I recently purchased this little synth from DOEPFER Musikelektronik and thought I would give a run down of my initial thoughts on it.

The DOEPFER Dark Energy is a 100% analogue semi-modular monophonic synthesizer. What is very handy about this little unit is that is also has a MIDI/CV converter built right into it! The MIDI/CV converter can also run over USB, so essentially we have a completely analogue synth the can be controlled dircetly from your PC or Mac.

At first glance this is a fairly simple synth. 1 oscillator, 1 low-pass filter, 2 LFO's, 1 ADSR envelope, and ofcourse the VCA. However it has a few little tricks up it's sleeve that you might not expect. For example, the LFO's have a "Low/Medium/High" switch for LFO frequencies that extend right up into the audio range and right down to over a minute at their lowest setting.

While some might be put off by the fact that this synth only has one oscillator, let me assure you it sounds HUGE. Not only that, but the pluse width modulation on this synth sounds great. By modulating the pulse width on the oscillator you can achive a much richer sound characteristic, similer to a unison type effect.

Another little trick is that by turning the filter resonance up completely (into self oscillation) you can achive a sine wave oscillator. It takes some careful tuning of the filter cutoff frecquency, but thanks to the included note tracking it is possible to use this a lovely tonaly playable sine wave sound.

One feature I would really have liked to see on this synth however is portamento. It is possible that by patching the CV2 output (MIDI pitch bend) into the VCO F front panel socket pitch bending can be achieved. However in most cases this is not an entirely workable substitue for portamento.

Overall this is a great sounding synthesiser for it's price (398 EU). The single oscillator (and the PWM) sounds great, the filter is amazing, and extra features like filter FM, ultra fast/long LFO and envelope settings, and external audio input make this a worthwhile and unique synth.

Here is a short little track I made using the Dark Engery. All tracks are raw Dark Energy - Except the kick drum (it's a sample) and one of the synth lines has a slight ammount of delay on it. No compression or EQ was used.

 NA (Dark Energy) by Noir du'Soleil

It's been a long time since I've properly updated this blog. Please accept my apologies.

Much has happened during my online absence. I've spent some amazing nights in Berlin (Lots of love to all the wonderful friends I made there: Tara, Sophia, Chris from Blutengel, etc. xx). I've come near death under the unforgiving Australian sun. I've started my own club night (Isolation). And I have been working hard on the next Noir du'Soleil record.

This time I want to give you an inside look on the creation of this record. I intend to do so via semi-regular updates on this blog under the Studio Diary title (and tag).

So, let's get this underway with Studio Diary #1.

As some of you may know, another passion of mine is vegan cooking. I'm not terribly good at it, but it is something I enjoy immensely. On this particular morning I was in a cooking mood, thus I enlisted the help of Cabaret Voltaire and The Birthday Party (R.I.P. Rowland) to help me out with breakfast.

The end result: Mexican-inspired Tofu Scramble with Homemade Hashbrowns.

After breakfast I was very excited to start work in the studio. I had written down an idea in bed the night before that I wanted to try out in one of the new dance-focused songs I was working on.

Musically, the intention of this particular track is to blend a melodic EBM/Futurepop sound with strong influences from Tech-Trance and Psytrance. I knew that at some point in this track I wanted a huge build dropping to a solid kick and bassline. The idea scrawled in my book was perfect for this. I was going to use the Korg DS-10 (a music app based off the Korg MS-10 for Nintendo DS) and the inbuilt delay effect in order to create a rushing, out of time, delay-driven drum build.

The DS-10 has a very dinky little drum sound which was perfect as it would sit out as being different from the pounding drums of the main track. To accentuate this difference I programmed a beat that was not a 4/4 dance beat. I ran the beat through the internal delay effect on the DS-10, set feedback to near-full, delay mix to 100%, ran the beat with the track and gradulay brought up the delay time until it became a wall of sound. The effect was exactly what I was looking for!

It has been a few days of solid work now. The track still has a long way to go - but so far it is sounding great. At the moment I am very optimistic and I feel like the new songs, although they are young, are starting to sound like a new + much more sophisticated Noir du'Soleil.

Lots of love,
Koe. xoxo