Ciat-LonbardeTetrax Organ Wooden Analog Touch Synthesizer

Ciat-Lonbarde Tetrax Organ

Considered to be the bass counterpart to Sidrax, Ciat-Lonbarde's Tetrax is a touch-based analog synthesizer with wooden bars, banana jacks, and, of course. a tendency to veer into uncharted sonic territories. The wooden bars contain piezos installed underneath them, which allow for a unique sort of pressure sensitivity—not like the constant signals of capacitive touch, but rather producing signals based on changing pressure and movement of the player's hands. These piezo-bars in turn control the amplitude of a dedicated oscillator, which may have its pitch set via the associated slider.

While Sidrax's oscillators create sweet triangle waves that can be patched into harsher timbres, Tetrax pushes richer waveforms right out of the gate. This difference comes down to the fact that, unlike Sidrax, Tetrax offers separate global pitch controls for the rising and falling portions of the triangle wave. This allows for all manner of ramp, sawtooth, and triangle waveforms to be created. Interestingly, Tetrax also offers separate chaos controls for the rise and fall of the oscillators, allowing for cyclical, cascading frequency modulation and feedback on only one portion of the waveform.

Patchable Ciat-Lonbarde instruments use banana jacks, and Tetrax offers a colorful array of 28 different patch points to conjure up different sounds. In this case, the jacks follow a simple color scheme: hot colors are outputs (red and orange), and cold colors are inputs (blue, green, and grey). Each column corresponds to one of the four oscillators within Tetrax, and the jack positioning rotates to facilitate different convenient patching arrangements. Additionally, the grey inputs at the top correspond to the two global pitch controls on the left, and the two chaos controls on the right.

While you might think that six patch points per oscillator is not a lot, Tetrax will surprise you with the variety of patches that it can create. By taking the oscillator output from the red jack, and patching it into another's blue frequency input, the clangorous sounds of FM are easily achieved. Each oscillator also contains two "glitch" inputs on green jacks, creating sync-like and reset-like sounds depending on the patch. In tandem with the orange jacks, which produce the press and release piezo signals, a world of dynamic and interactive patches is ready to be explored.

Small but mighty, Ciat-Lonbarde's Tetrax is a force to be reckoned with.

Tetrax Organ Features

• 4-note analog synthesizer
• Pressure sensitive wooden bars with piezos inside
• Global rise/fall pitch and chaos controls
• Ramp, triangle, and sawtooth waveforms acheived based on global settings
• Tuning slider per bar
• 28 patch points
• FM and two glitch inputs per voice
• Audio output and press/release CV outputs per voice
• Grey inputs for rise/fall pitch and chaos
• Side-mounted banana jack for common ground
• TRS minijack stereo output