Sound Workshop Flexur T2 is a new Trautonium-inspired expressive Synthesizer and MIDI/CV controller which is currently under development.
We first saw Chris from Sound Workshop with his Wiggler, an expressive Synthesizer that is now finished. Then, he released the Quord, a compact harmonic drone Synthesizer.
In the meantime, the developer released the Quord harmonic drone Synthesizer based around four sawtooth waves. Sound Workshop has been working on a new project called Flexur T2 for some time, inspired by an instrument made famous by Oskar Sala.
Sound Workshop Flexur T2
Flexur T2 is a new expressive Synthesizer that is inspired by the legendary Trautonium. You won’t find a classic keyboard with white and black keys in the Sound Workshop Flexur T2.
It uses two Trautonium-inspired floating touch bars that offer a different feel and experience when playing. Even an experienced keyboardist will encounter something new here.
It’s somewhat like putting someone in front of a Moog Theremin, but I imagine this one is way more accessible and easier to learn.
The touch bars enable continuous control of volume, pitch, and modulation. The user interface for the synth engine is straightforward, and I suspect it’s digital, like the Wiggle’s. It has a streamlined knob per function layout that makes it easy to play and tweak sounds at the same time.
Flexur T2 has an oscillator section, which likely includes multiple oscillators, since it’s called “oscillators” and there is a mixing slider.
Tone and “textures” parameters give you tweakability over them. Then there is a section that combines a filter and a VCA, which could be a low-pass gate. In addition to classic cutoff and resonance controls and a VCF/VCA mixer, there are two other controls.
One makes the sounds plucky, similar to low-pass gates, and the other adjusts the VCAs’ sensitivity (push) or, more precisely, the behavior of the first floating touch bar, which controls the volume.
Next to this is an output section with volume control and a drive. You can refine your sounds using an effects processor with pepper-and-salt controls.
Unique Modulators
The two floating touch bars make the Sound Workshop Flexus T2 a unique instrument. They allow highly expressive sound play and are also a key part of the modulation engine.
First, you have a loopable envelope with an ADR characteristic with velocity. This determines the basic structure of the sound.
Things get more interesting with the white buttons, each with a different function: push, pluck, pitch… Some of them are associated with the gestures you make with the floating touch bars and can be used as a modulation signal.
This incorporates modulation into your playing, making it very expressive. A dedicated 6×12 modulation matrix on the left and buttons on the right allow you to assign these modulators to parameters.
Further, you can change the root notes and the voicing (incl. polyphonic) on the user interface. All these settings can be saved in presets.
Control External Signals
Expressive Synthesizer, yes, but it’s also an expressive MIDI & CV instrument.
According to Sound Workshop, Flexur T2 will feature dedicated CV outputs (pitch, gate, push, envelope) and two expression/gate inputs, allowing you to control your favorite analog synths.
Plus, it will have USB-C and TRS MIDI input and output with MPE support, so you can also control any digital instrument. The final version also includes full-sized balanced instrument cable jacks.
Sound Workshop Flexur T2 First Impression
I find it very welcome and exciting that Chris from Sound Workshop is taking a completely different approach to developing musical instruments. See Wiggle, Quord, or now the Flexur T2. Each of these is unlike any traditional synth that you might have seen before in another form.
Flexur T2 looks like a very exciting upcoming Synthesizer that places a lot of emphasis on playability rather than a trillion features. I’m curious about the final product and how expressively it can be played.
Sound Workshop Flexur T2 is currently under development and is in prototype status. You can support the project by pre-ordering it on the official website for $1380, down from $1480, as a fundraiser. Shipping will take 6-24 months, says Sound Workshop.
More information here: Sound Workshop
I don’t understand the lack of business sense here at all. I bought the Linnstrument overlay from this company before, so I have some interest in them, but they seem to be incredibly bad at business. Outside of the Linnstrument cover, which is a simple and inexpensive item, these guys just want to keep collecting money without actually releasing much of anything.
Does anyone actually have a Quord? The Wiggler is only in testing — allegedly. And now they want $1,380 for a product that does not have a single demo and will be allegedly be available in this incredibly wide range of 6-24 months, which basically is meaningless.
Just as a consumer, this is insulting to me. The attitude here is — “Just give us, as an unknown entity, your money for an unknown product and we’ll give it to you at an unknown time.”
Sound Workshop is a one-man company and doesn’t sell in big quantities or to big retailers.
I can buy one Quord on my local second hand market so yes, Chris shipped it.
That’s fine. I’m not accusing him of fraud. I just figure that if you’re going to be asking people for this kind of money on a product, you should at least have a more definite timeline for completion and should have video demos of what you’re trying to sell. The Instagram link in here doesn’t even work, and there’s no video of this anywhere else.
that’s a problem of IG compatibility with my backend. The video works fine on Instagram
Yup, I see it now. Thanks for fixing that.
Chris here from Sound Workshop. Totally reasonable response. Just wanted to share that I shipped 35 Quords and 550 LinnStrument surfaces. It wasn’t until shipping about 300 surfaces that somebody made a nice YouTube video about it, so Quord hasn’t popped up much on the internet since I shipped it.
Quord had some mechanical and analog design inefficiencies that make it difficult to build, so I paused production. It needs a design spin before making more, but I haven’t gotten to that yet because it’s a side quest/learning experience. The main quest has always been to make a standalone expressive synth.
In this video I described how I pivoted from Wiggler to Flexur because I realized that sliding between notes is very important for vocal melodies. https://youtu.be/MI9AiFhuldU
I feel pretty good about Flexur shipping in 9 months, however I put 6-24 months to set the expectation that it can take longer if we run into obstacles, I’ll add some more clarity to the product page.
Here are some demos of Flexur. The crowdfunding effort escaped my email list sooner than expected. Catching up now.
https://youtu.be/MI9AiFhuldU
https://youtu.be/2KdcxLxFh8g
the prototypes look better than the finished design. I’d refine the square look of the prototype a little further and go with that.
Thank you Chris for that thoughtful response to some incredibly entitled w*nkers. I think it is important to hold makers, creators, companies accountable. However we also have to be aware that a 1 person operation is just that. A difficult enterprise unlike any other.
You have a distinct design language, don’t lose that.
Some will like it others will tear it apart
I apologize for the bluntness, but I want to be honest about my first impression and reaction to this.
It looks less like a synth and more like a piece of copy and paste Instagram living room decor
It’s clearly built for a very speciffic crowd and serves as a perfect match for that millennial pastel ‘aesthetic crime of good taste.’
This thing has that distinct Instagram/Etsy product photo energy where everything is aggressively soft washed and has that people pleasing look.
Sorry to be this hard to that product while the floating touch bar concept is actually great, the color choices, price point, and feature set feel like a bit of a red flag to me.
Perhaps it would be wiser to take the TINRS route and sell just the keyboard interface as a development platform for other manufacturers who can expand on the concept.
Right now, it feels slightly half baked and overpriced risking becoming just another boutique toy that pops up in the synth bubble, fades away after two years, and only resurfaces as a background gimmick in a YouTube video five years from now
Then again, what do I know? I’m probably just an uncultured idiot shouting at clouds, so feel free to ignore my absolute clueless hot take
Actually I don’t think you’re a w*nker, I think you’re totally right! Just because it’s difficult being a small business means we should be unaccountable. I do feel that it’s pretty early for me to be asking for funding assistance. In this case I’m asking people to trust me, and also looking for people who want to help it exist and are willing to take on some risk to help it become a reality. I added a few paragraphs to the product page clarifying the risk.
Right, except I was trying to provide you some shield from the criticism, yet it seems you would rather pander. And accountability is more important than ever, however my point was that it seems to be much more convenient to pick the little guy/gal for some than actually hold the much larger companies to account.
Fair, thanks Sarah. I guess I’m coming from a bias of trying to avoid being the typical businessowner in the comments who is too chipper and saying “don’t worry about anything everythings fine!”. Actually ya some of the comments made about the look of the product were not productive.
I find this instrument very inspiring. I soundtrack astronomy videos and have a lot of synths, but I don’t have anything with the expression that I want. I’ve looked at wind controllers and other devices and the best I saw was the Haken Continuum, but it was very expensive. When I saw the Flexur I immediately recognized the workflow from Hainbach’s video about the Trautonium. This is exactly the right interface and feature set for me. I pre-ordered and am happy to wait awhile for this to become a reality. My best of luck to Chis in this endeavour. I am happy to support someone’s dream of making the instrument they envision in their heart and mind, and thankful they are willing to share it with others.