It’s the most wonderful time of year: New Firmware Season! We started out with Ampla Legio, a multimode-gate for the Legio. Last week we introduced Fala Versio, a stereo formant filter for the Versio platform. This week, we round out the platforms with Toros Iteritas Alia, a PM drone oscillator for the Alia.
Toros Iteritas Alia is available to purchase in both black and silver now. If you’re an Alia owner and you’d like to try it out right now, head over to the firmware swap app and load it onto your module.
First and foremost, Toros is designed for drones: long, evolving, modulated drones that’re the perfect core for a dark patch. Toros has three different algorithms that change how oscillators are routed, similar to the algorithms on classic FM synths. The interface is simple: there’s a root Pitch encoder, and three Freq[uency] offset controls for three operators. These offset controls are a core part of the resulting timbre: even the smallest adjustments can drastically change the frequency relationship of the internal oscillators, resulting in big timbral shifts. And by slightly detuning the different oscillators from each other, you can achieve drawn-out beating as the oscillators drift in and out of phase. With the bottom switch, the range of the frequency controls can be constrained down to a minor third for dialing in precise ratios, or, for more extreme sounds, can be expanded to 1 or 2 octaves.
There are also three unique Blendex controls, which change how much an oscillator is routed to either the phase-modulation input of the next oscillator in the algorithm or the main mix out. These are great CV targets, too – send in an envelope or an LFO for dramatic timbre changes.
Toros has an additional output, too. The Fun Out produces a buzzy saw wave at the core frequency set by the Pitch encoder. It’s great if you need a simpler waveform for a different style of patch, or for even more beefiness when mixed in with the main Out.
Lastly, we did away with the classic Alia octave switch and added in the Jump button. Jump doubles the frequency of the output while it’s pressed or a high gate is present at the input. It’s a great target for gate sequences and adds an interactive element to a patch.
We’ve been considering what we wanted the next oscillator on the Alia platform to be for a while. We’re huge fans of FM (the NE headquarters has more DX7s than one might expect, which also inspired the development of the Debel Iteritas Alia firmware), but their interfaces are… uninviting, to say the least. We decided this was a problem we could solve.
The first step was deciding how to make sure that all the controls did something all the time. One of the issues with traditional FM layouts is that many controls often do nothing (or are multiplexed across so many parameters that they are mindnumbing to use). For example, if you have three oscillators modulating each other in series, the frequency and index controls of the first oscillator in the chain do nothing unless the next oscillator’s index is also turned up. The solution to this was Blendex, which simultaneously changed the level and routing of an oscillator at the same time. This meant that, no matter how things were routed, adjusting any Blendex control at any time would change the resulting timbre.
The next sticking point was frequency ranges for the offset controls. Markus and Stephen had vastly differing opinions on how wide the ranges of the Freq parameters should be; Stephen was primarily using Toros for drones that required lots of fine tuning, and Markus was primarily using it for gnarly, noisy, reese-style sounds that didn’t need the same delicate touch. After much discussion, the Range switch was devised, so that both styles of patching could be accommodated.
Breaking away from traditional grid-style control layouts already made Toros quite easy to use, but we wanted to make sure that the documentation was also fun to read through and easy to understand. We love making digital products because it allows us to create some extremely complex signal chains while keeping the modules themselves compact.
We decided that, with the release of Toros (and Fala), it was the perfect time to change up how signal flows are documented in our user manuals. Not only does it let us show off a bit more of the algorithms we worked so hard to develop, it can make it much easier to understand the multi-function parameters of a module like Toros.
If you’re curious how the three different algorithms work, you can take a look at the fancy signal flow diagrams for each one in the Tone Generation section of the user manual. While Toros is extremely easy to dive into without even looking at the manual, seeing how things are laid out internally can clear up some questions you may have as you patch, and might even inspire some new patches.