Vaco Loco - Zira Mono Synth Built With Korg Chips

US Zira Mono and GorF Sequencer 16/07/13

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Got a call from Paul Maddox - he's involved in organizing the excellent Cambridge Synth DIY meetup - we attended this a few years back (actually it was at least five years!) - it was a blast.

Paul has just made some of his hand built machines available. First up is Zira, a monophonic, 2 Osc synth which uses Korg NJM2069 VCF/VCA filter chips - these the same type used in the Korg DW6000/8000 and DSS1.

It has two digital oscillators, each with 48 waveforms, there's a single sub oscillator, two ADSRs, an LFO and some complex modulation. It's a wonderful sounding 4 pole, 24dB/oct VCF with built in VCA.

It also comes with 64 patch memories.

Also from Paul (aka Vaco Loco) is the GorF mini MIDI 8 Step sequencer which has just had a fairly major OS update.

GorF is a small, MIDI, analogue style step sequencer, but with a lot of extra features;

you've got 8 steps, each step can have a different note, velocity, Step length and you can send up to two CC's per step.

Gorf comes with 64 sequence memories. you can chain two of these to give you 16 step sequences.

There's also a unique 'bank play' mode that gives you a performance mode where you can play sequences on the fly and change the number of repeats before it skips to the next, making it a very powerful performance too.