Niklas Roy’s “Vektron modular” is a unigue approach to experimental synth hardware. The main device is essentially a control interface + display, capable of accepting a variety of digital chips as its core –
The device plays compositions which are stored on microcontroller modules. The modules in this presentation are based on the Atmega family and are programmed in GCC (Arduino) and Bascom. In general, the synthesizer can work with any other TTL Microcontroller as PIC, Propeller or even ones which don’t exist yet, as the computation happens on the module and the Vektron itself only provides the peripherals.
The low-bit noises in the above demo may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but this take on modularity could be used in a number of different ways. Top-loading cartridges at a live gig would be about a thousand times cooler then clicking software presets on a Macbook.
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