Busy day yesterday -- I approved final versions of a couple of tracks mastered by Obsidian Sound and descriptions of what the engineer did (and made a lot of notes about it), the last module I was trying to sell finally went on Reverb, of course the auctions here, and Akemie's Castle arrived and I set it up and recorded a quick play with it.
If you have plenty of space in your rack, Akemie's Castle is pretty fantastic and quirky:
- Since it's NOS Yamaha OPL3 chips, we're talking dirty FM. Aliasing, clicks and grumbles when modulating operator levels, crosstalk and leaky VCAs... it's glorious
- VCOs A and B have independent pitch and outputs, but in some algorithms double up on the operator settings.
- VCO B can do 5-voice chords. Chord settings include some octave combinations that are basically additive synthesis, and some pretty heavy detuning options (but which sound good mixed at a low level with VCO A). The chords make it a drone monster, especially with fun combinations of FM ratios... it's really a 24-oscillator module, although with limitations on how those oscillators are assigned
- CV in the level inputs can easily distort things in a pretty unique way.
- If you multiply carrier frequency, it multiplies minor instabilities in the VCO frequency. So if you crank the base frequency way down and the multiplier way up, you get some lovely additional weirdness.
