By laying out faders, encoders, displays, and an 8×8 expressive grid, Polyend hopes you’ll play their Medusa’s synths sounds. So here’s some sound of what was going on in my studio.
Here’s a live jam, just getting a bit lost in the Medusa world:
It’s not really a demo so much as me enjoying what the instrument can do. Because they’re new, we rely on musical performance of instruments. But that’s not to say it’s obvious how to do so. We “demo” an instrument – even though we’d never expect to “demo” a violin (not any more, anyway).
A few features stand out to me as useful to play, which you’ll see getting some use:
- Swapping and modulating wavetables: this was recently expanded with a bunch of additional wavetable sources; there’s a particular character to the Medusa offerings that I really enjoy
- Grid Mode: this lets you sequence and even ‘play’ different parameters stored in each individual grid
- Different internal scale modes (no custom scales/tunings or Scala support yet, though there’s a nice scale/mode assortment, and you can set custom tunings in Grid Mode by manually tuning them in)
- Envelopes and modulation: obviously, this adds additional motion in the music; what sets the Medusa apart is on-the-fly assignment, which you can think of as a digital equivalent to patching cables
- FM adjustment – well, just because this can sound wild, as frequency modulation does (both on the filter and oscillators)
- Mixing oscillators: with three digital + three analog + noise source, you can add and subtract layers in the sound via the faders
I also went ahead and added some effects and an extended version of this live set:
The first recording is dry apart from some very very light plate reverb and compression. The SoundCloud upload includes my favorite Eventide effects – Ultratap [multitap delay], Omnipressor [compressor], Blackhole [reverb].
Here’s a more straightforward play with the different oscillators and basic voice structure:
And, of course, be sure to read the full review:
Beneath Polyend Medusa grid and knobs, a wealth of possibilities