Erica Synths Steampipe

Erica have teamed up with software developers 112dB to create a genuinely original synthesizer.

Considering I spend much of my journalistic life writing about synthesizers, here’s something of a controversial statement: I don’t get particularly excited about working with simple waveforms. Sure, I can appreciate the value of a throbbing supersaw, a chiming FM tone or a guttural folded sine wave as much as the next producer, but I can’t deny that I get immeasurably more excited when I hear about new ways of manipulating samples, digging into complex acoustic raw material, synthesizing the behaviours of physically occurring harmonics, and so on. Granular synthesis, wavetabling, delay‑based no‑input mixing... [holds hands up] what can I say. That’s where I really get excited.

All this makes me more or less the target market for the Steampipe, a ‘true’ physical modelling synthesizer from Erica Synths in collaboration with Dutch plug‑in developers 112dB, whose Steampipe you may recognise as a software instrument built for Native Instruments’ Reaktor. It’s not the first Riga‑Utrecht joint venture, either, with Erica and 112dB also working together on the Nightverb reverb as well as a spate of Eurorack modules, including the lauded Black Stereo Reverb and Black Stereo Delay. The Steampipe isn’t far off the ideal collaboration between the two: it not only provides a second lease of life for an instrument that seems to have come perilously close to slipping below the radar, it’s also an excellent opportunity for Erica Synths to continue their relatively recent expansion into standalone formats — with the success of units like the pin‑matrix‑endowed Syntrx and thunderous Perkons HD‑01 drum machine speaking for itself.

Hard Core

The Steampipe is at its core an eight‑voice polyphonic synth. In fact, no: on the surface it’s an eight‑voice polyphonic synth. At its core it’s something very different, since, well, it doesn’t really have any oscillators. It’s gorgeously built, with a sturdy (3kg, no less) metal enclosure and wooden sides, a surprisingly high‑resolution screen on the upper right of the interface and a perfectly acceptable level of I/O; there are stereo outputs, an audio input (more on that anon), both DIN and USB MIDI and a sustain pedal input. Of course, that’s nothing less than what I’d expect from a €1000 unit. Its panel is spacious and navigable, replete with Erica Synths’ solidly mounted, generously sized trademark knobs that happily correspond more or less to one function each.

As far as its recognisable synth‑ness goes, it’s certainly a MIDI‑controllable electronic instrument, which responds particularly well to MPE, for reasons that will become clear. It has lots of modulation capacity, room for 192 user presets, and a high‑resolution screen, complete with cute little organ pipe animation to indicate voice allocation. Look on the panel and you’ll see an envelope, a low‑pass and high‑pass filter, and other familiar circuits. Where it takes a very sharp left turn is in its voice architecture.

At the top of the panel, its signal flow begins not with wave‑generating oscillators but with an envelope and a noise generator. Beyond this is what looks more like an odd selection of effects than a voice‑sculpting topography. This is because the Steampipe operates in a distinctively non‑linear way: instead of a more conventional signal flow, in which waves generated by oscillators flow through filters and VCAs, it essentially employs a system of feedback loops redolent (at least at its most basic level) of a Karplus‑Strong algorithm: which is to say, it uses incredibly short delay times with variable tuning and feedback to create resonating oscillations out of the simplest of sonic stimuli.

Airflow

This is probably a good time to say that it took me longer than I like to admit to actually work out exactly what is going on with the Steampipe’s signal flow, and while Erica Synths’ manuals are almost always fantastic in my experience (and made of paper! Yay!), on this occasion I would have loved a bit more detail about the fundamentals of the Steampipe’s topography, as well as a few more commonalities between the workflow as laid out in the manual and what’s actually displayed on the panel. Some things, for instance the (surely very important) fact that its workflow is comprised of two primary sections, the ‘steam’ and the ‘pipe’, are not indicated with any visual cues on the interface at all, while other details in the manual are left technically vague. This wouldn’t ordinarily matter, but since there’s little precedent out there for the Steampipe’s workflow, one can’t really assume the usual level of contextual understanding.

Nonetheless, things soon begin to make sense: ‘steam’ and ‘pipe’ are in fact good analogies for what goes on here (and be prepared for a lot of inverted commas). For instance, in an organ pipe, the movement of air doesn’t generate much sound by itself, but creates energy to excite the pipe, which does generate sound. Here, the ‘steam’ constitutes either raw direct voltage current or white noise, or a combination of the two thanks to a Mix knob. The character and ‘pressure’ of that ‘steam’ is then further dictated by a gain knob, an envelope and a low‑pass filter.

Next, then, is the ‘pipe’. This is where things get a lot less linear, its primary currency being feedback. The pipe begins with the Karplus‑Strong‑esque Delay Box, which sends its output through a saturator and high‑ and low‑pass filters, before feeding it back into itself. The Harmonics knob in this section controls the spread and character of the Delay Box’s harmonics response, or “‘stiffness’ of the resonator body” as Erica Synths put it — not unlike the Position control on Mutable Instruments’ iconic Rings Eurorack module. It’s a curious beast, the Harmonics knob, in that it can have little effect on a sound or completely mutate it, depending on the position of other parameters, but suffice to say this is because sometimes the harmonic core of the sound is, well, the core of the sound, and sometimes it’s not; it might be the ring of feedback or the saturated push of white noise. Next to the Harmonics knob is a knob called Splitpoint for ostensibly adjusting how those harmonics are separated. Together with its corresponding button, this provides a lovely touch for further sound sculpting. In essence, it ‘splits’ the delay line into two to lend itself to bell‑like, almost ring‑mod‑style sounds with variable levels of dissonance. There’s also a Polarity button to change the polarity of the delay and either accentuate mainly odd or all harmonics.

On the back panel we find a power switch, quarter‑inch stereo outs and headphone out, MIDI I/O ports, a USB‑B port and quarter‑inch sockets for a sustain pedal and audio input.

Feedback, Saturation & Reverb

The Feedback section has a Push knob to control how strongly the signal is fed back in, and — in a very elegant bit of design — its own two‑stage envelope (decay and release) for some highly musical control over its movement, which can be further augmented via the modulation matrix. It’s worth saying at this stage that across the board the Steampipe leaves little unexplored when it comes to playable expression and movement — and not just in the MPE sense (though this it handles capably with a very well‑furnished MIDI control matrix). As well as the Feedback’s own envelope, the ‘steam’ section offers velocity control over its envelope, envelope control over its filter cutoff and keytracking over both. There’s Drift to inject some tuning instability into the equation, as well as adjustable glide, and there’s also adjustable delay in the LFO section to allow modulation to drift in after a note is triggered. There’s no envelope control for the main filter section, but with so much else on the table I didn’t miss it.

Continuing along the signal path, the Saturation section comes with a Symmetry knob to even further adjust the balance of odd and even harmonics in conjunction with the Polarity button, and a level deeper offers a choice of two modes via the screen menu: mode A for asymmetrical waveshaping to add even harmonics, and mode B for phase modulation, whose complexity makes it better for richer, brassier sounds. Musical and fun it certainly is, but as the manual states, its primary purpose is in fact to “ensure the maximum amplitude of the resonances is tamed within limits and the pipe does not explode”. We won’t argue with that.

Finally in the chain is the Steampipe’s onboard reverb, which immediately looks nice since it’s nestled beneath a pair of responsive LED meters, and also because it’s labelled ‘Reverberator’. In some ways I was surprised to find this, since it feels superfluous to the Steampipe’s raison d’être, but I soon realised how important it can be to the physical‑ness of its output, particularly with the Size knob at lower levels to communicate tighter, smaller ‘rooms’. It’s also the reverb that accounts for the Steampipe having a stereo output, so even with very short tails it can create some lovely width with the Spread knob in play.

Harmonic Playground

The Steampipe’s non‑linear character, particularly in its signal path’s latter half, extends into the workflow. Since its use of feedback means that everything more or less affects everything else, adjusting something as simple as the filter doesn’t just change the harmonic content of the master output but can have a huge impact on the overall character of the Steampipe’s sound — including its tuning. The same goes for things like the Harmonics knob or Split button. To mitigate the musical headache this might cause, the Steampipe places a Tune button close by, which presents a gyroscopic tuner on the screen and even trimmers for the filters to keep things in the ballpark when adjusting. It’s the right call, using this kind of tuner: it’s not as quick, but it crucially allows you to decide on the centre point of the tuning instead of automatically trying to isolate a fundamental. When working with harmonically complex sounds that can range from blissfully tuneful to almost atonal, the appropriateness of a sound’s tuning can sometimes come from an unexpected part of its timbre. There’s even a Play button to allow quick auditioning from the unit itself, be it for tuning or sound sculpting. Neat.

All this non‑linearity can threaten frustration, since it’s all too easy to change a parameter or two and quickly find oneself completely unable to return to a previous sound. But that’s part of it, I daresay, and further to this Erica Synths have kept it fairly quick and easy to save and rename sounds on the fly; something I found to be central to the process of Steampipe sound design.

External Audio

Another hugely rich avenue on the Steampipe is its capacity to process external audio. Rarely do I find myself using the external inputs on a hardware synth, because more often than not it amounts to simply sending audio through a filter. This is useful at times, particularly if you have a synth with a celebrated filter design, but not really very creative. Here things are very different. Sending external audio into the Steampipe and hitting the Ext/W button replaces the ‘steam’ (that is, the noise and voltage generator) with a signal and corresponding envelope follower, which means that the resonator can imbue your sound with all manner of character, from bright and rich shimmers to feedback‑infused filth. And it’s still possible to play the Steampipe, of course, since the ‘steam’ isn’t where it accepts MIDI messages — the ‘pipe’ is. So in this sense it can take on vocoder‑like qualities, or synthesize chords out of just about anything, for that matter. Add the onboard reverb into the equation and it’s a highly capable piece of creative studio hardware.

The Steam Is In The Details

The Steampipe covers more or less all the bases I can think of (or, you might say, pulls out all the stops) when it comes to physical modelling, as well as several more. It allows for tweaking down to a pretty incredible level of detail, often with more than one control pursuant to a particular aspect of a sound’s character. This I feel is important: in the June issue’s leader column Sam Inglis reflected on the importance of context when sound sculpting with synths, and how much an interface and its environment can influence the way one makes certain decisions.

112dB’s instrument is very much deserving of everything Erica Synths have endowed it with: well designed, well built and phenomenally creative.

One of the Steampipe’s biggest overall assets is the way it manages to accommodate — encourage even — approaches from numerous angles. Its layout isn’t the easiest to navigate, but at the same time it’s pretty much possible to start from anywhere when building a sound and work from there. 112dB’s instrument is very much deserving of everything Erica Synths have endowed it with: well designed, well built and phenomenally creative. And with a price just under four figures in lengthof just under $1200, it’s something of a bargain.

Information

£977 including VAT.

www.ericasynths.lv

$1199

www.ericasynths.lv

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