The story
The Intellijel/Cylonix Cyclebox is one of my favorite eurorack modules. It’s a wavetable oscillator that definitely was not held by it’s mommy. It’s great for sound design and rhythmic noise pads, but it’s also quite musical. I thought it would be a great subject to try out with the Kontakt sampling method you all are using for the Piano Book project. Four layers–from warm and chill to Moog-through-a-Marshall-amp–are selected via velocity.
Reviews for Cyclebox Fux Pad
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Touchy Little Synth
This is a fun sound. It's character changes wildly from a somewhat muted square wave up through four different velocity layers to a mangled, distorted saw wave. There are some nice overlaps between the velocity zones which helps to smooth things out, but the jumps between the different sounds are still pretty pronounced. I found that decreasing the effect of velocity on the filter cutoff helped to smooth this out and increased playability. The lowest velocity layer runs only 0-50, and I found that extending the velocity ranges of the samples in the lowest velocity ranges upward and compressing the velocity ranges of the samples at the top yielded a much more controllable and playable instrument. It might just be my playing style, though. Regardless of all of that, this is a fun, musical, and playable instrument! Super job!
Extreme variation in synthy wonder
Interesting synthy number with extreme variation across its velocity layers. This makes the playability a little difficult but with a step input approach the velocities could be easily tamed and some rather cool textures created from this. I like...
Awesome analog synth but not really for me
As ive said before im personally usually not into aggressive distorted synths. So im not really into this and cant imagine where this would fit into my music. More objectively speaking though its a really fun and characterful sound. I know alot of people in the community are really into these kind of sounds so i know alot of people will really like this even though i dont so much. Its really cool how the different velocity layers trigger different sounds. This means you cant really play one sound dynamically but you can set your velocities and have access to different sounds in one patch which is cool. Again, even though its not for me its very characterful.
This sounds like an Organ on steroids
This sounds like an Organ on steroids. You can see in the mapping editor how the 5 layers have been blended, but the crossover isn't quite enough for it to be really playable. I think two separate patches with just two/three layers to each could be a good way to simplify this pad and make more playable sounds from it. Overall It has a Vox organ quality to it underneath the distortion, but it's not quite my kind of thing, but someone will love this!
A weird way of controlling a sound
I really never experienced such difference when it comes to dynamic layers. This instrument features quite a few different sound signatures in one patch, that are only control through velocity. And boy oh boy they differ a lot from each other.
The low velocity features a very smooth retro synth with a veeeery long tail, which the longer you hold it, the shorter it gets, and that might be really hard to deal with by itself. If you manage to press a little harder, you will start distorting the signal, with the very top layer being a heavily saturated one. This all makes it extremely inconsistent when it comes to performance, but it makes sense once you start programming it instead.
