Turbocharge KORG’s Prologue synth with Sinevibes

Synth hot-rodding? Earlier this year, KORG introduced the notion of their synth as extensible platform, by adding an SDK for their Prologue polysynth. The only question was, what would developers do with it – and now we get one answer.
Sinevibes, the small shop of Ukrainian developer Artemiy Pavlov, has been known for clever, elegant Mac plug-ins (even if there’s a lot more). But Artemiy has decided to embrace hardware as one of the first developers for KORG’s Prologue synth. And the results are unique and lovely, letting you transform the oscillators on KORG’s instrument with new spectrally satisfying waveshaping oscillators.
Basically, it’s a plug-in for your hardware.
Here’s what you get:

Juicy, edgy wavetables are the order of the day. Specs from Sinevibes:

Two sine oscillators with variable balance, frequency ratio and beating frequency.
Five different waveshaping algorithms with continuously variable curve complexity.
Built-in lag filters for noise-free, ultra-smooth parameter adjustment and modulation.
Built-in envelope generator with widely adjustable attack and decay times (1 ms to 10 s).

Check it out, or buy it for just US$29, with full manual and example patches:

It’s interesting – we live in a music tech industry that benefits from small scale and diversity. Now, this model is well known in Apple’s App Store, but sure enough that hasn’t necessarily been a no-brainer for independent music developers. So, instead, we see creative music engineers developing for Eurorack (which frees them of the burden of making complete enclosures and power supplies, and lets them interoperate with an ecology of a bunch of manufacturers). Or we see them continuing to see plug-in development as paying for their time – especially with new opportunities like those afforded by software modular environments. And now KORG are in the game with hardware plug-ins.
What’s changed in part is the expectation of reducing development overhead but targeting more varied platforms. So you might make a plug-in for a software modular (VCV Rack, Cherry Audio Voltage Modular), and port it as a Rack Extension for Reason, and then ship the same algorithm for use on KORG’s hardware – or some other combination.
It’s encouraging, though, that in a world where consolidation rules, music tech remains weird and fragmented. A company like KORG will ship a lot of synths – but it’s great that they might also support a tiny or one-person developer, by letting their users’ customize their instrument to their liking. And it means you get a Prologue that might be different than someone else’s.
Previously:
KORG has a polyphonic Prologue synth – and it’s programmable

KORG are about to unveil their DIY Prologue boards for synth hacking

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