Corry BanksIn advance of the NAMM Tec Awards Arturia has been nominated in the category of Outstanding Technical Achievement for Musical Technical Hardware at the 33rd Annual NAMM Technical Excellent & Creativity Awards (NAMM TEC Awards). The awards ceremony will be held Saturday, January 27, 2017 in Anaheim, CA during The NAMM Show, and tickets can be purchased site or in advance here.
As Answered from Glen Darcey for Arturia.
What was the most challenging thing about developing the Matrixbrute?
There was a lot of new intellectual property that we had to develop. This is always the hard part, when you dig into the unknown.
Matrixbrute was a huge leap from microbrute and minibrute, what inspired such a monster analog synth product?
We wanted a programmable monosynth but wanted it to be something new and special. The Minibrute put new life into the analog synth market so we wanted to set a new high bar with the Matrixbrute.
What would you say was your primary goal in bringing Matrixbrute to market?
Making it programmable but not loading it up with menus and hidden features is always our goal. We wanted to keep it as musical as possible and not have it be like programming a DVR. We wanted to keep the price competitive as well. Other synths that were this size, and not even close to as flexible, were almost twice the price that we ended up with so keeping cost down was key.
Number one was making it sound great. If it doesn’t sound great, then it is of no use.
A lot of analog synths incorporate digital effects but not Matrixbrute. Why was it important to use analog effects?
We wanted to keep the pure analog ethos all the way through the synth. We may use digital effects on other products but we wanted the Matrixbrute to stay as pure as possible.
How would you describe the character of the Matrixbrute?
It can go from tame to wild. We designed the layout and the gain staging to allow for a wide range of sounds. With the three oscillators, the two filters, which have very different characters, the voice modes of mono, para, and duo split, we wanted to make it a sound designer’s dream synth.
A lot of folks say this synth is a modern classic why do you think that is?
That is for everyone else to judge and only time will tell. It is a nice combination of classic circuits that have been redesigned to make them more flexible and modern so by design it is a modern classic in that light.
More info on the Matrixbrute go here.