Organelle
Latest
The Organelle S is a more affordable take on Critter & Guitari's distinctive music computer
Since 2016, Critter and Guitari Organelle line has been one of the most unique ways to create music.
Poly Effects Beebo review: A versatile and complex touchscreen guitar pedal
Poly Effects Beebo is one of the most versatile guitar pedals on the market. It’s basically a modular synth in a pedal format with an easy-to-use touchscreen.
The Organelle music computer is nearly $100 off this weekend
Here's a sweet deal on a gift that could make sense for the more adventurous music-makers in your life. Critter & Guitari is running a sale on the Organelle M that drops the price from $595 to $499 from now through December 2nd. At that price, the music computer may be hard to resist -- it's a do-it-all instrument that can stand in as a synth, sampler, sequencer, drum machine or virtually anything else if you have the right code.
The Organelle is a music computer that can do almost anything
Not long ago, "portable" was basically a synonym for "toy" when it came to keyboards and synthesizers. Sure, a classic Casio like the VL-1 is not without its charms. But it's not exactly a serious musical instrument. That's changed a lot in recent years, partially due to miniaturization and clever engineering but mostly thanks to the relentless march forward of computing power. Perhaps no device is more emblematic of this than Critter & Guitari's Organelle. It is, at its core, a computer, and I don't mean that in the same broadly defined way that almost all electronics are computers. I mean that inside there's a Raspberry Pi running Linux. It's this fact that makes the Organelle so unique and flexible. Unlike other portable music gadgets, like the Pocket Operator, that focus on being a drum machine or a sampler, the Organelle tries to be all the things. It's a synthesizer, a sampler, a sequencer, an effects processor -- almost anything someone with the right coding skills can dream up. But there is a danger in trying to be a jack-of-all-trades: You often end up as a master of none.
Organelle M is a portable and endlessly hackable music ‘computer’
Critter & Guitari has been pumping out interesting musical devices since at least 2008. But a few years ago the company streamlined its selection of instruments to focus on two products: the ETC video synthesizer and the Organelle music computer. What makes the latter unique is that it isn't a synthesizer or a sampler; it's both or neither or some combination of things. It is, at its heart, a computer running patches built in Pure Data, a visual programming language primarily used for creating and manipulating audio. Though, much of that is hidden, and you can just fire it up and start playing if you want. Since its introduction in 2016 the Organelle has received multiple software updates. But about two weeks ago, it got its first major hardware upgrade.
The new Organelle is a synth built around a Raspberry Pi
It's a niche company, but Critter and Guitari was a big name during the portable synth renaissance, and back in 2016 it released its flagship instrument, the Organelle. Now, it's had a pretty significant upgrade.
