ELTA Music shared this demo of their SOLAR 50, a 50-oscillator/10 voice synthesizer that they say is tailored to making atmospheric sounds, background music, microtonal music, ‘super polyphonic electro symphonies’ and more.
The SOLAR 50 was inspired by early electronic musical developments of the last century, particularly Leo Theremin’s Harmonium.
Features:
- Solar synthesizer consists of 10 voices. Each voice, in it’s turn, consists of 5 oscillators (2 low, 2 middle, 1 high) with a pitch controller and a mute button for each oscillator. Each voice is provided with an envelope (attack/release parameters) controlled by a tactile sensor.
- Solar 50 has a piezo mic onboard, that lets it turn into electro acoustic percussion noise instrument.
- There is a GATE-ON button for every voice, making it sound constantly, and a voice volume controller.
- There are two independent LFOs , external CV inputs and the PLS connector for connecting a CV source in order to control the pitch of each of 50 oscillators and to start the envelope of any voice.
- Patching is possible with standard pin wires that are used in Moog Werkstatt, Bastl Instruments and in many other devices.
- MUTE buttons let you use from 1 up to 5 oscillators per voice, tuning in for chords, thirds, fifths and other intervals or to get a clean single note.
- Every oscillator has a sawtooth waveform. All voices are mixed together and then go to the effector block where you can use cartridges from ELTA CONSOLE pedal.
- Every cartridge has 3 effects, now 12 cartridges are available, so that are 36 effects in summary like delay, pitch delay, reverb, shimmer, tremolo, chorus, flanger, phaser, filter and more.
- You can also create your own effects in special software application (available on spinsemi.com).
- The effector unit is based on common FV-1 chip, which is DIY friendly.
- It consists of cartridge slot, three effect parameter knobs, effect switch, and master volume.
- The SOLAR 50 has dry outputs for 5 right and 5 left voices and a general mono output from the effector, where all 10 voices are mixed.
- Dry outputs can be used either to create a wide stereo field, processing them through stereo reverbs, delays and other effects or for tuning as you play (If you connect a cable into a dry output, it’s signal would disappear from the overall mix)
- Dedicated headphone output
Pricing and Availability
See the ELTA Music site about pre-orders. The estimated price is expected to be about $800 USD. They note that the “Final version will include a new design and additional, yet not showed functions.”
So this offers more than 10 times the oscillators than the Behringer Poly 1, and real polyphony, at about the same price?
Wonder what the true believers will have to say about that.
And look how much better it is than those sad six-oscillator ‘instruments’ Fender keeps churning out.
Seriously, comparing a quirky boutique device aimed at experimentalists/hackers (pin wires, custom plug-in FX chips, quirky architecture) with a mechanical keyboard instrument aimed at stage users is a little silly. I am more interested in this device than the ‘Poly D’ but if you wanted to add some keyboard sounds to your new rock/pop band I’d choose the latter.
I would rather choose Poly D as instrument over this. Poly D seems more user-friendly and less sophisticated..
This thing has no filter, no sequencer, very basic sawtooth oscillators… You’re comparing cats and dogs here.
Nice concept, but saw-tooth-only WF is a deal breaker for me. Kinda reduces the sonic flexibility of the thing. Why not at least include a square too (my knowledge of electronics is limited but I believe it doesn’t take that many extra components to extract a square from a saw-tooth signal)?
You can make any sound possible using just sine waves, so judging a synth by its oscillator shapes alone, vs what you can do them and how you can control them, doesn’t make sense.
If this was intended to be another basic Minimoog-style mono synth, then more wave shapes would definitely be useful. But this is very clearly NOT intended to be another Minimoog mono synth clone, but intended to let users explore new types of sounds.
Bottom line, if you can’t do something interesting with 50 oscillators at your disposal, is it the synth’s fault?
I just hear sawtooth strings and a few blip plops 😉
show me how to create any sound possible with that supersaw, lol
“You can make any sound possible using just sine waves”:
that’s called additive synthesis, which this synth is absolutely not based on, so I”m not sure what’s that got to do with anything we’re talking about here.
“if you can’t do something interesting with 50 oscillators at your disposal, is it the synth’s fault”:
you’re missing the point. I’m sure you can make one interesting sound, maybe 2 or 3 more… but I believe you’ll quickly run out of sonic-crafting possibilities. The point I’m making is that this is a bit of a one-trick pony. This sounds quite nice as a “string machine”, but still a limited one nonetheless. Banging the machine gives you fun fun transient noises, but that’s fun for like 5 mins.
I challenge you to buy this and come up with new sounds after 1 month of intense use. I’m as bored at all the Minimoog-clones out there as you are, but at least the Minimoog has been around for 5 decades and people still get interesting and fresh sounds out of it.
Very interestng, sounds lovely!!
Super cool design. Now I’ll see if I can make this in Supercollider. . .
Despite the limitations it sounds quite awesome !
Sounds beautiful. And seems like a lovely, thoughtful design. Indeed, pin patching actually feels appropriate for this instrument.
Would love to see a couple of ‘friendly’ pitch related features. Obviously, I’ve never actually tried it but on first blush setting 50 pitch knobs feels daunting at worst and kinda tedious at best.
First, something like a shift key that you can hold while turning an OSC pitch knob that would quantize it to semitones. Or maybe simpler/cheaper: a way to quantize the pitch of OSC1 where the other four related OSCs would snap to it in their respective octaves. Then you can easily/quickly adjust the individual pitches from there.
And/or some way to remap the plate CV output to adjust the base pitches. Basically a way to set a scale to the plates, ignoring the pitch of the OSCs knobs. That might be better done as overwriting the assigned pitch of OSC1 in each group only and the rest of the OSC pitch knobs work as offsets? I dunno. Using the built-in playing surface to control the pitches seems like the quickest way to change up the instrument for performance use, etc.
And a straight-up asking-for-way-too-much idea: oscillator rotation. Simplest version would be something like: each time a voice is triggered, it rotates through each oscillator. More complex would be presets for various other patterns like every other OSC (1, 3, 5, 2, 4, 1,…), every third OSC, 1+(2,3,4,5) where OSC1 would always sound and 2-5 would rotate, 1+3, 2+4, 1-5 (1 and 3 together, 2 and 4 together then all 5 together), etc, etc, etc. Seems an instrument with 50 oscillators would benefit from macro-like ways to group and rotate through subsets of the oscillators.
Oh hell, might as well keep dreaming aloud: sounds handy to have the lower row of LFO outputs be at 50% speed of the upper outputs.
I don’t mean any of this as “why doesn’t it have an ______?” style moaning. Just ideas hopefully aligned with the instrument’s intention because the instrument itself is quite inspiring.
Gah, so many questions!
Are their ways to assign the CV output from plate pressure (or coverage/finger size)? Can you assign the output from the plate’s x/y axis?
What does the big thing in the middle playing surface do? Is that the piezo mic?
What’s going on at 9:00 in the video when he yanks the SD card out? 🙂
Can the effects be used in series or is one at a time? Like, can you have a filter *and* a reverb?
i love the sound and that’s a pretty incredible price. nice work.
I was very interested until I saw….no pun intended…that it was saw wave only. It needs square and triangle as well.
It makes great video background music.