Elta Solar 50

Ready to preorder the Solar 50 – Big Ambient Machine by Elta?

Elta has been teasing their 50 oscillator touch plate droning ambient super synth for a couple of months now. Looks like they are arriving at the final specs, look and feel.

Inspired by early electronic instruments of the last century such as the harmonium.

Oscillators don’t have linear or logarithmic dependence from control voltage and remind of first electro musical instruments and organs generators. Each voice is provided with an envelope (attack/release parameters) controlled by a tactile sensor. In addition, there is a GATE-ON button for every voice, making it sound constantly, and a voice volume controller.

There are two independent LFOs and a bunch of external CV inputs on board and so-called PLS connector for connecting a CV source in order to control the pitch of each of 50 oscillators and to start the envelope of any voice.

Patching is possible with the euro rack standard. MUTE buttons let you use from 1 up to 5 oscillators per voice, tuning in for chords, thirds, fifths and other intervals or to get a clean single note. Every oscillator has a sawtooth waveform. All voices are mixed together and then go to the effector block where you can use cartridges from ELTA CONSOLE pedal. This adds even more variety to the sound of the instrument!

Every cartridge has 3 effects inside, now 12 cartridges are available, so that are 36 effects in summary like delay, pitch delay, reverb, shimmer, tremolo, chorus, flanger, phaser, filter and many more! You can also create your own effects in a special software application (available on spinsemi.com (http://spinsemi.com/)). The effector unit is based on a common FV-1 chip, which is DIY friendly. It consists of a cartridge slot, three effect parameters controllers, effect switch, and master volume. The SOLAR 50 has dry outputs for 5 right and 5 left voices and a general mono output from the effector, where all 10 voices are mixed. Dry outputs can be used either to create a wide stereo field, processing them through stereo reverbs, delays and other effects or for tuning as you play (If you connect a cable into a dry output, it’s signal would disappear from the overall mix).

No word just yet when this might happen, but it looks like they are moving along pretty steadily.

PRICE (without shipping and money transfer expenses ) – 900 Euros (or dollar equivalent) + 50 Euro worldwide shipping. Shipments of the first batch will take place in May-June.

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