What’s going on people!?
This week in our Tuesday weekly production live stream James took a look at the U-He Tyrell N6 synthesiser!
Inspired by Bladerunner (which somehow I haven’t seen), this freeware synthesiser comes jam-packed full of features, and with a decent present library to explore there’s plenty to reverse engineer and play around with.
The synthesiser consists of 3 Oscillators (1,2, Sub) with Oscillator 1 giving you 4 choices of waveform to choose from (Sine, Triangle, Saw and Pulse/Square) and Oscillator 2 (Saw, Pulse/Square) providing an extra 2, the Sub oscillator is a square wave. There’s coarse and fine-tuning for oscillator 2, and modulators for both oscillators below the waveshape pots. Next to that is a fader mixer for the 3 aforementioned oscillators, the noise oscillator, ring modulation and feedback.
The filter’s modelled off an early edition of the filter found on the Diva synthesiser and has LP/HP (Low Pass/ High Pass) and BP (Band Pass) mode. It’s kind of a strange beast this (or maybe I just don’t use any analogue gear really ha) as the number of bands the BP mode uses, is controlled by the VCF pole/slope selector found to the right of the synthesisers filter and resonance faders. When 12db/Oct is selected there is one band and it’s controlled by the Cutoff fader, however, with 24db/ Oct and 36db/Oct, there are additional bands controlled by the MIXSPR (Mixspread) fader (3rd fader in the filter panel).
Hardwired to the vibrator fader is LFO 1 with LFO 2 free to modulate other parameters and both can sync to tempo. There’s a matrix with draggable targets for further modulation and the depth of all three panels controls the amount of modulation applied. Rounding it off is the VCA Envelope 1 and Envelope two, which have adjustable targets for both.
Here are some words from the creators:
‘Tyrell is the name of a project by the German online magazine Amazona.de. A reader survey and follow-up on forum posts provided a pool of ideas for a low-cost hardware analogue synth, which Mic ‘Moogulator’ Irmer collected and used to develop quite a powerful concept. Based on a design similar to Roland’s classic Juno 60, a few modules and novel features could be added without making the product too expensive. However, it soon became obvious that developing the hardware would have taken years, so U-He offered to turn the core design into a freeware softsynth. That was late 2010. Only a few weeks later, TyrellN6 was out for beta testing. After some serious bug-fixing and fine-tuning, the final release version became available in April 2011.’
We managed to get quite a few decent noises out of this little freebie on stream over on Twitch. Thanks to our discord community for the feedback and for tuning in!. Catch that over on our channel (www.twitch.tv/stonx_music). The synthesiser is pretty decent for detuned reesey style things. You can also make some sort of haunting acid style pads and leads quite easily.
I’ll probably use this for certain things in my workflow. It’s nice to have to work within the limitations of analogue emulated routing. I found I made a different quality of sound than synths like Serum and Vital, so it’s nice to mix it up.
Words by James Clarke (Stonx and Stonx Music Co-Founder)
