Roundup - Christmas Eve Eve Special 2022

Festive Greetings Dear Readers!  It's Christmas Eve Eve (so the day before the night before Chirstmas) so unless you do something pretty drastic to affect your yearly Naughty/Nice balance then by now you should have a good idea if you are getting that five thousand pound Moog Vocoder that you've been lusting after all year or, if you were a bit Naughty,  maybe just a Doepfer 3hp Blanking Panel.  It's not over until the fat guy comes down the chimney as the old saying goes so fingers crossed and we'll see how it goes on Sunday.

It's been a fairly tough year here at Signal Sounds - Royal Mail strikes, Courier meltdowns, COVID, Brexit, massive supply chain issues but we're all still alive and kicking and bugging out on weird synths and stuff and we hope you all are too.

Next mail-out will be in 2023 (!) so have a great Christmas, New Year and general pagan festivities and we'll see you all then.

PEACE!

The Torso T-1 is superb stand alone Euclidian sequencer with MIDI and CV/Gate out with an incredible "hands on", playable feel.  It looks very simple on the surface but has some very neat ideas up it's sleeve including Ableton Link which gives you adjustable sync and clock over Wi-Fi and a ton of randomisation and real time performance abilities.

Torq did a nice pre-Xmas double whammy by dropping the price £50 and they dropped the new V2 software update adding per-step parameter changes (similar to Elektron gear) and new MIDI FX .  Double Drop action!
 

Other new features in firmware 2.0

• Quick view when changing parameters (optional)
• Internal track routing (route one track to another)
• Brand-new and improved random modulation behaviors
• Stepped to slew possibilities on the random modulation
• Free division (non-quantized divisions per track)
• Cycle looping
• CC track updates (includes slew and step edit) 
• Playable keyboard in the PITCH menu
• Multi-channel tracks

We've just had the last delivery of the limited edition of the Korg re-issue of the Arp 2600M.  It comes in a very fancy ARP suitcase with wheels (which you could easily repurpose as an actual suitcase so you can be the biggest Synth Nerd EVER at the airport when you next go on holiday.  Not that us Synth Nerds ever go on holiday because we've always blown the budget on another bloody synth).

It also comes with a Korg Keystep MIDI controller which plugs straight into the 2600's USB Host port, not a computer in site.

The Z-DSP is TipTop's hugely powerful voltage controlled digital effects system with a wide range of expansion cards.  They've just updated it with a swanky new Black panel and released the FSU (Fuck's Shit Up) Card Bundle and the True Stereo Bundle.  Other cards to check are the Halls of Valhalla,  Mariana Trench and Time Domain, all top notch stuff

Woooo!  All metal limited edition Tracker SE from Polyend.  Tracker is a superb modern implementation of the original Tracker style sequencers that ran on the early generation of home PC's.  It plays WAV files but also has a built in Wavetable and Granular synth AND an FM radio for some on the fly sampling. 

There's only a few hundred of these bering made so don't miss out.

SonicWare have been kicking about for a few years now with various Kickstarter projects but they really seem to be hitting their stride now and have a bunch of interesting new releases coming up.  This is an excellent desktop sampler and sequencer with an obvious nod to the 80's giants of sampling, E-Mu and Akai.  It's a 12 bit machine with a deliberately lo-fi approach.  Built in speaker and battery capabilities make it a supremely portable music making machine.

f your company is called Steady State Fate and you were going to release a Low Pass Gate module what would you call it?  Steady Gate Fate?  Nope.  Low Pass State Fate?  Nope.

How about Steady State Gate?   

Bingo!

In a similar space to the legendary Natural Gate from Rabid Elephant, this modules takes various circuits and melds them together in a precise way to emulate all the good bits of Vactrol based Low Pass Gates (a certain "musicality" in their response and some unpredictability) but with more reliability, control adn availability.