Discovering this awesome instrument
I spent about 6 month looking at videos about this unusual analog synth. I was especially attracted by the patch bay and the sound of the oscillators, but also by the really musical sounds people managed to get out of it. I finally decided to buy one in December.
Tuning the beast
The machine was soon on my desk, I unboxed it and plugged it right away. But what a bummer, the synth was not tuned, the intervals between the notes were not correct, how comes?
Hopefully, I easily found out the tuning manual on the Dreadbox web site. I took a screwdriver and all my courage to open the beast and follow the instructions...
4 small screws to tune the two oscillators.
- Scale VCO1
- Tune VCO1
- Scale VCO2
- Tune VCO2
It was finally quite easy as only the VCO1 scale had to be adjusted. Everything was fine again ;-)
The patch bay
I spent quite a lot of time trying to find some documentation on how to creatively use the patch bay, But the best advice I found was to experiment by myself, so I did.
I already had some additional cables (I use with my Arturia Microbrute) to split the modulation sources. The VCO2 and M2 sources are the most obvious ones, and I quickly got some interesting results. In the above example I did the following routing:
- M2 -> PW
- M2 -> REV
- VCO2 -> VCF
A jam with a lot of echoes ;-)
I captured this jam yesterday. My Novation Circuit was a perfect controler for the Nyx. I use my Moog Slim Phatty for the bass and the Elektron Analog Keys for the pad.
The EHX Memory Man with Hazarai echo pedal adds a river of sweet echoes on the Nyx sound, love it!
A track!
As usually when I have a new gear, it makes me write a few songs. Here is a first one. The Dreadbox Nyx perfectly complement my good old Moog Slim Phatty. I just love how they sing together in the Chorus (starting at 2'45").