't get enough of these kind of gentle key patches on the Katla synthesizer! For this patch I used a similar approach to the previous one, using the self oscillating filter as a sound source. But this time I played with modulating the wave folder, which at times in the piece almost feels like an extra melody coming in. I also once again tuned one of the voices an octave higher than the other ones, for unpredictable octave jumps in the melody, I just love that so much on Katla! For the next patch I'll try a more distorted one, promise."

See the Genki label below for additional posts.

Genki Instruments Katla #3 | Winterdagen

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"Time to put Katla through the arp test! Feeding Katla some arpeggiated chords, does it sound full enough? Are the envelopes plucky enough? Is it easy to keep interest up while playing with the synth parameters? I'd say absolutely, but you can judge for yourself!

I love the fact that Katla's envelopes can be both super slow as wel as super plucky. And Katla's super lush reverb really steals the show here:)"

Genki Instruments Katla #2 | Winterdagen

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"Here's another patch on the gorgeous ‪@genkiinstruments‬ Katla synthesizer.

For this keys patch I made use of Katla's voice rotation, with one of 5 voices tuned an octave higher than the rest, resulting in unpredictable pitch jumps in the melody, which I love. I didn't make use of Katla's oscillators for this patch, in stead the sound is coming from the filter with the resonance fully up, which tracks pitch very nicely when tuned with the simple calibration mode of holding down the two filter mode knobs.

I'm a big fan of these singing filter sine waves, which always feel a tiny bit unstable which makes them sound magical. To top it off I'm modulating the panning of the voices, I blended in some of Katla's lovely noise for some warble and I added some of the amazing internal reverb, which reminds me a bit of my Vongon Ultrasheer. I love this sound so much and I've never heard any other synth make it quite like this!

You don't see me playing the keys in the video, but I played this patch for hours, instant inspiration really. This melody is came out of that improvisation.

Thank you for watching!

ps. sine waves generally don't translate all that well on phone/laptop speakers, so speakers/earbuds/headphones advised.

Katla is shipping as of this week, find more info at: https://genki.is/"