Interface
Cherry Audio: Waking the titans
Founded in 2018, Cherry Audio has become one of the most beloved softsynth creators, recreating yesterday’s legends virtually. We spoke to CTO Dan Goldstein to find out more about the company’s latest release: Novachord + Solovox
Cherry Audio Dan Goldstein
cm: The Novachord + Solovox collection revives two legendary harbingers of the modern synth and brings them to the desktops of 21st century musicmakers. Why did you decide to go that far back?
Dan Goldstein: “If you’re the sort of person that loves the art of synthesis, and you’re obsessed with the history of synthesisers, then you simply have to be fascinated by the Novachord. It’s a fully-polyphonic synthesiser with filters and envelopes that was designed nearly 20 years before the word ‘synthesiser’ even existed. There are some fascinating engineering achievements in the Novachord, and we loved the challenge of recreating its unique tone and character. I love that our customers never know for sure what Cherry Audio will do next, and we really enjoy occasionally exploring history’s weirder and more esoteric electronic instruments.”
What unique characteristics could these classic instruments bring to modern productions?
DG: “The sound of the Novachord is incredibly unique, and isn’t something that can be recreated with most modern synthesisers. Every note has a unique combination of tube-driven divide-down oscillations, an adjustable brightness filter, and a primitive-but-unique envelope. The entire mix is run through a set of lowpass, band-pass, and high-pass filters (a predecessor to Moog’s fixed filter bank), and the complete mix is played through a pair of dark-sounding 85-year-old field-coil speakers which have a unique sizzle. The tone of the speakers and the acoustic room is a huge part of the Novachord’s sound, yet every Novachord sample library that we’ve encountered has been recorded dry through an added line output. Because the modern notion of a synthesiser was still decades away, the controls and filters of the Novachord are tailored to creating quasiorgan sounds, orchestral-ish tones, and sort ‐of-piano-esque plucks.