Cherry Audio Novachord [WiN]

• Writer: Cherry Audio
• Provider: Staff R2R
• Product: Novachord
• Model: 1.0.2.21

Manufactured by the Hammond firm from 1939 to 1942 and debuting on the World’s Truthful, the Novachord contained 163 vacuum tubes and over 1,000 customized capacitors. Its divide-down oscillator structure mixed full 72-key polyphony with an early model of analog subtractive synthesis. The Novachord’s structure predicted the ADSR envelope, utilized a resonant band-pass filter, and included a vibrato unit. These now-familiar strategies resemble designs adopted a long time later in Moog and ARP polyphonic synthesizers.

Regardless of its historic significance, the Novachord didn’t get pleasure from industrial success. Though it resembled a normal organ at a look, the entrance panel controls weren’t well-suited to the efficiency methods of organists or pianists of the interval. As well as, the quite a few vacuum tubes have been unstable, making the 500-pound instrument difficult to keep up. Manufacturing stopped in 1942 due to poor gross sales and components shortages throughout the Second World Battle, with Hammond solely manufacturing round 1,000 Novachords.

Nonetheless, the instrument was used for many years on many notable period recordings, similar to We’ll Meet Once more by Vera Lynn and Brother Bones’s Candy Georgia Brown. It was additionally prominently featured in movie soundtracks together with the intermission for “Gone With the Wind” and within the scores of “Rebecca,” “The Maltese Falcon,” and “The Ten Commandments.” However it’s best remembered for its otherworldly sound as heard in horror and sci-fi style productions similar to “Cat Individuals,” “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” “20 Million Miles to Earth,” and “The Gorgon.” On tv, the Novachord remained a favourite of composers together with Jerry Goldsmith and Harry Lubin of their work for The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, respectively. At present, fewer than 200 Novachords exist, and it’s mentioned that solely 5 stay in operation.

Novachord Options:

32 polyphonic voices, synthesized not sampled.
Three Resonators: a resonant bandpass filter community working consecutively in low (400 Hz), mid (800 Hz), excessive (2000 Hz) frequency ranges.
Deep Tone setting for the tone generator sign, with a one-pole (6dB per-octave slope) lowpass filter with a hard and fast frequency of 160 Hz.
Good Tone setting for the tone generator sign, with a one-pole (6dB per-octave slope) highpass filter with a hard and fast frequency of 2000 Hz.
Full Tone setting controls the amplitude of the dry (no filters utilized) tone generator sign.
Tones routed in parallel to all the filters, processed after which summed collectively to create a composite tone.
Assault knob with seven Assault/Decay/Maintain envelope choices, from Sluggish to Quick, with sustain-pedal managed launch (approximately3.5 seconds).
Adjustable depth vibrato with two choices: Vibrato I as used within the earliest Novachord fashions, and Vibrato II as utilized in later Novachords.
Built-in reverb impact with Room and Corridor algorithms plus speaker emulation to copy the Novachord’s built-in amp and audio system in an acoustic area.
56 presets masking Basses, Keys, Pads, and Strings, by Director of Sound Design James Terris.

Commonplace for Each Devices:

Full MIDI management and DAW automation for all controls, with easy-to-use MIDI be taught and mapping (Preset and International).
Cherry Audio’s in style Focus zoom-in function, in addition to normal UI zoom and resize through drag.
Full documentation accessible straight on-line from the instrument or in downloadable PDF format.
Person-adjustable oversampling management.