Category: 
The Andromeda is big and heavy. It comes in a cardboard box so large that I couldn’t even fit it into a regular taxi and I remember having to wait for a taxi-wagon to get it home from the store.
For me, this is a stay-at home synth. I’ve only ever brought it out for gigs once - I had 2 Crystalline Effect gigs in one day in Sydney; one at a trendy cafe in the afternoon and one in a big club (the Gaelic Theatre) in the night. (Actually Kong was playing guest keys at both of these gigs - between the afternoon and night gigs we drank an entire bottle of Jose Cuervo and were pretty much passed out backstage at the Gaelic Theatre before showtime - oops) As great as the A6 looked onstage, it was really too much effort fretting about it and for essentially playing over a backing track, the 16-voice analogue engine was really overkill. Oh, and I brought it out one other time to shoot a Crystalline Effect film-clip for our track “When You’re Asleep”. Watch the clip here. The setting for that film clip is actually the boiler room of my old workplace. The building used to be a juvenile gaol (jail) and there are still holding cells downstairs. I made friends with the building maintenance guy through a mutual love of Kraftwerk and arranged to come in on a weekend, so we went in with instruments and shot some footage in the cool-as-fuck boiler rooms and holding cells.
There’s no real reason you can’t use the A6 onstage though, if you’re a braver man than I. In practical terms it’s only about as heavy as an Ensoniq ASR-10, for example, and it even has an incredibly bright blue LED on the back of it whose sole purpose is to let everyone in the audience know that you’re playing an A6 even if they’re too far away to read the logo (assuming they’re a total synth-geek who happens to know about the A6’s blue beam).
The thing is like the debris from a crashed spaceship taking up residence by my computer. It’s large stature is indicative of the larger-than-life sounds it creates, and it’s the out-of-this-world sounds that it does best. It sports 74 individual knobs on the surface which is intimidating to the newcomer, and it inspires you to create intimidatingly large sounds as a result.
Unfortunately (perhaps) this is at the expense of the ability to create bread & butter sounds. I find that I am hard-pressed to get it to do a typical trance lead stab sound (like the ones you’d find on a Vanguard or real Virus), and whenever I go to make a typical trance stab on the A6 I end up with something completely different, which I personally think is a good thing.
It can get a satisfying range of useful sounds though - the bassline on the Crystalline Effect track “Do Not Open” (my fave TCE track) is from my A6 and I still believe that’s immensely phat.
I’m at the point with my A6 where I know I still haven’t explored nearly all that it can do, but can get a pretty damn wide palette of sounds from it to make it extremely useful. It’s loaded with presets and I’ve recognised beats and arpeggiations lifted straight from A6 presets used extensively by Collide on their “Some Kind of Strange” album, as well as on Urceus Exit’s hit track “Metro”.
The unit has 16 analogue outputs, which is a feature I’ve never explored, having only ever used the main 2 outs. Due to the sheer polyphony that the A6 features, you can have each of the 16 voices assigned to a MIDI channel, and essentially have an entire song running 100% live, but for better or worse that isn’t how I roll - I like to work on one layer at a time and then record that into my DAW as audio.
Although having just typed that, it’s pretty inspiring now to create a live set wherein all 16 channels are running 100% live…hmmmm! Imagine that - a computer just sending 16 channels of pure MIDI information to the A6, and tweaking the layers live from the A6 - I shall give this some serious thought! Perhaps for an exclusive mix for download from this website in the future. Makes me wish I didn’t sell my 16 channel analogue mixing desk (actually no it doesn’t, that thing was well cumbersome..).
Anyway enough of that serious digression… To wrap up this write up here are some samples of the unit in action. Hope you enjoyed the anecdotes and feel inspired to grab an A6 if you see one - I’m certainly chuffed with mine. Between this (for the whacked out sounds), my Moog LP (for the staple sounds and serious basslines) and a copy of Z3ta (for the odd trance stab), I feel seriously sorted, synth-wise. Combined with a good sample collection that I’ve been collecting for about 12 years, you could lock me in my studio for the rest of my life and I will be a happy man.
Sample 001 - some spooky dronescapey stuff:
Sample 002 - a satisfying cutting lead sound from a new Shiv-r track in progress:
Recently:
- Shiv-r remix SAM
- Moogerfooger MF-107/Freqbox
- Moogerfooger MF-101/LPF
- “The End” - Filmclip launched!
- Interview: Cyber Angels
- New remixes by Soman, Reaper & XP8
- Shiv-r remix Freakangel
- Sexy Techno Party Time
- Massive press onslaught: Interviews in Orkus, Sonic Seducer, Negatief and more
- Acess Virus TI Desktop
