Unknown Devices Raiju: Percussive synth sent to bring punishment
Raiju combines a complex digital oscillator, an ADSR envelope and an analogue lowpass gate to produce thunderbolts and lightning in percussive form.
Raiju
Early access preorders have opened on this intriguing percussion synth from Unknown Devices. While we won’t be seeing it until late September you can start anticipating its arrival and get your hands on an exclusive t-shirt.
Unknown Devices says that Raiju is the embodiment of lightning in animal form and that whenever lightning strikes ground a raiju has been sent to bring punishment. That all sounds very dramatic but can the module live up to the hype? Not yet, perhaps. The demo, below, sounds good but I’m not really sensing the drama.
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Features
Back to the facts. Raiju contains a complex triangle core digital oscillator with a 5-stage wavefolder and pitch decay envelope. It has a straightforward stage controllable ADSR envelope with nicely lit sliders. You also have a bit of shape control and a configurable end-of-cycle output. At the top you get an input for the analogue LPG.
It’s not completely clear how these features relate to one another. I’m still trying to find where the digital oscillator’s sound comes from. But I can fathom a guess that the controls for the oscillator are being doubled up on the ADSR sliders via a Shift button. Everything else is presumably triggered from the same Trigger/Gate inputs. There’s talk of a web-based configurator so you set the module up to suit your tastes and way of working. That sounds interesting but also makes you wonder how often you’re going to have to be plugging the module into your computer.
I’m really enjoying the quite mellow and non-painful sounds from the demo video. I wonder when the pain and lightning come in? Let’s hope they can offer us some more demos before release time comes around.
Raiju should be released in late September, preorders are for €230.
- Unknown Devices website.
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