14 October 2008

Anywhere Instruments Semtex XL

On my AtmoSphere album I used a lot of synthesizers, but I also had two machines on lone. This Anywhere Instruments Semtex XL belonged to my friend Hanz. We made some very nice sound effects for the album on this machine. For this reason I thought it would be nice to give it permanent residence in my studio. So I bought it from Hanz. It is a semi-modular analog synthesizer. That means that some signal-paths are pre-patched, but you can alter the path by patching in cables. You can make very freaky sounds with this machine. We sometimes even had to filter of unusably high frequencies in the music (like 21 Khz and above). It has very nice LFO's that you can switch to low, medium and high frequencies.

4 comments:

Joel said...

Looks like a very capable beast too from the company web site. The MIDI implementation looks impressive to! Did you guys use MIDI when working on the album? Or did you record the audio straight into the sequencer for each take?

Synth.nl said...

I always work with midi for the melodies, but not on the SFX. We recorded them straight into the sequencer. So we didn't use midi on the Semtex.

Anonymous said...

Well, MIDI / CV implementation seems nice in theory, but actually I find it not so handy to use in practice. Mostly because the internal MIDI / CV converter is kind-of homebuilt and not as stable or easy to use as I'd like it to be or as solutions offered by other companies.
But as my dear friend Synth.nl wrote, it works fine through good old manual dexterity. Kind of gives the necessary vintage groove to things... ;-)

Anonymous said...

Great sounds you have there!

Have a Happy Holiday!

btw, have you heard the all casio synth Christmas recordings by Kasio Kristmas? You might get a kick out of it?