Noise Lab Formantic: Voltage controlled formant filter
4,8 / 5,0 | 
Looking fabulous in those Noise Lab colours the Formantic is a control-laden formant filter with bags of room for versatile filtering and expression.
Formantic
Formant filters can be a bit of an acquired taste. The idea is that you use a bank of bandpass filters to simulate the vowel sounds humans make with their mouths. Is that something we want? Apparently, yes, it is and is, in fact, something to get excited about.
Formantic combines two resonant 12dB bandpass filters with a single resonant 24db low pass filter. Each filter has its own resonance and frequency cutoff controls for dialling in your ideal sound. When pushed, all of them will self-oscillate in alarming ways giving you another source of sound in your rack. What stands out, of course, is the little mini joystick.
Control
You can control both bandpass filters with the joystick. The X-axis controls the second band pass filter, and the Y-axis controls the first. That’s going to give you a lot of expressive control over the sort of sound emerging from the outputs. There are two outputs. The main output contains everything the module has to offer and there’s also an output containing the signal from the bandpass filters, bypassing the lowpass filter.
CV control is available over most things, and they are normalled, giving you control over all the filters with a single modulation input if you wish. Similarly, there’s a big fat master cutoff knob to give you full macro control of the cutoff. Formantic has two inputs and an intriguing selectable signal path.
Formantic is about to be released, although Noise Lab has not set a price at the time of writing. But it looks like a solid, interesting filter that’ll bring some human vibes to your modular musings.
- Noise Lab website
- Formantic entry on ModularGrid.
- More from Noise Lab.
It was seen in the wild at Superbooth a couple of months ago and you’ll find a demo in the video below.
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