Building the Oscillatron

Building a three voice analog synth beast in Eurorack...

A while back I bough a Pittsburgh Modular Taiga desktop and placed it in my desk Eurorack setup.

It’s an excellent and highly dynamic synth but the timbre of it just didn’t really work for me, I just felt it lacked the kind of warmth and character needed for IHF tracks, and so it mostly just sat there looking cool for months.

Sorry Taiga…

A few months back it occurred to me I could recreate something like the Taiga from different synth modules and oscillators. I’d just bought a Dreadbox Hades as a bass synth (as since selling my Behringer Neutron nothing I had really been able to get the low end punch I needed) and decided to use that as a foundation for this new analog monster I was dreaming up.

Lucifers own monosynth, in the best possible way

Aside from my battered old Teisco, the Dreadbox Nyx was the first analog synth I really fell in love with, and since then I’ve owned (and sold on) an Erebus, Typhon, Nymphes, a Drips module and even a mighty Abyss - and so for my second synth voice I opted for another Dreadbox in the form of a Telepathy module.

The menu is a little tricky at first but I mastered it in a few days and now can make use of its excellent MIDI CC features to control it in Logic from my Nektar CS12. Needless to say, the Telepathy works beautifully alongside the Hades, especially playing an octave above.

For the final synth voice I opted to build something out of multiple Eurorack modules, and remembered I’d spotted an oscillator from legendary pedal makers Earthquaker Devices a while back that looked both intriguing and affordable.

Waves = Transformed

And so I ordered the Wave Transformer and have to say, it’s become my favourite Eurorack oscillator. The thing is incredibly dynamic, versatile and seems to be made up completely of sonic sweet spots. I’ve certainly got it to sound gnarly, but it never sounds bad.

I then bought a tiny York Modular three channel mixer module to mix all three voices, and a Ladik VCA-ENV which isn’t just ‘snappy’ but in fact ‘surgical to the point of splitting atoms’ - and with a good range of options too.

Finally - the filter, which has been a bit of a conundrum. I originally ordered an After Later FILTHy which got stuck in the mess that is the post Brexit customs systems and so was presumed lost, and then tracked down a second hand WMD C4BRN to use instead.

C4BRN and FILTHy filters both in action here

After some confusion, both turned up on the same day and so I tested them side by side. While the WMD is excellent, surprisingly the After Later suited the Wave Transformer much better as it has more subtly and less aggressive, which works better with the timbres the Wave Transformer kicks out, to my ears at least.

Also, while it’s not as dynamic (because that C4BRN packs a lot of features) it does have attenuators for both Cut Off and Resonance and that gives me the kind of control I need for sculpting sounds. Both are great so I’ll be holding onto the WMD for now as it will work great on more punchy IHF tracks, so it will live in my utility rack for now, alongside an attenuator to help control it.

And there you have it - the Oscillatron lives!