Lloyd Stellar's Homepage, with electro music, free music tools, retro games and a Wunderkammer

The disc itself, with the alchemist printed on it

The CD comes in a jewel case with an 8 page booklet. The front is the same fake 1989 car phone advert as the download, so on paper it still costs $125.00 including a free suit and telephone. The real price is €12.50, without the suit.

The six tracks of the EP stay a free download on Bandcamp, as before. The bonus tracks, Doomscrolling and Time is, Time was, Time is past, are only on the CD and will not turn up as a download later. The samples in Time is, Time was, Time is past come from the Brazen Head in my Wunderkammer.

Order it on Bandcamp, or look at the CD on my releases page first.

Preset 1, Deep Vocoder: my version of an old patch called WP Vocoder

The Micro Modular is a virtual analog modular synth from the late 1990s. You can patch almost anything on it, but I only use mine for its vocoder, because to my ears no other vocoder sounds this good. I spent a long time rebuilding it as exactly as I could, without reusing any of Clavia's code: the same 16 bands and the same fixed-point arithmetic, small flaws included. A switch called HARDWARE adds a model of the Micro's own input and output converters.

Then I converted the vocoder patches from my Micro Modular into 21 presets: patches I downloaded from the internet long ago and my own. Each one has seven knobs and a Morph knob, like a Nord with a patch loaded.

There is a three-minute sound demo on the Syd Vocoder page, along with the downloads, the setup for Ableton Live, the install steps and the manual.

The new panel, like the control desk of a Cold War nuclear power station

The new version got a new face: the control desk of a Cold War nuclear power station, in olive-green steel with heavy black knobs, red warning lamps, a Nixie tube readout and two VU meters. Every label is in English with the Russian one underneath.

The generator now has a saw, square or triangle wave, a zap section and a sub oscillator one or two octaves down. After the comb filter comes a low-pass or band-pass filter, and the effects are a chorus or flanger, a BBD delay and an alien reverb.

The Mac version is a universal build for Apple Silicon and Intel, for macOS 10.13 or later. It is not notarised by Apple, so the install steps include two lines for Terminal. The downloads and the steps for both systems are on the More Lasers page, and old links to Lloyd's Lasers take you there too.