Future Sound Systems FIL4 Timbral Sculptor: Folds, filters and fiddles
5,0 / 5,0 | 
The FIL4 Timbral Sculptor is a playground of harmonic alteration that pulls in filters, wave folding, rectifying and a VCA to take care of a large chunk of tonal fiddling.
FIL4 Timbral Sculptor
Stick in an oscillator or a number of oscillators, and FIL4 will take care of the rest. With the filter and VCA, it can act as a full synth voice, and then it has this whole section of waveform transforming shenanigans to give it some bite.
The filter has low, high and bandpass modes and is a -18dB/octave three-pole design. Future Sound Systems says that it can act cleanly with hardly any distortion but I’m not sure I believe them. Under normal conditions, it will self-oscillate when the resonance is pushed and has that TB-303 habit of accenting the resonance at higher cut-offs. This righteous side of the filter is all dependent on not engaging the rectifier or wavefolder in the resonance path. Turn those babies on and you have a very different monster.
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You can control both resonance and cut-off with CV, and you have an Audio FM control to flood the filter with audio rate modulation from its own input. I think that perhaps it’s the Lockhard wavefolder and rectifier network that’s wired into the resonance path that really brings the thunder to this module.
Getting Timbral
While the filter section is classic subtractive synthesis, the Timbral section comes after the more “West Coast” deadband wavefolder design. You can switch it to be pre or post filter. It’s more about additive synthesis where more and more harmonics are being produced as you lean into the Timbral section. This is all about the Drive knob.
Divkid has released a demo video (below) that takes you through the whole gamut of sounds and possibilities. And very quickly, you get into the nuttiness of the wave folded resonance. It sounds completely brilliant. But it’s also capable of fabulous nuance and tonal explorations, so it’s not just about bringing the pain. FIL4 really is a sculptor of timbrals.
- Future Sound Systems website.
- More from Future Sound Systems.
- Module on Modular Grid.
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