Superbooth 22: Fred’s Lab Manatee: Digital 9-voice spectral machine
5,0 / 5,0 | 
From the laboratories of Fred comes a new digital monster. Manatee is a multi-timbral 9-voice digital spectral machine with bags of personality.
Manatee
This is something to do with old digital machines that found some personality. Inspired by some digital classics (probably a bit FM-y) Manatee is great at producing moody pads, bell-like tones as well as flirting with virtual analogue. It mixes wavetable and unconventional additive synthesis but fusing together a complex procedural spectral source with a real-time re-sampler. Well, that sounds like fun!
Each voice benefits from a self-resonant filter, overdrive, loopable envelopes and an LFO wired to the filter. Manatee can handle three parts at once, each containing a pair of spectral modulators, a resonator, modulated delay, mixing, and arpeggiation.
Fred Lab’s has built the Manatee like a tank. Consequently, it has industrial-grade pots, switches and connectors. The internal technology is a dual-core 16 bit fixed-point DSP running a hand-crafted assembly engine. It has MIDI In/Out, external sync, and a backlit 16×2 LCD display.
Manatee is still under development, and so many things may change. The hope is to release it on Kickstarter soon to take some preorders and get the machine over the final hurdles. There will be an initial run of 150, and the anticipated price is to be around €600.
There will be two machines at Superbooth. They will be auctioned off at the end of the show via eBay. Fred will be on booth Z251 if you want to go and check it out.
