Radioactive and Tesseract Modular

Equipment
1

I wonder if anyone else caught this today. Radioactive, a 6HP Analog Modelling VCO. Tesseracts description:

  • Radioactive is a small but powerful 14-bit analog modelling voltage-controlled digital sound source : a complete voice Eurorack module in 6HP. It consists of 3 simultaneous independent oscillators, voltage-controlled AR/ASR transient generator, voltage-controlled pitch slew (glide) and voltage-controlled waveshaper with 5 different modes, but that’s just the beginning. Its forte consists of selectable gate/trigger/constant envelope timing signals, rather unique 3-voice polyphonic mode, semitone-quantized mode, voltage-controlled waveform selection, on-the-fly selectable 10Vpp CV input range with offset (except for Pitch), a few experimental features, and then some.
    Under the hood, it’s a chiptune-inspired wavetable-gnawing sound cruncher with a mind of it’s own, and oh boy it’s dirty. It could be described as raw and untamed, but it would probably be an understatement.

It sounds extremely ambitious. I am curious to know more about the polyphony mode they describe here. Looks like it is based on Atmega MCU. I’ve heard of their other module, Nutella Tsunami based on the Sparkfun Tsunami wave trigger. But I’ve not really heard much in general about Tesseract Modular. Really curious if anyone has any feedback.

unnamed
unnamed.jpg271×1141 207 KB

3 Likes
2

Hi @dianus. Mangu Díaz is a lifelong friend. I know him very well, he’s great musician and restlessly creative. As he got into diying modules he also started customizing and designing his own modules looking for his own needed features. So he finally founded Tesseract with the goal of offering these ideas in the lowest possible cost. You know, modular is expensive and he wanted his modules to be very affordable, in terms of direct cost and HP as well. He focus on mods of existing modules he liked, or completely non-existent ideas.

For Radioactive he teamed up with Sinisa Kekez, who apparently pushed its Atmega (not STM32 MCU) to its maximum potential. It’s a lo-fi digital piece with lot of charms. I’m not huge fan of lo-fi digital stuff, but this little thing captivated me. I mean, that polyphony, liveness and control in 6 HP! That’s going to be my next build for sure. Listen to this, it’s so sweet:

FranKinksTides is a very interesting recreation of 2 Tides and part of a Kinks. I am building this right now. His TexMix modules allow for custom configuration of a mixer with pan, pre-post sends, mute, cue, stereo or mono channels, VC vactrol gate.

His 8x8 matrix is a great utility. You can have different signals in (gates, pitch CV, audio) and choose which of them you want to feed each output with. I use it to have my sequence and trigger generation sources available to send to different sound sources, being able to feed a sequence of pitch with different gates generations. Pretty essential in my current workflow. I’m going to build my second one (he’s working on a 12x12 one now though).

And he told me about his last finished design: his own version of 16n aka faderbank, with CV inputs added, so the 16 faders will act as CV faders, 10v manual generators, MIDI controllers (usb and minijack), CV to MIDI CC converters (+/-5v or +10v), and… it can talk to monome :wink:

I know that I sound like a grandma, but I’m very proud of my friend, ok? :slight_smile:

7 Likes
3

Please tell your friend (of whom you are justifiably proud) that I for one would love to know more about this design.

4 Likes
4

I will! Basically he added the CV inputs (making possible all these CV to MIDI features, allowing attenuation of CV, and increased the range of CV outputs to 10v. He’s done with pcb design and now needs to build it, test it and debug it, you know…

I’ll keep you updated!

2 Likes
5

You should be very proud, their work is fantastic!! Glad to have some feedback on the designer, it sounds like their practice is very well thought out. I think I will add Radioactive to my to-do list very soon! I am a fan of lofi oscillators, it actually reminds me of one of my favourites the Orgone Accumulator

Their 16n mod sounds amazing too! I built a 16n not too long ago, and was left wishing it had a bit more capability. This new flexibility will put the design over the top!

1 Like
6

Very nice one!

It sounds like made especially for you! I’ll let you know how it’s going on. Glad that I could help.

7

Guys, let me introduce the carbon based part behind Tesseract Modular to you. Say hello to @M4ngu

8 Likes