Intellijel Cascadia: Semi-modular super sonic playground

14 Apr 2023 by Robin Vincent | 3,9 / 5,0 | Approximate reading time: 3 Minutes

Intellijel Cascadia  ·  Source: Intellijel

Intellijel Cascadia  ·  Source: Intellijel

Intellijel Cascadia  ·  Source: Intellijel

Intellijel Cascadia  ·  Source: Intellijel

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Cascadia is an unexpected semi-modular synthesizer from modular makers Intellijel. It has 34 sliders, 16 knobs, 28 switches, 5 buttons and 101 patch points. Let’s get patching.

Cascadia

Intellijel has kept this one nicely under wraps and then chose the chaos of the NAMM weekend to let us know about it without being there. But it could be a perfect time to launch as synth news from NAMM is very thin on the ground. Anyway, it’s a massive, desktop dual-oscillator semi-modular synthesizer with wavefolding, multimode filter, waveform mixing and an insane amount of modulation and utility. But that’s perfectly normal coming from a modular company.

Intellijel Cascadia · Source: Intellijel

It has a complicated-looking front panel. There’s a lot going on and I get the distinct feeling that this is a deep and complex animal that’s going to adore being patched up in interesting ways. It is semi-modular so it will make sound without any patching. The words on a white background by patch sockets display what the normalled internal routing is. When you plug in a patch cable you break and replace that connection. This has an ARP 2600 feel about it but the layout is very unfamiliar.

The facts

So what does it have? At the top you have a MIDI-to-CV section for attaching a MIDI controller keyboard and feeding out pitch, expression, velocity and continuous controls into Eurorack modular signals. At the bottom is VCO B, and alongside going left to right is VCO A. It’s all a bit backward! They are both analogue oscillators and VCO B can also be an LFO. VCO A has some extra features like thru-zero FM, pulse width modulation and hard/soft sync. All hard-wired to VCO B.

Intellijel Cascadia · Source: Intellijel

For modulation, we have two envelopes. Env A is an ADSR with an added Hold control whereas Env B is a complex multimode function generator. It can be an AR envelope, a cycling envelope and LFO or a burst generator.

Then heading up to the top there’s a waveform mixer with two patchable inputs, a Sub-oscillator and Noise generator. The filter has eight modes including low, high, bandpass, notch and Phazor. There are multiple FM inputs for cutoff and resonance and some added drive. Alongside is a West-coast style parallel Wavefolder. After the linear VCA we have the Global Output Mixer with overdrive and bypassable soft clipping.

Phew, that’s a lot! But there’s a whole other row of modular utilities that take this machine right into its modular roots. The Utility Row has Sample & Hold, slew, mixer, attenuverters, triangle LFO, mults, precision adder, inverter, bi-polar/unity shifter, ring modulator and a lowpass gate.

Intellijel Cascadia · Source: Intellijel

And finally, on the back, you have balanced inputs and outputs, MIDI In/Out/Thru and an effects send and return. This is a ridiculously featured machined.

Availability

Cascadia appears to be available now for £2,149 which goes to show exactly how deep and premium this complex semi-modular is. Wow, what a machine.

• Intellijel website.
• More from Intellijel.

Affiliate Links

Intellijel Designs Cascadia No customer rating available yet

2,218.00 € at

Both Divkid and Mylar Melodies have done videos on it and I thought it rude not to include both.

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