November 2022 Eurorack module round-up
This month’s best new Eurorack releases include very different oscillators from Make Noise and Morphos, a versatile formant filter from Noise Lab and Andrew Huang’s new collaboration with Endorphin.es.
Make Noise XPO
Pretty much anywhere you look in Make Noise’s module catalogue you’ll find a classic. The North Carolina brand’s impact on Eurorack has been immeasurable, with genre-defining releases like the Maths and Morphagene helping to forge a reputation for innovative, engaging modules. The XPO is the latest offering, described as a stereo ‘prismatic’ VCO, although the product description and manual don’t really make clear what this means. A recent video on the brand’s YouTube channel explains that the term is used here as an analogy for the way light is refracted through a prism, with the XPO allowing you to mimic that process with sound, ‘refracting’ it by manipulating frequency, timbre and space. The way this is implemented proves typically unorthodox; the XPO appears quite conventional at first, but there are important little details which make it much more powerful than it seems.
There are five mono outputs (sine, triangle, saw, spike and sub) plus three stereo pairs (PWM, Vari-Timbre and wavefolding), the latter three of which can be manipulated using a Center combo control, left and right-hand Modulate knobs and accompanying CV inputs. What quickly becomes apparent is that there’s a huge amount to explore here. The PWM outputs are the most straightforward, but Vari-Timbre does Buchla-style continuous sine-to-saw crossfading as well as blending in the triangle wave, while Wavefolding mode gives you control of shape and fold point as well as the degree of folding. The result, with the Modulate controls working in stereo, is a module that can create width as well as harmonic interest in a unique way. The XPO is designed to work alongside the brand’s QPAS filter, Mimeophon delay and X-PAN panning mixer, forming the basis of a fully stereo signal chain from oscillator onwards. In practice, it’s interesting even if used in mono, but if you’re set up for stereo it’s even better.
Norand Morphos
Norand’s Morphos VCO is also a dual analogue oscillator, but it couldn’t be much more different to the XPO. Instead of stereo signals, the objectives here are complex modulation, thru-zero FM and dynamic movement in the form of 3D morphing between multiple presets. We’ve seen a few different takes on the complex oscillator concept recently, but Norand have pulled it off very well here, particularly given that the morphing features add an extra layer of, er, complexity. Each oscillator has a touch-sensitive preset strip which allows you to morph the sound across three axes. With so much inherent harmonic variety available from cross-modulating the two oscillators, you can find yourself creating huge shifts in sound as you morph, but you can also do much more subtle things by setting up quite similar presets and modulating between them. Compared to other complex oscillators like the Cosmotronic Vortex and Patching Panda Operat, the Morphos offers quite a different experience, but it’s all very neatly designed and well thought out, with backlit controls changing colours to reflect the active mode. A potentially confusing concept, but executed very well.
Noise Lab Formantic
Combining two resonant 12dB/oct band-pass filters with a single resonant 24dB/oct low-pass filter, Noise Lab’s Formantic is all about creating those classic vowel sounds you’d expect from vintage formant filters. There’s plenty of versatility thanks to two separate inputs, one which runs through all the filters and one which only hits the low-pass. You can also run the filter sections in parallel or series, allowing you to get subtle as well as extreme effects. You’ve got CV control over nearly everything, but it’s the joystick which provides the most immediate fun, allowing you to control the cutoff frequencies of the two bandpass filters. In fact, the level of control over the cutoff frequencies proves particularly useful when you dig deeper, with a master cutoff control affecting all three filters, allowing you to set up a starting frequency with the individual controls, modulate via CV and tweak manually simultaneously. Fun, distinctive and very useable.
Endorphin.es Ghost
A collaboration with YouTuber Andrew Huang, and it’s essentially a digital multi-effects module, although the way it’s designed makes it feel like an interesting cross between Eurorack and old-school dedicated rack effects units. You’ve got a mixture of delay, reverb, filter and distortion plus compression with sidechain ducking, all crammed into 16hp. The separate sections can be chained in different ways by pressing the Routing button, shuffling the FX (delay/reverb), distortion and VCF, giving you plenty of scope to get creative and explore the contrasting sounds of different routings.
The Ghost has clearly been developed with creativity in mind, functioning either as an effect to slot onto the end of a signal chain or as a synth voice in its own right thanks to the ability to perform Karplus-Strong synthesis and generate sound using the filtered delay line. Sonically, it’s relatively basic in terms of the depth you can dig into with each effect, but the objective here is to tick all the boxes, not to offer the most complex version of each separate processor. The downside of all these features crammed into one module is that the controls are a little cramped. Maybe not an issue for those with smaller fingers, but larger digits may struggle to tweak the filter cutoff frequency without knocking some of the nearby knobs. Ultimately, though, it’s probably not a dealbreaker. Overall, it’s a solid all-rounder.
Greg Scarth