Music Thing: Metasonix Wretch Machine Tube Synthesizer
posted Nov 25th 2005 5:15PM
Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:
Before Robert Moog, most synthesizers were made from vacuum tubes. RCA had one in a laboratory in Princeton in the
1950s. It cost $500,000, filled an entire room and recorded it's own output on a six-headed lacquer disc cutter. But by
the late 60s, Moog had popularised solid-state synths built from transistors. They were (relatively) cheap,
(relatively) portable and (relatively) reliable. So, unlike tube guitar amps, which were locked into musical culture by
60s guitarists, tube synths evaporated into history.
That is, until now. Last week, tube guru Eric Barbour of Metasonix unveiled the
S-1000 Wretch Machine, a
brand new (almost) all tube monophonic synthesizer, with three glowing bar-graph tubes, a tiny brass joystick, lots of
knobs, a light-sensitive filter and a patch bay to integrate it all with your modular setup.
It's big (6 units of rack space), heavy and understandably expensive at $2,500, plus $300 if you want a MIDI
interface. And some people have suggested it's not the most beautiful synthesizer ever created (Personally, I wish it
was bright yellow, like Eric's other products) . But you
will never, ever, get more analog than this.
analog to the MAX
Technically, this is not very analog at all, since analog in this context is defined as
'(electronics) of a circuit or device having an output that is proportional to the input'
Which is really not quite the case in this synth full of distortion and non-linearity. And that's probably a good thing.