Midweek Modular: Matriarch update, Space FX and Phaze 4 Daze
4,2 / 5,0 | 
This week Matriarch gets an update, Behringer might ship an FX module, Blue Lantern has a bunch of crazy stuff and Rides in the Storm has a VCF/VCA.
Midweek Modular
Here are the bits and pieces of modular that caught my eye this week.
Moog Matriarch update
Moog’s four-voice paraphonic modular instrument got an update. The Matriarch is such an analogue presenting machine that you tend to forget that there are microcontrollers inside that dictate how the circuitry holds together.
Moog Matriarch · Source: Moog
The V1.30 firmware comes with a few bug fixes and enhancements. A few highlights are that the pitch wheel now sends CV information to the KB CV Out. The KB Gate Out now follows the MULTI TRIG selection. The keyboard controller and expression functions have been overhauled and properly translated to the relevant CV outputs. And MIDI velocity curves have been added.
For a full list of changes, visit the Moog website, where you’ll also find a nice new updater app that makes the updating procedure nice and smooth.
Behringer Ships the Space FX
We are seeing a lot of photos of Behringer products sitting on green anti-static testing mats, along with a post saying that they are just about ready to ship. But it’s been a couple of years since anything actually materialised. However, the latest product that’s promising to ship is the Space FX Eurorack module.
Behringer Space FX · Source: Behringer
We first heard about it a year ago when it was ready to ship pending a few chips. It’s based on Klark Teknik 24-bit DSP technology and offers 32 effects. It has a nice display, a very useful On/Off button and absolutely no CV control of any kind, which is a shame.
At $49 it’s a stunningly good value way of adding effects to your Eurorack, provided you’re happy to set it and forget about it and don’t care if it syncs to your patch.
Blue Lantern Modules
This week has three new modules from Blue Lantern, including the FM Sinus Lab, the Phaze 4 Daze, and the CSR-VCO.
FM Sinus Lab is a phase modulation through-zero wavefolder. What you do is put a triangle or sine wave into the top and then modulate the heck out of it with an alternative waveform patched into the middle. You can adjust the phase of both waveforms, giving you phase distortion. Then at the bottom, you have this huge 14-stage wavefolder. Each section has an internal VCA so you can modulate with envelopes and such like. Blue Lanterns says that there’s nothing quite like it, and “You can easily create Mega Drive FM Big Boss sound effects”. Cool!
Blue Lantern Modules · Source: Blue Lantern
Phaze 4 Daze is an impressive-looking analogue phaser effect based on the 1978 Farfisa Polychrome Phaser. It has a voltage-controllable LFO with a Sinus Spike specific to the phaser design.
CSR-VCO is a weird shift-register noise and triangle core synthesizer built into a module. It’s analogue and somehow manages to come up with arcade-style, chiptune and crazy pulse-wave sounds. All it needs is pitch and a trigger, and you are off.
While they are fascinating to look at and interesting to read about we really need some videos!
- Blue Lantern website.
Rise in the Storm SED
Finally, we have SED. SED is a solid three-channel mixer, VCA and VCF, with overdrive and a resonance boost. It’s built from high-end discrete components and offers lots of modulation. The CV input on the cutoff has an attenuator, and you’ve also got a linear FM input with amount control.
The mixer routes into the filter and then has its own output. The VCA can be treated entirely separately with its own Input, Ouput and CV control.
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- Rides In The Storm website.
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2 responses to “Midweek Modular: Matriarch update, Space FX and Phaze 4 Daze”
No shame! The Behringer reverb module cost 50 bucks. And in this case it stands alone. It does not really need cv connections, but it is a nice small Handy Module for fx. You can carry easy to anywhere. So where is the shame 🤦
$49 for an FX module, wow, but it’s really just a guitar pedal with no CV inputs! Behringer doesn’t understand modular.