East Beast - fully analog East Coast style semi-modular synthesizer What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word “synthesizer”? Close your eyes and think about it. Ok, enough you’re drifting, probably thinking about pineapples. Anyway, for a lot of people, the word synthesizer envokes visions of big filter cutoff knobs, envelope generators, and importantly, big fat-sounding voltage-controlled oscillators. These are the hallmarks of East Coast style synthesis. East Beast is a fresh take on these old-school concepts with a few beastly twists thrown in here and there. Oh and by the way, we almost forgot to mention, if you are into the whole eurorack thing, you can pop East Beast out of its included enclosure and it transforms right into a 40HP eurorack module. They should’ve called it Optimus Beast! Mighty Big Oscillator you got there… East Beast’s oscillator, designed in partnership with the too serious for words people from Pittsburgh Modular Synthesizers, is a part of their 5th generation of analog oscillators stemming from a super-serious 10 years of continued research into analog oscillator development. Its circuitry is not a clone or based on any outside designs. It is made with 100% modern components. This keeps it very stable, and giving it a super rich, and unique sound. Definitely not junk. PGH Filter? What in the flying banana pancake monster is that? Our uncomfortably serious friends (if you can call them that) at Pittsbugh Modular Synthesizers are just as serious about filters as they are about oscillators. Frankly, it’s a bit obnoxious (like we should talk). Anyway, this is a really really really good filter…. More on that to follow. Most of the filters you are used to hearing are transistor ladder filters, or copies of transistor ladder filters. This is not one of those. The whole goal in making this filter was to create a creamy smooth filter with no dead spots, a very common phenomenon in all filters, but check it out. No dead spots. From nasally to biting and elsewhere, it’s all one large sweet spot. See spot sweep? Good spot, sweet spot! Ok, this is just getting weird…. moving on…. East Beast’s filter is a multi-mode filter, meaning it can be used as a low pass filter, high pass filter, bandpass filter, or a combination of the three for an even wider sonic palate. Tons of filtery fun ffs. Shape the beast in your own image To further sculpt the sounds we’ve included an envelope generator & LFO. The custom envelope circuit creates a snappy, percussive attack for expressive performance. The dual range LFO opens up a wide range of LFO and audio rate modulation possibilities. Get wobbly & weird, or not. No judgment from us here, we promise. Get patched. Semi-modular means that the East Beast will work without any patch cables or anything. But what fun is that? Who doesn’t want to have their own personal spaghetti mess of cables sticking out of their synthesizer to get wacky with? At the very least it makes you look super sophisticated to anyone observing. Anyway, East Beast has basically 9 different patchable modules (Oscillator, filter, envelope, VCA, LFO, multi-mod tool, sequencer, MIDI to CV converter, and button keyboard) with a whopping 18 Eurorack compatible patch points to plug into itself and your other gear. All for your patching pleasure. MIDI too! We’ve said it before, we love MIDI… It makes us feel warm and snuggly on the coldest of days. We lay in bed at night thinking about connecting everything to a giant MIDI interface that responds to brainwaves. Yeah, we know it’s messed up. But what’s not messed up is East Beast’s MIDI. It has MIDI in and a fancy MIDI thru so you can chain multiple MIDI monstrosities together. Maybe you don’t share our weird MIDI fetish, but at the least, you can enjoy plugging a MIDI controller into East Beast and rocking out and/or sequencing like mad. Again, no judgment. Performance non-junk-stuff But wait, there’s more! East Beast includes quite a few additional performance features. Why not get extra beast-like by getting serious like our friends at Pittsburgh Modular Synthesizers (they buy us lunch each time we include their full name on our website) and dive in with its built-in tap tempo clock, arpeggiator, and sequencer. There’s a lot of opportunities to inject in some randomness too. Pizza! Was that random? We think not.
