Madrona Labs say that  Virta, a new voice-controlled synthesizer will be released on Monday 28th March. Here's the story taken directly from the company's blog...

Virta was a set of ideas floating around since four years ago and a conversation I had with a producer friend of mine. He had been talking to another friend who we'll call DJ X, a person whose records I liked, with a room full of classic synths and a head full of musical ideas, but who nevertheless said what he was wanting most was to just sing and vocalize, play around with mouth sounds, and have that turned into music. This got me thinking about pitch detection and vocoders, and spectral analysis, and modulars...

So the project was in the back of my mind for a while, and there were lots of precedents. I have had lots of fun over the years putting voice and instruments and drum loops into synthesis boxes with pitch trackers. The Korg X-911 comes to mind as the most fun toy specifically designed for this. Its big brother the MS-20 is surely capable of a wider range, however. There's also the Roland SYB-3, a little "bass synthesizer" that was always flat and "bad digital" sounding but fun anyway. And, again from Boss / Roland, the RSD-10, a primitive digital delay/sampler with a pitch tracking control input, designed to let any keyboard control its (two second!) sample using sound as the interface. With a modern pitch detector and other analysis tools, and the patchable interface of Aalto to use, I knew I could make something fun in this department, capable of unlocking some new sounds.

After releasing Kaivo I decided that whatever this was, would be the next Madrona Labs product, and I started learning a lot about pitch detection, spectral analysis, and about the voice in general. Things I remembered from my linguistics classes in my first year of college were actually useful, which is always nice. I built software components like a compressor, pitch shifter, diffuser, vocoder, and periodicity and pitch detectors.

The name was hard. I went through ideas like voco (pretty much taken), kantos (taken), kantu (Esperanto for sing, sounds kind of wrong) and similar things and you know what? Voice and singing is a popular subject and anything good and short to do with it is probably snapped up already. So I started thinking laterally a bit, about the signal flow and patching, and virta came up almost immediately, and I knew it was right. It wraps up a trilogy with aalto and kaivo so nicely--in Finnish, aalto, kaivo and virta mean wave, well, and stream respectively. Virta also means stream in the sense of electrical current.

I've been having so much fun making patches for this friendly new monster. Though it's capable of wild new sounds, it also has a range of bread+butter, simple effects, and I hope that the patchable interface will make it a great tool to reach for in these less fabulous applications too. I'm excited to hear what you do with it.

Pricing and Availability:
Virta will be on sale from Monday March 28 for $89.

More information:

• Virta

• Madrona Labs Updates All Instruments 04-Oct-22
• Tweakable Reverb For Live Performance 27-Aug-19
• Semi-Modular Synth For Mac And Windows 06-Mar-14
• Kaivo Physical Modeling Synth From Madrona Labs 12-Nov-13
• Madrona Labs Updates Aalto Synth 08-Jun-11