Superbooth 23: Sound Werkshop has showcased the Wiggler v2, a new prototype of its upcoming expressive mono Synthesizer.
Every year the Superbooth is the epicenter for new Synthesizer releases or raw prototypes. With some luck, you will also find new developers who don’t have a booth yet and want to find out how the whole business works first.
So does Chris from Sound Werkshop. Last February, he released a video for a new expressive Synthesizer called Wiggler for the first time. This went viral for Synthesizer click ratios on YouTube and managed over 170k clicks in three months.
Sound Werkshop Wiggler v2
At Superbooth 23, Chris was a visitor but had his Wiggler in his backpack in a revised v2.
Wiggler v2 is a very basic synth at its core. It is based on the Dasy Seed Chip and is a digital instrument. It has a single sawtooth oscillator and white noise generator that goes through a Moog-style Ladder filter—and is refined with effects. The Superbooth Edition only had a reverb, but more to come.
It will also offer an arpeggiator, built-in scales, and an attack/decay envelope called “pluck”. It adds slower or faster percussion at the beginning of every note. Plus, you can loop it. You can also work with modulation of the pressure to the pluck speed to make it more creative.
The unique thing is the way of playing and the mechanism that Chris developed. Aside from pressing notes (pressure), you can wiggle/bending them in any direction (horizontal and vertical), giving an expressive character to the played notes. The mechanism relies on the concept of flexures. Plus, you can set it to different scales making playing more straightforward.
First Impression
It’s an exciting synthesizer that Chris from Sound Werkshop is currently developing. Especially how you can play it can leave you wanting more. You have to take into account that this is a raw prototype. What the final synth looks like and what it can do is not 100% fixed yet.
Here’s his first video again, which is an excellent resource to know more about the concept of flexures – the mechanical part and how it works
Sound Werkshop Wiggler v2 availability and price is TBA.
More information here: Sound Werkshop YouTube
welp, it looks AI designed..
Chris here, I’m a person I promise! I wanted to maximize the variation in the size, shape, and position of controls to make it as tactile as possible. My pet peeve is a grid of repetitive knobs that forces you to read labels to do anything.