Midweek Modular: Alia Oscillators, Mega Utils, Big Waves and an Atlas
3,6 / 5,0 | 
This week’s Midweek Modular finds new Alia firmware, gets into Mega Milton, enjoys The Wave Transformer and gets interpolated filtering with Atlas.
In the build-up to NAMM we’ve seen a few pre-show releases that were worth highlighting. Firstly, the humungous Erica Synths battle station Eurorack wall of modular case thing. Erica is calling it the Megarack, and I’m pretty sure it would be on everyone’s aspirational wish list. It’s the sort of thing you could build a studio around. Read more about it here.
Secondly, STG Soundlabs/muSonics have had it with all this Eurorack nonsense and have released a new “Vanilla” modular synth in the American format, also known as 5U Moog Units. It looks and sounds wonderfully vintage and has some useful rear patching and normalisation. Read more about it here.
Korg has had a heck of a week, but it rounded things off with the stunning reissue of the PS-3300. It’s an extremely rare synth from the 1970s with three oscillators per note, giving it a polyphony of 49 voices. It’s an amazing thing to bring back, and I’m sure the price will bring some tears to your eyes. Read more about it here.
And then, slightly out of left field, comes Gamechanger Audio with the MOD series of effects pedals that include a little patch bay. The pedals extract voltage from the incoming volume and pitch to modulate other parameters. It’s a brilliant way to get external effects interested in your modular. Read more about them here.
Midweek Modular
So, in the moment of calm we have before NAMM brings the storm of wild gear coverage, here are a few choice bits of modular to look out for.
Noise Engineering Incus, Cursus and Ataraxic Iteritas Alia
A trio of new firmware for Noise Engineering’s 10HP Alia oscillator platform. Ataraxic and Cursus are reworkings of previous modules, whereas Incus brings a new twist to the table.
Ataraxic Iteritas Alia is a digital oscillator inspired by the last millennium and based on the Ataraxic Translatron. It all starts with some shaped waveforms that get their interpolation scrolled before being amplitude-modulated, folded and distorted. It’s very modulatable and can have the waveform held via a button. It has a separate out for the sub-oscillator which is something the original never had.
Cursus Iteritas Alia is a dynamically generated wavetable oscillator. You have spectral-like controls over three different wavetable generating modes, including Fourier sine waves, Daubechies wavelets, and Walsh transforms.
Incus Iteritas Alia is an FM percussion and instrument voice. It uses a combination of waveshaping, saturation, folding, FM and additive synthesis to generate wildly metallic tones.
All the firmwares are interchangeable, so you only have to buy one to get access to all six of the current Alia range.
ALM Busy Circuits Mega Milton
It’s a smorgasbord, a Swiss army knife, a Rolodex, a sushi conveyor belt of analogue utilities smashed into a single 8HP module.
Contained within its field of patch sockets are a stereo line level adjuster, a four-channel mixer, a slew limiter, Sample & Hold, a white noise generator and an illuminated buffered multiple. Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of normalisation going on to minimise the complexity of patching. Or you can simply patch into the bits you want to use.
It’s the sort of module that’s useful in any patch.
EarthQuaker Devices The Wave Transformer
If you are looking for a nice, fat and vintage-sounding oscillator, then The Wave Transformer could be for you. It’s good over eight octaves and can generate seven simultaneous waveforms, including a pulse and square sub, plus an intriguing “complex” output.
The big “Transform” knob morphs through basic waveforms into an increasingly complex bed of harmonic textures. Further adventures can be found through Hard and Soft sync and Linear and Exponential FM inputs. The Transform control will also work on external signals, and you can even mute the input and use it as a harmonic gate and VCA.
There’s lots to explore in here.
Vostok Instruments Atlas
I was able to get a look at this at Bristronica last year, along with a whole series of very cool-looking multi-channel modules from Vostok Instruments.
Atlas is a four-channel multimode filter. It can be a compact collection of independent filters that you can patch all sorts of things to. Or it can be a filter bank with an interpolating morphing scanner, which lets you smooth your way from filter to filter. You can, of course, daisy chain through lowpass, highpass or bandpass filters or ping them for bits of percussive excitement.
So, by themselves or as a gang, you’ve got some impressive tonal possibilities dancing around in here.
- Vostok Instruments website.
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