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.