Maybe you don’t need a new synth; maybe you just need your KORG gear to add a magical new oscillator. Sinevibes Flare is here, and it takes all the good stuff in additive synthesis and makes it way more accessible, giving you rich, organic, edgy, and metallic timbres as you desire.
Additive synthesis: your source for perpetually terrible organ / weird bell sounds. Okay – no, it doesn’t have to be like that. Additive synthesis at its core is a simple concept: basically, rather than filter out complex sounds (subtractive synthesis, and even to some extent so-called “West Coast” synthesis), you add partials one at a time to the sound. All sounds can be imagined as some combination of partials, so that concept makes sense. But typically what can go wrong for a user of additive synthesis is, you have too many partials and a bunch of direct control in a way that isn’t particularly intuitive. Filtering out sound we do in the real world all the time – mutes, your hands, your mouth. Adding partials is a bit different.
Artemiy and Sinevibes have made a far more usable, musical take on additive synthesis, thanks to a few design decisions:
- 8 sine wave partials (which is a more manageable number)
- Full aliasing suppression
- Use one of 12 harmonic pitch ratio curves – so you can dial in a timbre right away
- “Variable spectrum trim” – this lets you gradually reduce the amount of additive harmonics, as Artemiy writes, “like an ideal brick-wall low-pass filter.”
- Built-in envelope generator and LFO
- Built-in lag filters for noise-free, smooth parameter adjustment and modulation
So yes, you read that correctly – this is an additive oscillator with easy filtering. It’s like subtractive additive! (The terms honestly don’t matter – this combined with curves = get the timbre you want to hear, faster) That filter works progressively toward the higher frequency range for clean output with no aliasing.
You can use the envelope generator and LFO to modulate pitch, spectral curve, and spectral trim, giving you something uniquely controllable.
And all of this runs on KORG, prologue, the veritable minilogue xd (which SInevibes has turned into the versatile keyboard of the past decade), and the stupidly affordable NTS-1. (Note: for now, that’s only the original NTS-1, not the NTS-1 MKII; they’re different architectures!) There are 20 example presets (preset tables), an extensive PDF manual, and a multi-engine Preset Converter Utility, plus all formats in your purchase.
Demo:
And if you don’t own the requisite KORG hardware, here you go – that minilogue xd now comes in a sexy inverted version (at least on preorder) and a desktop edition without the keys:
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Perfect Circuit:
Minilogue XD Hybrid Keyboard Synthesizer (Inverted)
Minilogue XD Analog / Digital Hybrid Keyboard Synthesizer
Minilogue XD Analog / Digital Hybrid Desktop Synthesizer [no keys]
Sweetwater:
Korg minilogue XD 4-voice Analog Synthesizer – Inverted
Korg minilogue XD 4-voice Analog Synthesizer
Korg minilogue XD 4-voice Analog Synthesizer Module [no keys]
Korg Nu:tekt NTS-1 DIY Synthesizer Kit [note – this is the OG model, not the MKII – so it works with Flare!]
Guitar Center:
KORG minilogue xd Polyphonic Analog Synthesizer Black
KORG minilogue xd Inverted Polyphonic Analog Synthesizer
KORG minilogue xd module Keyboard Voice Expander and Desktop Synth Black
KORG Nu:Tekt NTS-1 Digital DIY Synthesizer [same – MK1!]
Guitar Center also has quite a few used Prologues (they’re now discontinued)
And here, return to the far more innocent days of 2019, and Artemiy’s prescient guest editorial on how great this SDK would become. (I’d say he was right, at least as far as Sinevibes is concerned!)