Future Sound Systems Cric

Future Sound Systems’ debut desktop is very much in a class of its own.

Just when I thought Bristol’s Future Sound Systems were getting ‘serious’ with the Cric, they put a cartoon frog in its manual with a speech bubble saying, “Hi there! My name’s Francis and I’ll be popping up here and there to guide you towards certain things to look out for when using Cric.”

Francis Crick was, of course, one of the great British scientists, and such in‑jokes would be incredibly annoying if they didn’t somehow align perfectly with Future Sound Systems’ design ethos. From their filters to their oscillators to their modular guitar preamps, the company’s philosophy combines solid pragmatism, labcoat‑worthy experimentalism and a certain light‑hearted — surreal, even — creativity. I say all of this because, in many ways, the Cric is the ultimate expression of this philosophy, which is the key to understanding it.

An all‑analogue, patchable desktop synth, the Cric is quite a beast. At least, it’s more beastly than anything Future Sound Systems have produced to date, but make no mistake, this is a premium synthesizer: patiently designed, impeccably built and, to be honest, with little precedent in its field. Aside from a few diminutive standalone offerings, the company are of course best known for their Eurorack acumen, from which I’m happy to report the Cric draws more than a little. Despite this, however, it’s telling that at this year’s Machina Bristronica exhibition, the Future Sound Systems crew didn’t bother bringing any modular goods with them at all, instead focusing solely on showcasing the Cric.

Complex Oscillations

That modular mindset is certainly still traceable here, however, in that the Cric’s circuits can be patched any which way. Three oscillators and a white noise source constitute its sound generators, but it doesn’t take long to realise that these coalesce to create something far more than the sum of their parts. The first is the Scissor oscillator, which is the most traditional of the three, though in fact it’s also not very traditional at all. It has four wave shapes — sine, triangle, sawtooth and pulse — each with its own attenuator and output. So, right from the off, with these all sounding together in different combinations, there’s already decent scope for sculpting composite sounds with different waveforms. The Scissor oscillator doesn’t stop there, though: beyond its knob for variable FM, switchable between linear or exponential, it has a shape control which of course varies the pulse width of the pulse wave, but also shifts the harmonic content of the sine and triangle waves. This functionality is dependent on a switch which, when on Clean, maintains a ‘purer’ version of those waveforms, and when on Shape imbues those triangle and sine waves with a type of notch at their peaks, resulting in a grittier texture reminiscent of older, characterful analogue synths, as well as FSS’s own Cyclical Engine module.

Next are a pair of ‘DNA’ oscillators. These are curious things, delineated as +DNA and ‑DNA. The +DNA oscillator only outputs positively‑rectified sine, triangle or saw waveforms (that is to say, with the negative‑going half of the wave form flipped to positive‑going) while ‑DNA outputs the inverse. These only have one output apiece of their respective DNA Mixes, but the VCA levels of those constituent discrete waveforms can be individually attenuated and modulated thanks to individual pin inputs.

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