Overview
At first glance, you could mistake the PEK for a piece from Mark Vail’s Vintage Synths department. A closer look reveals that this is no mass-produced axe: High-quality materials and precise fit and finish are coin of the realm. Virtual analogs and many affordable MIDI controllers have let us take knobs for granted once again, but this baby uses one knob per function almost all the way down. Nothing out there is more immediate when it comes to getting your hands on your sound.
Here’s a quick look at the engine — refer to our October ’04 issue for more thorough treatment. An Evolver voice is really its own mono synth. That synth’s two analog oscillators are real, not virtual. Then, there’s a proudly digital pair kicking out waveforms from mellow to crystal-shimmery to raspy ’n’ rude. On both analog and digital sides, one oscillator is hardwired left; the other right. This makes for head-engulfing stereo separation, but everything can be summed to mono. An output pan knob means you don’t have to reach for your mixer to reduce, reverse, or fold down the stereo field.
The VCA and lowpass filter are also chambers in Evo’s analog heart, but its digital brains handle the rest of the signal path, including highpass filter, tuned feedback (literally feedback whose pitch you can determine), distortion, and delay. This means even the analog oscs go through a stage of internal A/D conversion before making it to the outputs. Purists be assured: I listened critically alongside a gen-u-wine Prophet-5, and the sound is not an issue. Frankly, the PEK was fatter. Still, digital I/O would be a welcome addition for digital audio workstation users who want to keep it all in that domain.
Many synths offer deep and flexible modulation choices, but the PEK stands out for sheer ease of making those choices. Sections with “destination” knobs — just grab and assign — include a free-floating extra envelope, four LFOs, and the “modulators,” where you give jobs to MIDI controls like wheels, aftertouch, or pedals. Virtually any parameter is fair game — try oscillator pulse width for subtle-to-dramatic timbral variation.
Sequencer
It may be the same as the Poly rack’s internally, but Holy Retro, Batman, this is much more fun. There are four tracks, (step-based, not the “workstation” kind), allowing complex counterpoints to be played. Twist 16 knobs to determine the note played at each step, or record steps from the keyboard. One of many trigger modes is arpeggiator-like, gating and transposing the sequence from the keyboard, and the clock can be divided into meters from half notes to “swing” eighths to 64th-note triplets.
Last month, I raved about the Roland V-Synth’s step modulator, a sequencer for automating sound parameters. The PEK does much the same thing, since each track can send events to any destination. For digital oscillators, that includes the wave shape itself, inviting all manner of rhythmic, percolating wave-sequencing.
In Use
Electronica star BT, who’d been using a PEK on the soundtrack to the film Stealth, dropped me a line to say, “This thing reminds me why soft synths still suck and analog still rules the world.” Now I know he’s enjoyed a soft synth or three, but taking Evo to a gig with my cover band, I got no less emotional about the technology. For innocuous pads that wash around other sounds as opposed to over them like a wave, use a ROMpler or virtual analog synth. (It was said the Prophet was “not a pad machine” in its day, too.) While the PEK certainly can do gentle, lilting textures, even the mellowest had undeniable density and authority next to my other synths, and I don’t mean subtly. The difference grabbed me by the lapels. For stuff I wanted to stand out, like the sawtooth noodle on Rick James’ “Give it to Me Baby,” or the main comp through Prince’s “DMSR,” it was like discovering those tunes’ essential grease for the first time.
In the studio, I wanted to see how exotic the digital side could get. Factory waves duplicate the Prophet VS, right down to their high-end aliasing, but get this: Beginning in Logic’s sample editor (any will work), I took a slice of pipe organ, made 16 copies, and carved different harmonics out of each. Then, using Darren Richards’ free “Wave Dump” utility (Mac or PC) from DSI’s website, I dragged-n-dropped ’em into the PEK, where they became digital waveshape options. Setting up the sequencer to step through them, I used two tracks to split odd and even steps between oscillators, then synced up the LFO’s for crossfades: as one osc’s volume increased, the other decreased. The result was this haunting, ever-morphing thing that could’ve come off some six-figure digital megasynth of the ’80s. All this before even touching the analog side . . . slide my meds under the door and leave us alone.
The process required some care. Each WAV file must be exactly 128 samples long at 16-bit/44.1Khz. It’s therefore not practical to turn Evo into a ROMpler for playing piano or drum loops, but anyone suggesting that should have their mouth washed out with soap anyway.
For editing, soloing an oscillator, LFO, or sequencer track by holding down its button was a huge convenience, as was the “compare” function: Besides A/B-ing edited and unedited programs, I could audition the sound in any memory location I was about to save to. Vexations were minor: Displaying a parameter without changing its value required the tiniest brush of a knob; something like the Alesis Andromeda’s “view” buttons would address this. When editing, I was tempted to type values on the keypad, but only once, as this switched programs and lost my changes. Use the Param2 and +/- controls instead. Last, it didn’t bother me that most parameter values were simply 0–100, but some sound designers might want to see frequencies in Hz, levels in dB, and so forth.
Conclusions
It’s fair to say the price-to-polyphony ratio — not to mention craftsman quality — puts the PEK in the same “boutique” as Voyager and Andromeda. I’d add the Studio Electronics Omega line to the list, where four voices will run you $2,895 and eight are $4,495, appreciably more than an Evo keyboard-plus-rack. The 16-voice Andromeda is a good value that does “classic power-synth” stuff, but only Evo can do this and sound like nothing else, sometimes within the same program! Skeptics who insist that it’s too expensive just need to get an earful. It’s like a mint Prophet-5 plus a PPG Wave in a single reliable box that easily tucks under your arm and lights up like a night out on Coruscant.
As similar as the guts are, the keyboard’s vibe is as different from the Poly Rack as the rack was from the mono Evolver. The rack was a programmer’s instrument whose viscera-shaking sound commanded players’ attention. The PEK is a player’s axe whose layout programmers will flip for. Whichever you are, this is nothing less than a future classic and a major event in synth design.