The WASP - A Very British Synthesizer

yo yo yo [Music] so this is the wasp it was launched in 1978 by electronic dream plant in england which makes it a british synthesizer [Music] at a price of pounds around a grand in today's money it was intended as an affordable synth for those without the wherewithal to grab themselves a mini moog or an odyssey and it was a relative success being used by artists such as sting the bee gees wings the buzzcocks and the hives one of the ways they kept the cost down was by using a lightweight plastic chassis with stickers on it that feels about as robust as an airfix model but whilst you could probably snap it like a twig it doesn't sound as cheap as it feels let's start with the keyboard which is actually made of conductive plates with a sticker over them that is kind of the 70s equivalent of playing a virtual instrument on an ipad i'll be honest it's a little bit hard to play although it's pretty nifty for glissandos where is it glissand d you said die slides [Music] on the left of the synth we have bend which really just acts as a quantized tuning knob [Music] and glide for your portamentos portament tie slides [Music] next we have the two oscillators which interestingly are digitally controlled we have sawtooth and square and then continuous pulse width on oscillator 1 [Music] and separate tuning on oscillator 2. [Music] to the right of that we have white noise [Music] in the same section as the white noise we have a control oscillator for modulation this has six wave shapes and a broad frequency range from sub-audio up into the audio range and it can modulate oscillator frequency and filter cutoff [Music] [Music] see [Music] the filter is multi-mode with resonance called q and can operate in low pass mode [Music] band pass mode and high pass mode [Applause] it can also be contoured by a dedicated envelope as can the vca the envelopes are slightly unusual in that the first is attack decay and sustain with switchable repeat and the second envelope follows attack decay and delay with the switchable repeat [Music] in the top right above the power and master volume knob we have two ports that look like midi but they aren't at least not on the original this particular wasp has been modified to add midi they are in fact a proprietary system developed by edp called link based around a seven pin din connection this allowed for three things one you could connect edp instruments like a wasp and a nat together and control both from one keyboard two you could connect edp's digital sequence of the spider to your wasp or three you could connect edp's polyphonic keyboard the caterpillar to a swarm of wasps and play chords or you can leave it unconnected and play on the fly you get it because of wasp flight it also has an internal speaker that reminds me of the door speakers in my parents 1980s mini metro but actually doesn't sound that bad the funny thing is that if you push the filter resonance and master volume hard enough through the speaker the crappy plastic chassis vibrates and makes a tone handy if you want a third oscillator okay enough talking let's make a quick track with it [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] there was a later wasp deluxe housed in a more robust wooden case with a three octave keyboard and an equally rare wasp special now whilst edp only lasted a few years one of its founding members chris huggett went on to form the oxford synthesizer company and released the legendary oscar and then after work with akai consult with and later join novation who of course put out the base station in 1993 and are still producing instruments to this very day so you could say that the wasp was this story's in section you know like inception but with an insect

Channel: Alex Ball

Views: 101,387

Rating: 4.9572368 out of 5

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Id: 5e6iKK1Bhj4

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020