The Roland Miniature Collection Will Put an 808 in Your Pocket: Synth Journal
The best of the rest of this week’s synth news!
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Get small with tiny toy versions of the Jupiter-X, TR-808, and others in the Roland Miniature Collection. This and more in this week’s Synth Journal.
Synth Journal
Roland Miniature Collection
If you’ve been to Japan lately, you’ve probably noticed clusters of oversized gumball machines full of plastic capsules stuffed with tiny toys. Put in your money, turn the crank, and out comes one of usually four or five tchotchkes. Which one will you get? Not knowing is part of the fun. They’re called gachapon in Japanese, although we mostly just say gacha gacha. (“Gacha” is the sound of the crank turning, and “pon” is the capsule popping out of the chute.) They’re incredibly popular now, with all kinds of toys inside ranging from anime characters to cute little animals. They also like to make reproductions of consumer goods like food, stereo equipment, and sometimes even musical instruments. That’s where the Roland Miniature Collection comes in.
Recently announced, the Roland Miniature Collection contains four diminutive versions of Roland products, including the Jupiter-X synthesizer, JC-120 and Blues Cube Artist 212 guitar amps, and TR-808 drum machine. They look just like the real thing, only tiny. The 808 is only around 4 cm across. That is small indeed.
So how can you get ahold of one (or all!) of the Roland Miniature Collection? The items are currently available for pre-order on the Bandai site (link below). It’s all in Japanese, so you’ll need a robust translation app. And keep in mind that the site is also like a gacha machine – you don’t know which one you’ll get until it arrives in the mail. If you’d rather buy one from a machine, they’ll hit the streets of Japan in late November, which is presumably when pre-orders will start shipping too. Of course, if you can’t make it to Japan, you’ll want to look online for resellers. Many will sell all four in a single set, if that’s what you’re after.
If you’d rather have the real thing, some of the products represented in the Roland Miniature Collection are available at Thomann*.
Gene Synths Polygene II
Here’s something you don’t see every day. An inside-out synthesizer. This is Polygene II, a 24-voice polyphonic analog synthesizer from musician and developer LA Priest and his company Gene Synths, and pretty much everything on it is conductive. “Touching any part of the synthesizer bridges connections in the circuitry and creates a unique sound,” says the developer. Get in touch, why don’t you?
Polygene II contains two halves. One is inspired by the kinds of all-transistor analog synths of the early days like the Moog Minimoog and EMS Synthi, while the other half employs analog chips to generate customizable waveforms. There are two keyboard areas, one for each half, with the top one having 24 pressure-sensitive polyphonic pads and at the bottom, a 24-note keyboard for triggering “more familiar polyphonic synthesizer voices.” It’s got 12 tunable oscillators plus 12 harmonic subs, eight wave-shaping controls, 24 envelope generators with separate release control for each octave of the keyboard, a unique resonant transistor filter, and more.
Polygene II is very unusual but also very cool, and it sounds beautiful. Gene Synths is now taking pre-orders at a special introductory price of £959.
Conductive Labs The NDLR Rev2 Release 3 Firmware Update
You may remember Conductive Labs from its MRCC MIDI Router Control Center. The company also makes The NDLR Rev2, a four-track MIDI interval sequencer, and the company has just released a new firmware update.
Release 3 adds a whole clutch of new functionality to the sequencer, including a Euclidean Rhythm Mode for the Motif Rhythm Editor, Motif pattern step modulation, Motif gate length control, more global patch save slots, new mod matrix destinations, and more.
If you own a (the?) The NDLR Rev2, get thee to the Conductive Labs site and download the update forthwith. If you don’t own one yet, Conductive Labs The NDLR Rev2 is available at Thomann*.
Intellijel MEMS Mic
You’ve probably got a lot of different types of modules in your Eurorack rig, like oscillators, filters, wild modulators, and sequencers. But do you have a smartphone microphone? Probably not. I’ll bet since I said that you want one now. Well, you’re in luck, as Intellijel has just released MEMS Mic, a 2HP microphone module.
MEMS stands for Micro Electro Mechanical System, and this is the kind of tiny microphone you often find in devices like smartphones and tablets. Intellijel had the bright idea to put one in a Eurorack module. These mini mics have a very flat response across a large frequency range (around 6Hz to 20kHz), “which makes them excellent for musical applications,” according to the company.
Why not pick one up while you’re waiting for the company to release its much-anticipated Jellymix Mixer? The Intellijel MEMS Mix is available at Thomann*.
Adamstan JX-2044 Prototype
Lastly, this cool analog polysynth prototype has been making the rounds lately. Called JX-2044 from developer Adamstan, it combines the DCO section of Roland’s JX-8P with a 2044 filter.
According to Adamstan’s post on Gearspace, it’s an eight-voice bitimbral synth with two DCOs (with additional PWM), cross mod, three ADSR envelopes, three LFOs per voice, a 4-pole resonant filter, filter FM, and a 1-pole non-resonant highpass filter inspired by the one on the JX-3P. It also has a digital effects section with a resonant filterbank, chorus, a four-stage phaser, and delay/reverb.
The synth is currently in the protoype stage, but the developer is hoping to eventually make it available as a 5U rackable desktop module.
If you can’t wait, Roland’s all-digital JX-08 is available at Thomann*.
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