- The modular synthesis market is booming—this year's NAMM Show was rife with them—but it remains relatively expensive to get into. So it makes sense that some manufacturers are beginning to offer more affordable instruments that give some of the flavour of modular at a more gentle entry point. Boutique Greek operation Dreadbox's handmade products feel genuinely vintage—like the synthesizers which we now consider vintage, they're designed with an open, experimental mindset. Their Murmux semi-modular last year won hearts with its lush tone and aesthetics, and now their follow-up, the Erebus, aims for a more entry-level area.
Erebus can act as a MIDI to CV/gate interface, and along with its various other patch inputs and outputs—and the fact that it's a ready-to-go synthesizer in its own right—helps lower the initial outlay for those hoping to build up a more personalised modular setup. But it doesn't simply give people as much functional bang for their buck as possible. Much of the endearing quality of this fully analogue synth stems from the way it sounds—its full, rich tone reflects the sonic quality of the late '60s and early '70s. The knobs are nigh on identical to the ones on the Minimoog, and the patchbay over to the right gives a taste of the unpredictable, random way of working that modular synths engender, hewing to the more classic East Coast school of thought in which Bob Moog was a frontrunner. But while it's in line with that general style, it doesn't try to imitate. From the green-and-grey, art-deco stylings of the front panel, the wooden side panels, and the generally super-solid build quality, to the knobs, which have a lovely, thick action, it's also one of the best built synths I've ever seen.
It's a paraphonic synthesizer, which means that the two oscillators can operate independently but go through the same filter and amplifier signal path. That means that its behaviour displays something akin to two-note polyphony, with each oscillator handling one of the notes when two are played together. It can also operate as a monosynth by flicking the unison switch downwards. If you're holding two notes while you do this, Oscillator 2 will continue to sound the note it was playing before (the upper note) in monotone while you play oscillator one. It's distinct features like this that give the Erebus its unique character. The oscillators can each play at different octaves; they can be detuned together or separately with continuous knobs; and they have independent glide controls. One is either a sawtooth or square wave, and the other is either a sawtooth or triangle. Each can be turned off, and the mix between them can be controlled.
They both then go through a 12 dB-per-octave low pass filter. The gentle slope of this lends a soft character to the synth when it's not fully open, but not as much as you'd expect. That's because it's pre-fed, meaning that there's a pre-resonance accent that's always present, even when the resonance control is set to minimum, and this gives the filter some edge. The filter is controlled by an ADSR envelope with a depth control, and this envelope can be set to retrigger on each note, or to play legato. The amplitude envelope only has attack and release controls, and although at face value this seems restrictive, the filter envelope can be used to create longer sounds that start with a pluck. And the patch section is central to creating more interesting sounds anyway. The signal is subsequently fed to a nice sounding analogue delay, with controls for delay time, feedback and mix.
The patchbay offers six sources: mod wheel (from your controller keyboard), note gate on/off, the filter envelope, an LFO (square or triangle, with rate and depth controllable) and the pitch control voltages from each oscillator. These can be patched to nine inputs: the pitch CVs from each oscillator separately or both together, the filter cutoff and resonance, the echo time, the LFO rate and decay and the note on/off gate. The voltages that the outputs deliver, and that the inputs accept, are given in the manual, but really the joy here is in experimentation—patching the instrument randomly and seeing what sounds come out, without thinking about what's going on in the signal path. It's possible to get all kinds of interesting behaviour by patching things that shouldn't be patched, from modulating the filter and echo to give loose, organic time characteristics, to modulating the pitch and obtaining more wild, alien sounds. Around the back, there's an audio input that enters the signal chain just before the filter, and which journeys through the filter, amp and echo. It's affected on the way by whichever strange concoctions you've bestowed on them in the patchbay.
This isn't a poor man's modular, though, but a synth whose diverse feature set involves a modular flavour. It sits well in its price range, feeling neither under- nor overpriced. This is a crowded area of the market, but other patchable synths in the same range include Doepfer's Dark Energy and Korg's MS-20 mini, both of which can also act as springboards to a full modular setup. All three have distinct characteristics: the Doepfer is more upfront while the MS-20 is sharp and edgy. So the Erebus doesn't compete with them so much as offer a new alternative that wasn't here before. And this idiosyncratic yet homely instrument is quite a charmer.
Ratings:
Cost: 3.7
Versatility: 4.1
Sound: 4.7
Build: 4.8
Ease of use: 4.1