July 2024 Eurorack round-up
This month’s best new Eurorack releases include a versatile melody looper from Flame, oscillators from Rides In The Storm and XAOC Devices, plus a hardware version of a legendary distortion from Ohm Force.
Flame Ton
Flame’s Ton arrives as a companion module to the Takt rhythm programmer and Fire drum synth, although it’s a competent standalone module in its own right. Described as a melody looper, it’s essentially a duophonic sequencer and quantiser designed to create melodies up to four bars in length. The fairly simple approach makes the Ton quick and intuitive to use, with the built-in motion/proximity sensor proving particularly effective for controlling pitch.
Real-time manipulation options include transposition, glide and note repeats, allowing you to tweak and reimagine your pattern on the fly, making the Ton lend itself nicely to live performance as well as idea generation in the studio. It’s by no means the fanciest all-rounder of a sequencer, but Flame have created something quite distinct here, capable of sparking new creative ideas and making you approach songwriting in a fresh way.
Rides In The Storm BOC
A strictly old-school purist approach to oscillators here from Rides In The Storm, whose BOC is a discrete, fully analogue VCO/LFO with up to eight simultaneous wave outputs, including four sub-oscillator signals. This is real classic stuff, with pulse width modulation, sync, a built-in wave folder and both linear and exponential FM.
While the BOC doesn’t seek to reinvent the wheel in any particular way, it represents all the best things about vintage analogue oscillators, with a warmth and lushness that gives it a pleasingly bold character. The extensive range of outputs is a particular boon, not just for VCO use but also as a modulation source when set to LFO mode, with precise pitch tracking and stable tuning. Astonishingly good value at just under £150.
XAOC Devices Berlin 1989
XAOC’s Berlin oscillator is vastly different to the BOC. Apparently a relatively simple design with square and sawtooth outputs, the Berlin might look a bit basic, but look past the obvious FM and sync options and what you’ll discover is that the Berlin is designed as part of XAOC’s Leibniz Binary Subsystem; what that means is that the Berlin’s hybrid analogue-digital approach is effectively Fairlight CMI or PPG Wave-style wavetable synthesis, with varying clock frequencies resampling a stored wave. Best used in conjunction with other Leibniz modules such as the Lipsk ‘bit inversion commander’, Rostock ‘binary data pipeline’ and Jena ‘binary transfunctioner’, the Berlin will certainly appeal to more experimental synthesists, but proves capable of some really interesting effects and quite unique sounds.
Ohm Force Ohmicide
Originally released way back in 2007, Ohm Force’s Ohmicide plugin rapidly became something of a cult classic, offering fresh takes on filthy fuzz and overdrive. If you’re worried that porting a famously versatile plugin to Eurorack could end up as a confusing mess, fear not. Cutting to the chase here, the Ohmicide module almost seems better than it has any right to be. The Euro conversion is more simple than the multi-band software version, but still leans into the flexibiility of the plugin in a stereo module packing 111 different distortion modes.
The signal path is clever in its own right, splitting the signal with a crossover so that bass frequencies can pass through untouched, while higher frequencies are fed into a low-pass filter to (optionally) remove harmonics, through a gain stage into the main distortion effect, then another low-pass filter to tame the sound.
Each of 37 distortion types has three different modes or ‘fams’: Standard for the raw algorithm, XXX to add tube amp simulation, and Odd to introduce inharmonic distortions. Bias and Mod controls allow you to adjust the character of each setting, reacting differently for each program. Add in Melohman preset morphing drawn from the plugin, plus clever studio and live modes, and you have one of the most creatively interesting distortion effects on the market.
Greg Scarth