New Spectralis SoundBank - Analog Modulars 2010

This weekend I created my first soundbanks for the Spectralis II. Big deal right? What's significant about this is that I've finally come full circle to how I got started with synthesizers in the first place. The Spectralis was my first really serious synth. In hindsight it wasn't a great first choice since the depth of the machine requires someone who actually knows something about subtractive synthesis to get the most out of it. So I was pretty lost for a good long while. But some knowledge did trickle in and I read a lot of books, played around with other simpler synths, both hardware and software. I got involved with the monome and writing software and doing all sorts of other audio projects. The Spectralis languished.

During this time, I started building an analog modular synth and that was definitely the best learning experience I could ever have regarding subtractive synthesizers. Even though you can't save patches on the modular I did start getting in the habit of sampling patches that I liked before I tore them down. Fast forward a year and there is a growing list of sampled analog modular patches sitting here.

So to close the circle, I've gone back to the Spectralis which has suddenly opened up to me with my new found education. What was incomprehensible now makes perfect sense and I see the logic of this powerful machine.

The Spectralis has its own wonderful Analog/Hybrid voice (digital OSCs, true analog filters) which sounds as good as any modular on its own. This sample pack is not for that voice. This pack is for the three additional polyphonic digital synth voices that the Spectralis also packs inside it. These voices require a sampled audio source as raw material to work with. After that, you can adjust envelopes, filters, LFOs, pitch envelopes, pan, fx and many other parameters to sculpt the sound. Because these voices are digital, they can sound digital if the audio sources underneath are too predicable. Enter the modular.

This sample set is 400mb of analog oscillations that are raw and harmonically rich and unpredictable. Feeding these into the digital sections of the Specki give me a lot of raw analog clay to mold for additional voices. Notes may beat subtly out of perfect tune in a chord. Some patches are inharmonic or have large timbre changes across their range.

I quite like this idea and think this will be the first of more Soundbanks to get produced this way.

Its an almost 300mb download. If you have a Spectralis, you can get it here.

Analog Modulars 2010 - Spectralis Soundbank


Analog Modulars 2010 by bar|none is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.