Ciat-LonbardeSidrax Organ Wooden Analog Touch Synthesizer

Ciat-Lonbarde Sidrax Organ

Simple and open-ended yet full of mystery, Ciat-Lonbarde's Sidrax is a seven-note analog synthesizer with wooden touch bars, 44 banana jack patching points, and an embrace of cascading chaos and variable instability. The seven bars of Sidrax contain a piezo installed underneath, allowing for a particular variety of pressure sensitivity to control the amplitude of an analog oscillator. These bars also feature their own wide-ranging pitch tuning slider, which may be globally shifted by the coarse tuning knob at the left of the instrument. In typical Ciat-Lonbarde fashion, audio output is on a stereo mini-jack, with the press and release of each voice panning to opposite channels.

Like many of the other contemporary Ciat-Lonbarde instruments, Sidrax is wildly patchable with its colorful array of banana jacks. Ciat-Lonbarde's devices generally follow a coloring scheme where outputs utilize warm colors while inputs are on cool colors—in the case of Sidrax, this means red and orange, and blue, green, and grey respectively. All seven bars feature the same type of patch points, simply rotated across the instrument, and split across the middle three bars in the case of the middle-most oscillator. As you'll come to discover, this allows for easier patching of common configurations, like frequency modulation of one oscillator by another.

Without patching, simple but beautiful triangle waves are heard from each tuned bar, facilitating melodies, chords, and more. But try patching a red output into the blue input of the same channel—the frequency will drop down significantly, but this self-patched FM scheme creates sawtooth waveforms. In addition to the red audio output, each channel has two orange outputs for the touch bar's piezo press and release signals. In conjunction with the two green inputs, ambiguous "glitch" inputs, cascading patches where the bars and oscillators influence a chain of others are easily possible. We also recommend patching the black ground jack on the side into one or both of these glitch inputs—that jack is useful for much more than simply chaining banana instruments together to a common ground.

Even without using a single patch cable, there's one other way to create gritty sounds on Sidrax: the right Chaos knob. At minimum, this control has no influence on the sound, but turning it up begins to impart cascading frequency modulations as each oscillator is influenced by the left and itself affects the right. The soothing sounds of triangle waves will quickly dissolve into noise, grit, and rumbles, depending on both the global tuning and the pitch of each bar. And if you want to modulate this control, or the global pitch, the dedicated grey patch points on either side of the instrument affect their respective parameter.

Though the Cocoquantus and Plumbutter are perhaps the best known examples of Peter Blasser's singular style of designing instruments, Sidrax is known as a favorite by several veteran Ciat-Lonbarde aficionados. With any of these instruments, it's mandatory to give up some amount of control and expectation, but Sidrax may be the one that's most malleable to the whims of the player.

Sidrax Organ Features

• 7-note analog synthesizer
• Piezo-based pressure sensitivity
• Global pitch and chaos controls
• Triangle wave oscillators
• Tuning slider per bar
• 44 banana jack patch points
• FM and two glitch inputs per voice
• Outputs for audio and press/release voltages per voice
• Grey inputs for base pitch and chaos
• Banana jack on the side for common ground
• TRS minijack output