REQ: Rhythmic Robot Audio Dark Machine

Ex-soviet handbuilt synthesiser with 3 flavours of sawtooth and considerable damage • Contact corrosion, capacitor failure and stability issues throughout • Broken, erratic waveforms and randomised start-points ensure that every note is unique • Powerful, comprehensive controls including LFO Sync, Overload and multiple Filters • Stackable, detunable waveforms for insane levels of thickness – up to 19 oscillators at once! • Over 100 factory patches, plus awesome Glitch control for randomised new sounds.

Infos from Website:
The heart of Dark Machine comes from a damaged, abandoned ex-Soviet transistor synthesiser which was clearly handbuilt at some point in the early 1970s. With crude components and basic point-to-point wiring, our source instrument was once a fairly simple monophonic keyboard – though with a quite ambitious range of waveform options, including various filtered sawtooths, a squarewave and a triangle. Time, though, has not been kind to this little Cold War soldier. Capacitors have leaked; solder nodes have dried and cracked; the keyboard contact points have corroded and become intermittent; tuning is now unstable across the entire machine. The waveforms are grainy with interference and noise, occasionally fading in and out, crackling as the key contacts sputter, or slewing in pitch.

While in other (saner) hands this might have become a fun restoration project, we were far more interested in capturing the soul of the synth in all its crackling, buzzing, humming goodness. Played polyphonically, the uncertainty of those uneven oscillators translates into a strange, unpredictable lushness. Layered one on top of the other, the result is eerie and beautiful one moment, coarse and raging the next. The constant background interference and crackle makes even the simplest patches sound aged and sepia-toned, while stacking up all the sawtooth flavours simultaneously and tweaking the Detune control yields an instant headrush of thick analogue power. You can almost smell the hot circuitboards…!

In its most basic sense Dark Machine takes a single-oscillator monosynth and turns it into a 3-oscillator poly – but that’s really only one sixth of the story, since each of those three oscillators can in fact access 6 waveforms all at the same time. With the pushbuttons on the left of the interface you can, for each oscillator, engage three separate and distinct versions of Sawtooth, each with their own character and complexities; plus Square and Triangle waves; plus a pure analogue Sine wave for useful depth and body. On top of this there’s our favourite Korg 770 Scale Noise available as well: this follows the pitching and envelope settings for Oscillator 3, but can be mixed in separately. It’s great for adding extra graininess and air to your patches.

Website: