Chromatography

'Chromatography' is the presets pack for Cherry Audio Rhodes Chroma software synthesizer. The demo features several instances of Chroma. Other than a master bus limiter (ReaLimit from Cockos Reaper) no external effects are used.

{See video at top of page}

Rhodes Chroma was a seminal instrument from early 1980s developed by ARP shortly before their demise. The design was purchased by CBS Musical Instruments and put into production by their Rhodes Division in 1982 - already as the Rhodes Chroma. A keyboardless version was produced as well, called Chroma Expander.

For its time it was an extremely advanced, polyphonic and multitimbral instrument with velocity-sensitive keyboard. It also sported microprocessor at its core, and could be connected to a computer - an interface card was available for Apple IIe along with sequencing software.

Only 1400-3000 Chromas and Expanders were built at all, as their production ceased by 1985, and it's safe to assume that far fewer have made it into 2020s.

Thankfully, Cherry Audio has reproduced it in software with all the original features, and then some.

The first impression is that it has a fairly non-conventional architecture, compared to other VA synths. But it is mostly due to a non-standard naming (like 'sweep' which is in fact 'LFO'), and a wide array of signal routing modes.

'Chromatography' presets are built from scratch or from each other.
To load these presets into the synthesizer, unzip the archive contents into Chroma's Presets folder. For Windows 10/11 users it is C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\CherryAudio\Chroma\Presets.

...And have some Chromatic fun.