Brunswick: an affordable, naked DIY synthesizer from Future Sound Systems
There have been some murmurings about Brunswick for about a week and then it turned up on the Future Sound Systems stand at Synthfest last weekend. Now all the information has been released and it turns out to be a cool little grungy synth available in kit form for a remarkably sensible amount of money.
Brunswick
Originally created for a workshop at the BEEF (Bristol Experimental and Expanded Film) 2018 event and presumably named after the Brunswick Club where they meet. It’s designed to be an affordable, bare-bones synthesizer that can be self-contained for patched into a wider universe.
Brunswick houses a single VCO with sawtooth and square wave outputs. It’s based around the 4046 phase-locked-loop IC, also giving both a PLL and Phase Comparator which are addressable via the rather large 24 point patchbay. It responds to 1V/Octave, has pulse width modulation and two FM inputs. The LFO has both triangle and square outputs. The VCF is a Sallen-Key filter controlled by a pair of opt-FETs with Low, Band and High pass available simultaneously. The VCA has the crunch of all FSS noise boxes and is deliciously dirty in all situations. The envelope features Decay or Attack-Sustain-Decay modes. There’s plenty of opportunity for creating noise and craziness with the Phase Comparators and Phase Locked Loop inputs and outputs. You get the sense that you could probably feed this thing back into itself until it generates a synthesized singularity.
FSS has a few prebuilt ones left for £225 but the wider release will be through Thonk from the 19th October as a kit for a very tempting £99. That’s got to go on your Christmas wish list.
You are currently viewing a placeholder content from SoundCloud. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More information
This might also interest you
