The Knifonium is a hardware subtractive synthesiser which features 26 vacuum tubes as part of its circuit design. Being somewhat like an antique radio it has complex behaviours – sounds saturate and distort in complex but not entirely unpredictable ways and you would over time learn the quirks. It’s that which leads Knif to claim it to be ‘a musical instrument in a very traditional sense’ – an idea I think worth examining. He also says, ‘It sounds like nothing else.’ That, I will challenge.
The construction of this thing (valves! polished wood!) will cost you around $17,500 + tax. But it keeps selling out. That could be due to the sound – but here comes a virtual Knifonium made by Brainworx in Germany – ‘and Jonte Knif confirms that it sounds and behaves just like the real thing’. For a discount of $17,200 you can have a Knifonium with 8 times the voices, patch memories, extra effects and tweaks… and I guess the price difference is in the scarcity of the polished wood. Is this also ‘a musical instrument in a very traditional sense’? Of course.
Actually $300 is only the sucker price. You do some dealing and the price comes down to $99, which I paid, because I am your humble servant in synthesiser bullshit detection. But then I also paid the princely sum of $5 for a much older ‘vacuum tube-based’ synthesiser – AIR’s Vacuum Pro. Which I am pretty sure also lies in that ‘traditional sense’, because every grunt, gronk and shag that comes out of the one comes out of the other.
Let me explain the gronk. Both are subtractive synthesisers. Oscillators are mixed together, with optional ring modulation and sync, passed through one or more filters and amps and out to the ears. There are thousands of similar synthesisers, but these two have an essential difference under the hood. Take for example the tedious and insipid AAS Ultra Analog. I love AAS physical modelled synthesisers to death, but their Ultra Analog is simply a couple of oscillators fed into a filter which can then have a bit of burn added in. Same goes for Steinberg’s better Retrologue. But Knifonium and Vacuum Pro follow the idea that audio signal can overwhelm each part of the modelled circuit, the oscillator can hurt the filter, the filter can hurt the amp and the whole thing can swirl back again causing more insult. Like water sloshing around in a bath, it’s anywhere, everywhere and whoopsie-daisy.
Possibly Knifonium really does use a model of the whole system based on the behaviour of the hardware. If so, it’s not immediately apparent especially from the uninspired presets. My own adventures seem to locate the pain in the gains of each synthesis stage with some small gestalt – for example in the feedback modulation. Instead Vacuum Pro explicitly places a vacuum tube visual in each synthesis stage which glows more fiercely as the volume goes up. Both instruments respond to the kind of tricks I play with my own (cheap) hardware but in different ways.
Rather than copying a limited hardware instrument, Vacuum Pro uses all the advantages of virtuality – two complete sounds can be layered (plus an annoying ‘doubling’ effect that needs to be turned off), quad oscillators with delay feedback which adds lovely overtones, continuous waveform morphing, synch, dual filters with complex crossings, dirt, warble and the ‘vacuum tube burning’ of each stage of synthesis. All of this quickly overwhelms the novice who complains the instrument is overcooked. AIR now sells it as a stocking stuffer, but I honestly think that for $5 or sometimes less you are getting ‘a musical instrument’ that takes time and patience but will reward you for it. For its part Knifonium is also a better analogue synthesiser than most, but don’t overpay for the virtual wood.
Great commentary