Flame has announced the Black Filterbank, a new analog filterbank with a built-in sequencer, and the FM Kosmos, a quad polyphonic FM voice.
Do you know Flame Instruments from Berlin? No, then quickly catch up. The German company, which is still somewhat under the radar of many, has brought fascinating feature-packed modules to the market in recent years.
My highlight was not a module but the Mäander filterbank Synthesizer, which has unfortunately disappeared from the market again. The Fire module, which packs eight mighty drum synth voices into a 22HP module, caused a lot of excitement in the past. The two new modules that have now been announced are just as interesting and mighty.
Per Salzwedel, founder of Flame Instruments, announced two new modules: the Black Filterbank and the FM Kosmos.
Flame Black Filterbank
The Black Filterbank is not an Erica Synths module but a new analog filterbank module. You can tweak it with the faders and also animate it with the built-in pattern sequencer. That makes the whole thing more exciting.
According to the developer, the module is a compact version of the Curves filterbank. It offers a full stereo analog signal path with 12 filter bands, each with a 24dB slope. Blank Filterbank has several operating modes: low-pass, all-pass, three different band-passes, and high-pass.
There is also an interesting fill function that allows you to run through the twelve filter bands one after the other. The analog signal path also has an input-side overdrive based on germanium diodes.
As already said, the filter banks can be animated with an internal pattern sequencer. You can load and save your patterns from a 99-memory location.
The module ships with a free software editor (macOS, Win) for creating your own patterns for it. Alternatively, the filter bands can also be controlled with MIDI notes, with velocity supported. Interestingly, the sequencer doesn’t feature its own clock generator but can only be driven by an external one.
The Flame Black Filterbank also comes with an envelope that smooths out the progression by activating a second band next to the current filter band. On the connection side, it has a wide range of inputs and outputs.
Unlike its bigger brother/sister, it lacks individual inputs and outputs for the 12 filter bands. In the Black Filterbank, Flame only added a stereo input and output as well as four CV inputs for parameter controls. Plus a clock and reset inputs, and MIDI input.
Flame FM Kosmos
Besides Black Filterbank, Flame introduced the FM Kosmos, a new 4-voice 6-OP FM Synthesizer. The engine has 32 algorithms to choose from. Each operator contains a dedicated loopable ADSR envelope and settings for the ratio and level—so very classic FM stuff.
There is a special feature. You can morph between two sound variants within an algorithm, and the separately adjustable effects can also be morphed. Besides the polyphonic FM engine, there is also a dedicated multi-FX processor—no details yet on the available effects.
To make programming easier, each operator can be called up directly, and the parameters can be edited directly with the potentiometers on just one page.
Further, you can save your sounds into 128 hardware sound memory locations and 128 example sounds arranged in eight groups. Many parameters can be controlled via MIDI or via adjustable CV inputs.
The module interface has eight parameters and various buttons to select the operators. On the connection side, it has MIDI in/out on mini jacks, 1v/oct, gate and velocity inputs, stereo output, CV ins for the morph, and more.
First Impression
At first glance, these are two powerful new modules from Flame Instruments. The analog filter bank with sequencer is very tempting, as you can undoubtedly achieve fascinating filtering results. I’m looking forward to the first demos.
Flame Black Filterbank & FM Kosmos will be available in Autumn 2024 for 499€ each.
More information here: Flame Instruments
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