So I got back from Berlin on Wednesday last week 1 day late and very tired! I had failed to fill in a required form and attempted to do it on the Eurostar platform, but the UK form is like War and Peace and I failed to complete it in time. I also ended up spending £110 on Day 2 COVID tests (first company scammed me, despite being on the official government list). I have a suspicion that the travel stress won’t go away post-COVID. I think a lot of this is Brexit-related too. Sigh.
Superbooth was fantastic fun despite all the travel worries and it was great to chat to so many people. Overall I think the new ATX colour-scheme was a success. The audio demos seemed to go down well too. You can hear them on my Instagram account. I did some video interviews/demos which I’ll link to below, but I want to mention a couple of things that I couldn’t explain in the chaotic environment of Superbooth!
- I wasn’t able to show as many features as I would have liked. I made a decision back in July to do a complete software rewrite of the protocol that makes all the parts of the synth talk to each other. This was a massive undertaking and I worked on it all day every day, right up until Superbooth. I managed to complete enough to do an audio demo of the Atmegatron, Atmegadrum and Piano engines, but there’s still more to do now that I’m home. There’s also the Odytron (analogue modelling), Delayerton (delay effects), Cyclotron (wavetable cycling), String machine and new Bezier engine to convert to the new protocol. There’s also a lot more MIDI sequencer functionality to add. I will do more videos as this is completed.
- I had a power supply issue that I was unable to fix before the event. This resulted in a slight amplitude modulation of the entire audio output. I decided that it sounded fine through the speakers in the hall, but it’s definitely audible on the video interviews using the direct input. I’ve been told by several people that the audio was fine for the interviews, but I thought full disclosure would be the most honest thing to do. Obviously this issue won’t be in the released product!!
So here’s the videos (in the order that they were shot!)
Synth Anatomy
Lesindes
Sonic State
I am very grateful for all the positive support at Superbooth and it has really fired me up to finish this project off. So I hope to be bringing you more videos, audio demos and information about the ATX range in the coming weeks.