Beast-Tek Plutonium-239 Hyper Fist apocalyptic VCO
Beast-Tek Plutonium-239 Hyper Fist VCO · Source: Beast-Tek
Beast-Tek Plutonium-239 Hyper Fist VCO · Source: Error Instruments
That’s quite a collection of visceral, thought provoking words that gives you some insight into the character of this oscillator. It certainly looks toxic and is the sort of module that’ll make your brain bleed. The Plutonium-239 Hyper Fist VCO will melt your modular.
Plutonium-239 Hyper Fist VCO
They are calling it a post-apocalyptic wavetable VCO. While it can do all the usual wavetable type sounds it also has a resonant lo-fi feedback delay circuit that lends itself to spacey, glitchy drones and general weirdness. It has a clock input to produce amplitude modulation effects or slower percussive adventures.
The wavetable is formed of 8bit “grain table” sounds, with a switchable sample rate of 31kHz or 10.5kHz.
The RADS knob and the cool LED display are all about the bank and patch/waveform selection. There seem to be 15 banks with 10 patches in each, but it’s not entirely clear from the documentation. The first bank of drones is easy enough. |Then there are 2 banks of “Rotating/animated waveshaper”, followed by 4 banks of “Single Glitch”, 4 of “Alias VCO” and 4 of “Double Glitch”. The first two digits on the display show the bank, the last digit shows the selected waveform number.
There’s a load of sonic possibilities in these wavetable banks. This is not about beauty or subtlety, this is face melting abusive noise that the Hyper Fist smashes into your kidneys.
The Fist and Mod knobs do different things depending on what’s loaded. In drone mode the Mod may affect the pitch of the second oscillator and Fist may change the wave fold speed. Waveshaper mode has the Mod changing the wave shape while Fist determines the speed of rotation. In glitch mode the Mod selects the glitch while the Fist mixes the wet and dry sound. The Quantum button tends to switch in distortion or delay. I think it’s best if you mess with it to find out. Frequency, Mod and Fist are all CV controllable.
It looks amazing and sounds suitably nasty. You’ll find some cool demos on their Facebook page.
The Plutonium-239 Hyper Fist VCO is available now for $250. More information on the Beast-Tek website.
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