Getting hands-on with Dreadbox’s new 6-voice synth was a clear Superbooth highlight. Artemis is one instrument that combines 6-voice polyphonic analog with Sinevibes digital effects. But it wasn’t just my hands on it; we’ve got Sinevibes’ Artemiy playing this for us, too. And there’s more to this one than just the sum of its parts.
Afroditi Bitzouni, Dreadbox Creative Director, did all this exquisite creative work including the illustrations. And they’re so beautiful. I wanted to choose that image for a reason; the spirit of a synth is more than just a box and some knobs and faders. She found some inner soul in this machine in her designs.
On its own, combining analog synthesis and digital effects isn’t necessarily a clear win. There was the risk of just getting a neat analog synth with some digital effects tacked on – not bad, but not any different than what you’d get from just adding an effects unit to your synth of choice.
Artemis was different, though, Artemiy Pavlov of Sinevibes tells us. (There is reportedly no connection in the names.) Each preset, says Artemiy, was conceived with effects and synth in tandem. That meant a ton of back and forth between the voicing of the synth and the setup of the effects.
Here he is showing it to us:
It’s a combination that feels more tightly integrated here than on any past Dreadbox effort; it feels like this is what they were working toward. In my brief time with it, Artemis was just such a joy to play. It had the sense of what you’d get from a favorite rig, but combined into a single box. It’s not hard to imagine this being something you’d use to compose an entire film score. The time you’d normally spend cognitively switching from one device to another just moves seamlessly between tweaking the synth voices and effects. Checking the panel, it’s also nicely set up, with distortion, mod, delay, reverse, and sequence effects arrayed across the five faders on the right. They’re familiar Sinevibes effects, to be sure, but combined with all the precise details of the Dreadbox analog synth, everything comes alive.
And the architecture is deep.
Synth:
- 2x VCO with 3 waves, continuously variable waveshaping
- Hard sync
- Through-zero FM
- sub oscillator
- white noise
- Low pass (12/24dB) and high pass (12 db) filters with filter FM (via both VCO2 and noise)
- 2x ADSR envelopes
- 2x LFOs per voice, 8 waveforms, sync and cross-mod
- OTA-based VCAs, variable stereo panning
- Arpeggiator/ polyphonicsequencer with 6 modes and probability
And then you get into the effects. There’s more in there than you might imagine:
Distortion: Exponential, Parabolic, Sine Clip, S-Curve, Soft Clip, Hard Clip, Tri Clip, Tri Fold, Single Fold, Multi Fold, Sine Bend, Sine Fold, Sine Shred, Bin Shred, Sym Warp
Modulation: Chorus, Ensemble, Tape Chorus, BBD Chorus, Flanger, BBD Flanger, Thru-Zero Flanger, Phaser, Barber-Pole Phaser, Double Notch, Pitch Shifter.
Delay: Stereo, Ping-Pong, BBD Delay, Random Repeater.
Reverb: Small Reverb, Large Reverb, Huge Reverb, Cloud Reverb, Shimmer Reverb.
Combine that with full ranges of parameters. With all those choices, you can see how the presets become useful starting points for exploration. They give you useful pairings from which you can play.
More sounds – but really, it was a different experience getting to play it even for a few moments, even in a trade show hall where I usually hate touching anything. It’s something special.
It has all the personality, all the sonic worlds to get lost in that I appreciated so much about the original Dreadbox-Polyend Medusa collaboration. But it’s so much more refined, navigable, and discoverable; it’s clear Dreadbox has learned a lot since then, and the Sinevibes connection fits perfectly.
Available now. I don’t want one for review; I’ll just come to Greece and try it there.