Bento is a new Synthesizer by Giorgio Sancristoforo made for exploring organic noisescapes using shaky oscillators, feedbacks, ring mods…
Gleetchlab2021, Berna 3… fascinating experimental music software by the ingenious developer and sound artist Giorgio Sancristoforo. These have fresh ideas that invite musicians to experiment deeply with sounds.
Bento is the latest release from Giorgio and is a standalone Synthesizer with a Japanese, noisy soul.
Giorgio Sancristoforo Bento
Bento is a special kind of Synthesizer. Visually very eye catchy with its very classic Japanese design. It just oozes charm in my opinion. If you don’t speak Japanese, you won’t understand anything because the interface is only provided with foreign writing. The developer writes a nice statement about this in the manual that shows that this instrument is made for pure experimentation
Don’t underestimate the power of not knowing. Explore, don’t be shy, after all it’s not important to know the functions by memory, if you use your ear.
Giorgio describes it as a standalone noise box with very unique, unstable oscillator design. Bento consists of two signal paths (red/blue) featuring almost the same feature set: single generator, filter, amplifier, clock, and envelope. The blue signal also has a ring modulator section.
The Bento doesn’t feature traditional oscillators but generators that are models of analog computing patches that solve a differential equation. They are capable to produce all kind of bizzare noises as well as sawtooth, sine, and square waveforms. They all have a very unstable and alive character.
Then, it also hosts a 24 dB lowpass filter, also with a very own feature set. Instead of just cutoff and resonance, it has a full signal feedback that gives you screaming, feedback sonic results. There is also a clock generator with normal/random settings and a AR envelope. The latter can be triggered with the internal clock generator. Plus, you add ring modulation either to the blue channel or on both red/blue channels.
Authentic Tape Recorder
That’s not all. A tape recorder, also in a Japanese look, is hidden behind a second screen. It offers different tape, background noise and saturation controls. So you infuse another layer of instability, quirky and dirty textures to the whole thing.
Attention, Bento is not a VST plugin but a standalone software. With a virtual audio interface like Blackhole, the sounds can be forwarded to any DAW. The linked video gives you a complete overview of the Bento Synthesizer.
Bento is another fascinating Synthesizer software for electronic musicians. Once opened, the most delicious, weird, organic sounds can be heard. It’s lovely sounding piece of software. If you want to get a different look at music software , you should take a look at this and the other releases of Giorgio Sancristoforo.
Bento by Giorgio Sancristoforo is available now for 19,50€ and runs as a standalone app on macOS. A Windows version is coming
More information here: Giorgio Sancristoforo
It seems fantastic but I don’t use VST for synths, I’ll wait a physical edition. It could be so nice to have this sitting on the desk.
It’s stand alone for the moment, not a VST 🙂
But I agree with you, instant buying this, and I would love a physical version of that monster ! Love it !!