Exodus Valkyrie

MUSIKMESSE 2018: While many synth manufacturers are saving up their new wares for the Superbooth show in May, Exodus Digital is choosing to launch its new Valkyrie instrument at Musikmesse, which kicks off on 11 April and runs until 14 April.

It looks a pretty juicy piece of hardware, too: Valkyrie is 8-part multitimbral and offers two groups of 32x oversampled oscillators per voice (the total number of oscillators is 1280) with hard sync, ring mod and FM. Dual PCM wavetables provide you with 4,096 waves, while the dual analogue ladder modelling filters come in 12 and 24bB flavours.

Other features include a modulation matrix, a stereo hypersaw, an arpeggiator, three EGs and three stereo LFOs with 64 shapes and MIDI sync. There’s a nine-module FX unit and Valkyrie offers 128 notes of polyphony.

Ambitiously, Exodus Digital has come up with its own hardware design and operating system for Valkyrie, stating that DSP chips are “obsolete technology from the ‘90s”. It uses less than 10W of power and can start up in less than four seconds, apparently. What’s more, we’re told that this will be a “mainstream synth that will launch at a mainstream price”.

Both rack and keyboard versions of the synth are in development, and we’re hoping to find out more later this week. As things stand, the only official information you can find online is on the Exodus Digital SoundCloud page.

Polyphony up to 128 voice channel + dual mode / dual filter patch
Up to 32 notes per multi-timbral part
Multi-timbrality (8 independent parts)
Audio stream via USB
Each part can be mixed to one of the 4 analogue stereo line outputs
2 oscillators groups per voice (sawtooth, pulse, wavetable and noise available simultaneously)
Each oscillator group also has an independent detunable suboscillator with four selectable shapes and two selectable pitches. Real Hard Sync, Ring Modulation and FM (frequency modulation) is available between the oscillator groups.
Hypersaw (6 or 12 real oscillator hypersaw)
Wavetables: 4096 18-bit linear PCM single-cycle oversampled wavetables
Filters: emulations of classic analog ladder filters: low pass, band pass and high pass configurations. 2-pole (12dB/octave) and 4-pole (24dB/octave) responses are available for all three filter types. A Patch can be configured to have linked or independent parallel filters.
3 fast-response ADSR envelope generators
3 LFO’s with 64 wavetable shapes: Monophonic, polyphonic, random, antiphase and quadrature phase settings.

6 channels with up to 3 destinations per channel.
Nine module stereo effects unit per Part with a 3-band shelving EQ, a Formant Filter, 5-mode Distortion module, dual Limiters, stereo Delay module, 6-stage Phaser, Chorus/Flanger module and a Reverb module. All 72 effects modules can be used simultaneously without affecting polyphony.
Arpeggiator with 128 preset patterns, chord mode, MIDI clock.
Arpeggiator with 128 preset patterns, chord mode, MIDI clock.
Patch storage: 3,328 in total all of which are user programmable.
Free Editor/Librarian app for Windows and Mac
Processing: 32x oversampled 32-bit hardware sound generation. 96kHz floating point sound processing.
Analogue outputs: 4 balanced stereo pairs using 32 bit DAC at 96kHz sample rate.
USB audio: USB Audio Class 2.0 – 8 stereo 24-bit streams at 96kHz with 48kHz down-sample mode available.
USB 2.0 and legacy (5-pin DIN connector) MIDI
Display: High resolution 256×64 pixel graphic OLED
Full keyboard microtuning capability with MIDI Tuning Standard (MTS) support.