Robbie

Every instrument you hear, the orchestra included, is a Robbie sound, played from a written score by the same engine you will run.

Lantern Sky is Robbie’s dream, a slow waltz that belongs on a music box. Phantasia Electronica is ten minutes in six movements: Robbie arrives in an empty house, and the ghost of an old composer writes his fantasy for it.

Two oscillators and a sub, a multimode filter with its own envelope and a resonant high pass in front of it, three envelopes, two LFOs, Poly Mod, a modulation matrix, saturation, chorus, two delays and a reverb. Four of these can run at once as separate parts, which is what the Soundscapes use: one key, four instruments.

The oscillators are band limited, so a saw stays a saw at the top of the keyboard. Nothing steps when you turn it, and changing preset with a key held cannot click.

Every factory sound is programmed as a performance rather than a snapshot. Velocity opens the filter, aftertouch leans on the cutoff and brings in the vibrato, the mod wheel is one escalation, and the touch ribbon along the front edge is the wild card.

A list of parameters makes you configure. A plate with knobs on it makes you reach out and turn one, and then you have lost an hour. That hour is the entire point.

Room, hall, plate and spring. The hall started from a measurement of a real reverb tail, two and a half seconds in the mids, then voiced warmer than the room it came from, with thirty-two delay lines of prime lengths keeping the tail dense and smooth.

Pads, strings, plucks and bells place every note in its own spot across the stereo field. Bass, leads and drums stay in the middle, where a mix wants them.

Sixteen groups, a Signature bank of forty-eight made by hand, and the four-part Soundscapes. They come in banks of twelve, played from the twelve keys above the ribbon, and every preset carries a line telling you what it is for. Fifty of them, drawn at random, are on this site.