Cre8audio East Beast: East Coast style analogue semi-modular
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Cre8audio East Beast · Source: Cre8audio
Cre8audio East Beast · Source: Cre8audio
Cre8audio East Beast · Source: Cre8audio
Cre8audio East Beast · Source: Cre8audio
Cre8audio emerge from the woods with a funky little synthesizer. East Beast is fully analogue, full of beans and likes to growl at the moon – grrrr.
East Beast
What’s this? Cre8audio has moved out of its modular lane into the world of desktop synthesizers? That’s crazy, or, perhaps genius depending on your point of view. What’s certain is that East Beast is a firey and fun looking semi-modular centred around the gooey PGH Filter from Pittsburgh Modular.
East Beast embodies all the good stuff about East Coast subtractive synthesis in a simple and surprising box of squelch. The single oscillator sports four waveforms, glide, FM and pulse width modulation. It’s a 100% modern analogue VCO built on 10 years of Pittsburgh Modular R&D. The PGH Filter is also the result of years of development to come up with something that is smooth all the way through and devoid of dead spots. Cre8audio like to think of it as having one massive sweet spot all the way around. It’s also multimode with low, high and bandpass options.
Cre8audio East Beast
In terms of modulation, you have a single ADSR envelope which is hardwired to the VCA for level control and can also be directed to the filter cutoff. The single LFO is hard wired to the FM input on the VCO and has a couple of ranges from really long to audio rate for all sorts of weirdness.
On the right is a patch bay where you can start poking the Beast in unexpected places. This also gives access to a bit of MIDI control. The East Beast can be broken free of its plastic case and dropped into 42HP of Eurorack modular.
Behind the buttons
That’s the basics of the synthesizer behaviour but East Beast has a few more tricks up its sleeve. I’m sure you’ve noticed the little 1-octave button keyboard – yes you can play the synth. But the buttons also double up as function buttons that unearth all sorts of interesting things.
Cre8audio East Beast
The oscillator has 4 waveforms that can be used in all sorts of combinations including one where they go mad and produce noise. An alternative mode switches to a random waveform for each note or sequenced step. That’s just so much fun to play with. The envelope can be set to retrigger or the Gate can be set to Hold for droning sounds. A Multi-Function Generator offers 4 modes of digitally generated modulation. You can switch it to respond to MIDI CC, push out a triangle LFO, Random voltage or a Decay envelope.
East Beast also features a 32 step sequencer and arpeggiator. It has various modes including a randomising of the sequence. It takes this a bit further with the Random Note Pattern Generator which comes up with a continually morphing selection of patterns. You can save up to 13 patterns for later recall.
Availability
The East Beast is a lot of fun and not anywhere near as beastly as they’d have you believe. It should be available by the end of May for a not unreasonable price of around £215. Cre8audio and Pittsburgh Modular will be on booth Z390 at Superbooth.
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- Cre8audio East Beast: Cre8audio
- Cre8audio East Beast: Cre8audio
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