Airböurne Synthesizer System

flickr set by Brättli Airböurne
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You might remember the Airböurne from this post on my visit to Synthorama. Be sure to click on the Airböurne and Synthorama labels below for more.

Update you can see a video of the Airböurne modular here minus the sequencer. You can actually see the blank panel case of the sequencer at the start of the video.

New to the system is the Airböurne Sequencer AMS-496.

Update: Martin from Synthorama wrote in with more details. The Airböurne Synthesizer System will be shown at the Musikmesse at the Ghielmetti booth in hall 8, row H, booth 14. Martin will be there throughout the show. The following is some more detail on the sequencer:

"The sequencer has 4 independent tracks with up to 96 notes. You can place plugs in four different colours, corresponding to the four tracks. It is possible to place notes over 5 octaves. Every track you can also transpose 2 octaves down and 2 octaves up, so you have 9 octaves in total.

In the brown rows you can place white plugs if you want a gliding effect between the notes. You can choose every note of every track.

The red rows for Skip and Stop are not implemented yet. The red Repeat row allows to set an end of a melody, from where the sequencer repeats the melody.

The green Duration rows allow calibrated note lengths for every column. If you wish to have different note length at the same column for the tracks you must use the green Gate Hold rows for combining the note lengths.

The blue Volume rows allow to change the volume of every note of every track in 9 different levels. The blue Pan rows allow to define on which channel the notes will sound. You have the possibility to choose left, right, mono and random pan, for every note and every track. There are built in four independent pseudo random generators.

The white pitch rows are splittable in up to three independent sections. Here you can place up to three melodies. For every section you can define how many repeats (1 to 64) they have to run. So you can create small songs with three sections.

The internal beat generator counts from 20 bpm up to 300 bpm and the frequency you can alter with an external control voltage. With an externel quarter note clock the sequencer synchronizes in the limits between 10 bpm and 400 bpm. Later it will be possible to synchronize it via Midi clock (not implemented yet).

At rear you have the possibility to use the Pitch-CV, the Gate and the Trigger Outputs for every analogue synthesizer which uses 1 V/octave. The volume and pan signals are not available for analog synths because they are digital coded for the Airböurne Synth AVS-04 only.

On the exhibited model not all ist working perfectly.

Actually these malfunctions are known:
The bottom row (lowest C) of the pitch panel reacts not in the same column at the other rows.
The functions skip + and skip - are not working properly.
Sometimes some notes disappear or have the wrong pitch or note length. This is a timing error in one of the FPGAs.
The number of pitch plugs you can place on one row is limited, dependent of track, to 3 to 12 plugs.
The LSB digit of the internal beat generator will be only updated if the sequencer is in Repeat Mode :-) This is a real nice software bug in one of the micro controllers."