Modulate This! - Electronic & Experimental Music Tech, Technique, & People

Rob Papen's Blade Synthesizer Now Available + My Patches in Factory Sound Set

Rob Papen’s brand new virtual synthesizer Blade released yesterday. The price is € 99USD 119 (introduction price until end of May) and is available http://www.robpapen.com/blade.html.

The minute I saw teaser videos from NAMM I knew I’d be getting Blade because of it’s fresh immediate and expressive approach to additive synthesis. I became part of the beta team and since January I’ve been helping out by beta testing, making suggestions for features, and also creating new sounds.

While I’ve been releasing patches for various synths via Patchlab for sometime, this is the first time some of my patches made it into the factory library of a commercial synth – woot!  The screen shot above is one of my patches called “Nano Swarm Drone” where I flood the XY path with sustained notes using the Strum feature.

After you buy or download the demo, you can checkout my patches by clicking “Manager” then “Find” and enter “ MM”.

There are just tons of great factory patches from Rob and other sound designers as well giving you lots to start with. I encourage you to poke around and reverse engineer some patches. Remember the XY can be both a modulation source and target and can be mapped to a majority of parameters (filter, FX params…) not just the additive synth engine. Also note that he filters , FX (including the new tape effects added to Predator in December) and modulation system are straight out of Predator so they sound great and if you know Predator you’ll feel right at home in Blade.

If you are curios about what Blade sounds like checkout this new embedded tutorial video.

Mark Mosher
Electronic Music Artist, Boulder, CO
Official Web Site: www.MarkMosherMusic.com
Listen/Download Albums: www.MarkMosherMusic.com/music.html

Rob Papen Debuts New Blade Synthesizer at NAMM

Musicannews just posted this video of Rob Papen describing his new synth Blade. The synth uses a a “harmolator” to control timber and movement in a sound. Each note is displayed as a dot on an X/Y windows. You can modulate movement with a controller and sync movement to your DAW. Blade also has a sequencer and other standard parameters like LFOs plus two effects.

According to an email I got from Rob harmolator gives you "direct access with the 9 dials (to change the harmonic content) ... And of course this XY pad can dynamically change the harmolator using the 9 modulation targets."

So, the harmolator section that lets you dial up harmonic waveforms on a single oscillator then “ripple” through them and change the balance of odd and even harmonics. There is a spread function for thickening up sounds and a sub-oscillator. There is an easy page as well.

The synth should release in late February or early March as they are finishing up the bank manager. Blade will have an intro price of $119 for the first month then will be  $139.

I’m personally excited about this synth as it looks like a great instrument for performance with the opportunity to add motion and visualize the motion.

Update 2/11/2012 – I’ve added more videos I’ve found below:

 

Links

• http://www.robpapen.com/

Mark Mosher
Electronic Music Artist, Boulder, CO
www.ModulateThis.com
Official Web Site: www.MarkMosherMusic.com
Listen/Download Albums: www.MarkMosherMusic.com/music.html