Tempest

Tempest was my idea of a dream synth, it was to have the following features

The synth is broken down into three main parts,

  1. The Voice Card, which holds the filter, oscillators, EGs and LFOs
  2. Controller Card, which handles midi, voice assignment and patch storage
  3. Front Panel card, which handles the rotary encoders, pitch wheels, etc, etc

I began the design and had a case made, got the voice card working and begun work on the panel, when I got chatting with Axel Hartmann (I owned a Neuron at the time) and when I said I was working on something new, but had no money to finance it, he suggested we work together. I mailed him some of my ideas and some MP3s of the single voice I had built.I was to design and build the guts of the synth and he'd do the case/panel and market it under the Hartmann brand. This suited me just fine! He came up with several designs, and in the end the design you see above was based on some thoughts I had (layout of the oscillators) mixed with his ideas and using the parts he had already had made for the Neuron, including the sticks and knobs.

We went through the whole design phase, I built prototype boards and tried to keep the cost as low as we possibly could, as I knew cost would be a major issue.In the end the downfall was that I wanted to keep all the post processing analogue. This meant a relatively high cost to manufacture. Which, in turn, meant a high end user cost. The figure we arrived at was around £3200 for the market. When we did a survey of people and the price they'd be willing to pay for such a beast, 95% of them said less than £2200.

So the project has sat idle since this date. I've got the bits for two voices and my own case, so maybe one day I'll finish it. I'd like to finish it, but time and money may mean it never gets any further than just a pile of parts.

There are more pictures for your to see, just click on the gallery page. There's also some sounds for you to listen to on the sounds page.