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By far the thing that has occupied my mind the most is ‘tone’. By tone, I mean the overall timbre (wiktionary, if you should be so chumpish) of the sounds, individual sounds and the complete mix. Examples of fine tone to my ear are
Wumpscut: “Bunketor Sieben”
Marilyn Manson: “Antichrist Superstar”
Haus Arafna: “Blut”
Infected Mushroom: “Classical Mushroom”
RZA’s work on the first two Wu-Tang albums.
Those discs have probably been some of my biggest influences. I don’t mean to say I like everything those artists did, most of them have fell off the pony since those releases. I also know that for a lot of these releases the ‘tone’ was as much defined by studio engineers and mastering, the titles are just meant as examples, not cocksucking.
To modern ears, all of those albums have poor production in one way or another, but me they all capture something in the sound that is special. There is a common denominator in all those discs, or at least an amalgamation I have formed in my scattered mind, that is sonic perfection.
My aesthetic is way off the money these days. It is the antithesis of the modern face slapping compression and crispy clear highs. Of course, I like it dark and dirty, but more importantly, I like it is hissy, hummy, scratchy and with those mysterious wobbly-warbling-fluttery-sounds I love.
Nobody seems to understand the term “wobbly-warbling-fluttery-sound”, so I have decided to take the honors and give it a proper name. It will be hence known “kongism” seeing as I seem to be the only one able to hear them, or want to make them, and I have a bit of a colonial streak in me. I don’t mean to take credit for the sound, I only mean to steal the credit, and I think I’m morally ok with that.
Anyway, all the hiss, hum, scratch and kongism sums to an overall sound that probably exists only in my head, but I do hear bits and pieces of it around in reality, and occasionally capture a piece of it myself.
Aside from the actual music being written, ie. melody, harmony, structure, I have gone through a world of different paths to get the tone I want, but have never quite made it. Starting with obscure Direct X plugins from my impoverished days in the early 00s, various cpu devouring softs that did their best to emulate analog inconsistencies, to the mighty Minimoog Voyager, which is analog and inconsistent, but still not quite right. It is not to say no good music came along the way, or that any of the mentioned gear was bad, but I have never happy with the tone I was getting.
This inflated, narcissistic introduction is supposed to lead to a review of the Sherman Filterbank 2, but to segue at this point in the article would make it sound like the Filterbank was the magic answer to the world’s woes, which it isn’t, but it is pretty damn close. At the end of the article I will give my usual list of gripes ie. why it isn’t quite the magic answer to the world’s woes, but really I want to point out the way the FB is special compared to all the other gear.
From what I can tell, as an end user only, it comes down to design philosophy.
The Filterbank is built around everything that other manufacturers seek to avoid. Case in point, the Filterbank manual has an awesome line in it, which doesn’t initially appear that awesome, until given some thought. To quote, “In low frequency settings, a week ‘eee’ sound can occur… audible as a crossing over between both filters”. That certainly doesn’t sound too awesome, the idea actually sounds pretty damn annoying, until you actually hear it, which is probably why other reviewers haven’t slammed it for it. The Filterbank actually has a lot more idiosyncratic, glitchy or bizarre behaviors lurking under its conventionally bureaucratic gray exterior than just the occasional ringing ‘eee’ sound.
In fact, if you are buying this thinking you will get some stock sweeps happening, think again. Even on the plainest settings, the Filterbank exudes unpredictable noises. Once the more complex modulations, slopes and resonance kick in, turning that cutoff wheel up won’t just be ‘opening’ the sound, it will be transforming it into something new. Some settings will make the sound hiss, others will make it scratch or give some of the coveted kongism, or any combination thereof, and that is how it catches the dragon like nothing else I have heard.
Most producers will tell you hiss is bad, hum is bad, scratches are bad, and that they have no idea what kongism is, but it is also very bad. They will scold you for living in the 21st century and wanting those things in your ultra-transparent 2x CD quality recordings. After all, we spent a good part of the last century trying to get those things out of our recordings. I was born in the latter part of the last century. I take crystal clear recordings for granted, and I want some real analog dirt, not the new school of crystal clear analog ‘dirt’ sweeping the audio market.
A larger company would lock their engineers back in the lab to get rid of that “eee” sound. They would scratch their beards and do whatever engineers do to make sure the cross over between filters doesn’t become audible. At the same time they would inadvertently kill a good part of the filters character, but in the companies mind a dead filter is better than a filter with an ‘eee’ issue, so a dead filter is what you get. It would be truly analog, it would be advertised as truly analog, you would want it because it is truly analog, and it would probably sound no better than any half decent digital filter. Forget leaving any hiss or any scratch in the design, that isn’t 21st century. And that mysterious kongism sound would probably get the engineer’s feet tied to heavy bag of kittens and tossed into a river.
I don’t really blame the manufacturers. They have to bend to a market that demands analog ‘warmth’ but with digital predictability. This is a market that demands voltage controlled oscillators stay perfectly in tune, yet won’t buy anything with digitally controlled oscillators out of misguided principle (DSI… ahem). The engineers have done their given job well, and now we have true analog synths that often sound more stable than their digital counterparts, yet only marginally less sterile.
Instead of doing their best to tame the circuits, the Filterbank revels in everything that is ‘bad’ about analog equipment. After ten years of chasing the dragon with digital audio, I can appreciate how amazingly cool this is. Thanks to Herman for sticking it to the man and making this box.
Now, for some small objections (if you wanted a proper review, you should gone to a proper tech site, silly, though the following in boorishly techy).
- The tube gets into audible distortion often before the level is high enough to trigger the gate, even with the trigger being set to “sensitive”. The trigger problem can be worked around, but having the amount of drive being applied to the tube a little more tweakable or subtle would widen up the kinds of sounds the unit can process. I was hoping to be able to use this for some simple low-key tube processing, but that won’t be happening. Perhaps making the unit double as a tube processer would be the same as sorting out the filter cross over issue, by which I mean it would kill some of the magic for the sake of user friendly-ness.
- The sensitivity of the gate is on a three way switch. It would have been nice to have a pot here to sweep between ‘ridiculously sensitive’ to ‘ridiculously in-sensitive’. There are other options for triggering the gate through MIDI or CV, but that is fiddly and I am lazy. Also, I like pots.
- Quite a few of the pots are notched to centre positions. On some, this makes sense, such as the mid point between sending + or – modulation to the cutoffs. On others, it is just weird. The craziest ones are having it on the LFO and the input level. The LFO is supposedly notched at the point the frequency gets high enough to become an audible pitch. I don’t see how this is necessary, due to me having ears and all. The input one is more bizarre. Seeing as it will be tweaked according to the input material and desired drive, where it is relative to the centre point of the pot, or whether it is being cut or boosted is irrelevant. The real issue with these pots is that if you want a value very close to the notch, the knob will sometimes slip into the notch by itself.
- All of the three way switches are vertical, except for the LFO shape/trigger switch which moves horizontally. This is easy to forget and begging for a confused heavy hand to break it by pushing hard up or down, rather than right or left.
- Overall the pots feel a little cheap, or at least not as good as something that sounds so good should have. This especially so for the harmonics dial, which is so bad I don’t want to touch it. Sherman themselves (or himself) say that 99% of faulty Filterbanks are from bad pots… doesn’t that figure strongly suggest something to you? I know it would increase the price, but I would rather pay the extra dough now for something that will last longer.
- The MIDI control is annoyingly flexible. You can tweak the MIDI controlled parameters manually at the same time as they receive MIDI, meaning the real value of the parameter is somewhere between the MIDI CC and the actual front panel position. Everyone seems to think it is cool, but I hate it. I want MIDI to trump front panel every time, because if I am using MIDI it is only because I don’t want to record something with live tweaking. “Keep your grotty hands off the knobs then” I hear you say. Well, I would, but the side-effect of this is the 0-127 doesn’t seem to sweep through the full values of the pot. Worse, the front panel position of the knob, even without tweaking, changes the max and min values of the MIDI range. Worst, I seem to get an audible jump when the MIDI CC passes through the point of the real knob position, which is frustrating enough that I even thought that my Filterbank might be faulty.
All that might seem excessive, but they are minor issues. If my Filterbank were lost or stolen, I would have a new one coming to me within the day, even if I had to do some bareback porn with a junkie transvestite to get the money together (No, that is not a Freudian invitation to come steal my Filterbank, I genuinely don’t want to do the tranny porn).
Oddly enough, I have not seen any youtube clips that do the Filterbank any justice. The best one I have seen is straight from the Sherman website, here.
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