Winterbloom Castor & Pollux, An Eye-Catching Juno-Style Dual Oscillator

October 7, 2020 Synth Anatomy Eurorack, Hardware, News 0

Winterbloom Castor & Pollux, a dual Juno-Style Oscillator paired with an open-source engine that allows developers to take the module to other galaxies

Winterbloom is a US-based woman-owned Eurorack company that has already two interesting modules in its portfolio: the Sol, a fully customizable USB-to CV/gate module, and Big Honking Button, a simple sampler with 2MB of sample storage packed in a lovely arcade game style interface. You want to play with it right away, right?

She is currently working on a new module called Castor & Pollux. It has not yet been released, but it is generating a lot of buzz on social media. This has mostly to do with the “watching the stars in the sky” interface, which is absolutely a beauty. A real eye-catcher.

Details

Castor & Pollux (14HP) are two sound generators that are actually two Juno-inspired digitally controlled analog oscillators. Both offer a 7-octave range including pitch CVs (0-6v) and pitch knobs that range from -1 to +1 octave. These can be adjusted via USB. In the normal case, Pollux follows Castor when there’s no CV for it. With a built-in hard-sync function, you can elicit significantly richer sounds from both oscillators.

A Jun0-inspired LFO chorusing joins the dual VCO core with which you can achieve the beloved and desired juicy sound from the legendary analog polysynth. With its 9 outputs in total (waveforms, two mixers, crossfader, ramp, PWM, and sub for each), the module offers sufficient possibilities to integrate it into a modular system.

However, there is much more to discover than just a Juno-inspired dual oscillator. According to the developer, the module features a completely open-source firmware (written in C) that works with a completely open-source toolchain (gcc arm). These are easily upgradeable via USB mass storage. Musicians can thus write their own firmware and possibly expand the timbre range of the two oscillators even more.

I like these hybrid ideas because they take the advantage of the analog and digital world and melt it in one module. There are not many sound demos yet out. The ones published so far sounds very nice.