Exodus Digital Valkyrie multi-timbral synthesizer to debut at Musikmesse 2018

07 Apr 2018 by Robin Vincent | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

Exodus Digital Valkyrie · Source: Exodus Digital

Exodus Digital Valkyrie · Source: Synthanatomy

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New British synthesizer makers Exodus Digital Ltd are so new they don’t have a website yet and are currently operating out of their SoundCloud page. It’s a novel approach but one where sound examples of their debut Valkyrie Synthesizer are front and centre. And wow, this thing is a tour-de-force.

Valkyrie

It’s an 8-part multi-timbral multi-core digital hardware synthesizer which in our current climate of modular and analogue is not something you see every day. They’ve decided that DSP is a bit passe and have designed and built their own hardware and operating system.

Exodus says that Valkyrie will always deliver 128 voices of polyphony. The sounds are sourced from 2 groups of 5 oscillators per voice giving a total of 1280 actual oscillators. There are two PCM wavetables with 4,096 waves ready to go all with hard sync, ring modulation and FM. On the sound processing side there are dual analogue modelled ladder filters, a modulation matrix, three envelope generators, three stereo LFO’s with 64 (!) shapes an arpeggiator and a “killer stereo hypersaw”.

It has 8 parts in terms of synthesis but an extra 9th part is dedicated to effects. Valkyrie has a shed-load including limiters, EQ, formant filter, distortion, delay, 6-stage phaser and a reverb. And it’s all in 96kHz.

Connections

Coming out the back are 4 balanced stereo 32bit 96kHz outputs. Over USB it can route all 8 parts in stereo at 48kHz or 96kHz and comes with low latency ASIO drivers and fully implemented MIDI.

Desktop sound house

Unlike its namesake, the Valkyrie Synthesizer is not so impressive on the eyes, at least in the images we have so far. There are some older images knocking around (do a Google image search) when they were planning to release it 2 years ago and these actually looked a lot better. It seems that they’ve had to enlarge it and that’s rather ruined the lines. It’s not exactly ugly but it’s also not particularly cool looking. The OLED screen looks nice and it’s great to see so many hands-on controls. There’s probably a lot going on in the box and so it’ll be interesting to see how well the workflow translates to the user interface.

Looking forward to hearing more about it at Musikmesse next week. They do need to sort themselves out a bit. Give us a website with useful pictures and information would be good – maybe a video? But in the meantime check out the sound demos and feel free to be impressed.