The Crimson Chameleon!..

The Polivoks (Rus.: Поливокс) was designed by Vladimir Kuzmin with input on the aesthetics from his wife Olimpiada who was apparently inspired by Soviet military radios of the time. In production between 1982 and 1990 the Polivoks was manufactured at the Formanta Radio Factory in Kachkanar, Russian SFSR. With a retail price upon release of 920 rubles around 100,000 Polivoks were manufactured – peaking at a production rate of up to 1,000 units a month! Despite this, the Polivoks is not all that commonly seen an instrument outside of Russia.

Although intending to appear and sound similar to the Minimoog it has been said that Vladimir never had access to the instrument or indeed any technical information. On examining the schematics, I’d have to agree and go so far as to say the Polivoks is a very different beast indeed on a technical footing. Some have said the instrument was a poor man’s Minimoog but I truly think this is disingenuous to say the least as it sports some interesting unique features such as looping envelopes, a particularly efficiently implemented duophonic note assigner, and a quite remarkable and unique filter design.

In fact, whilst producing the original patches for this library I have been particularly taken by the filter on this unique instrument which is like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Sporting both Low Pass and Band Pass modes it can be quite an untamed beast at times but with care also capable of producing some really quite beautiful timbres.

It may be full of bizarre old Russian transistors the size of small flying saucers, plastic that feels like it was made from recycled Christmas cracker toys and easily winning the most horrific key-action ever made contest.. I truly adore this wonderful old analog chameleon of an instrument!

As always with all of my Kontakt Libraries the raw sample material has been captured faithfully and directly from the instrument (including in this case a few samples taken via a gorgeous 1968 Bruel & Kjaer type 2107 all- tube swept band pass lab filter). The Solo Synth Engine retains the sonic character of the instrument and yet help to present it in a new light permitting a wide range of tonal colours, textures and landscapes to be explored. With this in mind I have included many example patches in the library which I think will help to show the full potential of the Polivox library.

…oh and look out for the secret button!!  :-]

System Requirements:

This library requires the full version of Kontakt 4.2.4 or higher.
Approximately 685MB of free hard disk space is required.

Download Contents:

845 24-bit Samples
64 Example Instruments
66 Example Layered-Multis
User Manual
Audio Demo

More Details & Purchase via Kontakt Hub

Credits:

D.A.Wilson (Hideaway Studio) Sound Design,Sample Capture,Example Patches & Demo.
Mario Krušelj Synth Engine Script.
Boris Chuprin Cyrillic GUI Translations.
Anders Hedström (Flavours of Lime) GUI Design & Graphics.

HS-4KL-A020 04/12/17

Chromatix is a celebration of yet another successful resurrection of an old classic saved from the grave…

This time it was a gorgeous 1983 Rhodes Chroma!

After a very deep clean inside and out followed by a visual inspection it was quickly realised the original rather large and somewhat grizzly linear PSU had burnt out and was showing signs of several past repairs. News got round that a new cooler running switched mode PSU retrofit had been made available and was duly installed. Having returned power to the beast it quickly transpired that at least two voice cards had serious issues and were failing the dreaded auto-tune. This rapidly became a can of worms when it became apparent that almost all of the considerable number of analog multiplexors within the beast were practically dying in front of my eyes due to age and after the shock of being pressed back into action for the first time in several years. Following removal and replacement of some 40 or so unsocketed ICs much of the instrument returned to life leaving a final stubborn voice card really determined not to play ball. On discovery of a number of leaky transistor arrays and tired charge pump oscillators the final voice card eventually succumb to my continued harassment only to have a third voice card fail during soak testing!

After two weeks of intense toil this 16 VCO beast returneth to life… and what a beast!

Having sifted through and loaded up over 1000 patches during soak testing over 5.5 Hours of raw audio was captured directly from the instrument.

ARP’s Last Gasp…

ARP Instruments, the hugely influential name behind a string of famous instruments such as the ARP2500, ARP2600, Odyssey, Avatar, Omni, Quadra and Axxe, was in its prime during the 70s but by the early 80s the tables had turned for the worse and the company was losing money hand over fist thanks to a series of unfortunate business decisions, excessive cost of sales figures and overheads.

Work had started on the Chroma in the autumn of 1979. After two years of intense development interspersed by the project being temporarily shelved on a number of occasions things were looking decidedly shaky at ARP on the financial front. This was no fault of the R&D team behind this technically challenging design but due to increasing resistance from management who had their own battles to fight.

Philip Dodds was left to head a company dying before his eyes and several months of development were lost to company politics. The situation became dire and he was eventually left with little option but to close down the R&D department. Despite the ongoing stress of the situation he succeeded in selling on the IP rights to the Chroma design to CBS Musical Instruments and in the process was hired to oversee its production. If it wasn’t for this last gasp for survival the Chroma would surely never have existed.

The Chroma was an advanced digitally managed 16 VCO analog synthesizer released after the initial success of the Sequential Prophet-5. Both instruments offered patch memory with the Chroma sporting a bank of 50 user programmable patches. It was one of the first analog synths to offer multi-timbral operation, voice layering and keyboard splitting with velocity sensitivity. The voice architecture was unusually flexible whereby the firmware could route signals through two low pass filters, in parallel or series, or switch the VCA before or after the filters. Through a bespoke digital interface (Chroma pre-dated MIDI) it was even possible to edit voices in a program on the Apple II computer.

CBS released the Chroma in 1981 with a list price of $5295 and proved to be pretty successful with estimates of around 1400 units eventually sold.

56 Unique Instruments Presented in The Layering Engine…

Chromatix features a deceptively powerful layering engine which allows the user to create new sounds and textures with ease by selecting up to four out of a bank of 56 partial voices to be layered. Each layer has its own fine and course tuning, ADSR envelope, panning, velocity sensitivity, LFO and tone controls. This permits anything from huge pads to complex evolving sounds. Many of the demo instrument patches included are good pointers as to how some of these effects are achieved.

Above of each of the four voice panels there is an orange LCD display showing the selected voice. By clicking on each of the displays a pull down menu appears allowing one of 56 voice partials to be selected. With a potentially vast number of layered permutations at hand two different banks of 28 partials are available the first set assigned to channels 1 & 3 and the second bank of 28 partials assigned to channels 2 & 4.

Naturally the example instruments packed with the library can be used as is but where the fun starts is having a go dialing in your own sounds using the intuitive layering engine. All of your creations can be saved as .nki instruments simply by using the save as function by clicking on the files icon in the main Kontakt control pane.

The layering engine consists of four identical programming panels and an effects section. This release is the first to use a recently updated version of the layering engine which has recently been revised to include separate velocity sensitivity controls for each layer.

The TONE control is a deceptively powerful feature. In the fully downward position the signal is unaffected. As the control is moved upwards a continuously evolving complex EQ curve is applied. With some experimentation this feature can be used for embellishing formants within each voice partial and helping to sit each of the layers together in the mix.

System Requirements:

This library requires the full version of Kontakt 4.2.4 or higher.
Approximately 1.35GB of free hard disk space is required.

Download Contents:

1030 24-bit Samples
56 Partials/Voices presented in 4 Channel Layering Engine
75 Example Instruments
User Manual
Audio Demo

More Details & Purchase via Kontakt Hub

Credits:

D.A.Wilson (Hideaway Studio) Rhodes Chroma Restoration & Sound Design, Sample Capture, Example Patches & Demo. Stephen Howell (Hollow Sun, RIP) Original Layering Engine Concept. Mario Krušelj Synth Engine Script,GUI Design & Graphics  Anders Hedström (Flavours of Lime) GUI Graphic Design.

HS-4KL-A019 30/06/15