Kiviak Instruments, a young French development company, is working on Wofi, an exciting new keyboard sampler with granular synthesis.
Before a product becomes official, you get a press release from the company. To simplify the work that few days in advance so that you can write an article about it. If you do uninspiring copy-paste, 10 minutes is enough, of course. There are also moments when new products first appear on Instagram or other social media.
This is exactly the case with the new French development company Kiviak Instruments which first attracted attention with posts on Instagram. You can see a new intriguing sampler they are currently working on.
Kiviak Instruments WoFi
I didn’t know about Kiviak Instruments before. After a little research, we know it’s a French company founded by Romain Giannetti. We also get the information that they are active in two different areas: cloud platform management and the creation of new hardware/software musical instruments. With their new instrument, they probably want to bring their two core competencies together.
They’ve been working on this for some time. According to Instagram posts, Frédéric Meslin, developer of the Töröö or Zekit Synthesizer, is also part of the development team.
WoFi is a new sampler keyboard with a creative feature set called WoFi. It looks very knobby, has a clear interface, and has a solid display giving instant feedback on the controls. Even the instrument design looks nice at first glance. Rather compact and portable yet playable with a built-in keyboard, pads, or sequencer. It only has two octaves but is better than none.
According to the developer posts, you can sample straight in via the line input or microphones. Since the developers are also active in cloud management, I can imagine that a Wifi module is built in, with which samples can be pulled directly from a sample folder in the cloud. This is also indicated by the central section that says something about sharing your patches via the mywo.fi cloud platform or onto a cartridge.
It will feature classic sampler emulations, a filter, an envelope, and LFO. A lot of what we already know from modern samplers. There is also something called texturer. This could be the granular engine mentioned in the teaser.
Connection side, it will have a USB port, MIDI, CV/gate inputs, line inputs, and outputs. It also hosts a built-in speaker on the right side.
According to one commentator on Sequencer.de the WoFi will be presented at the Insane Festival in August. I’m looking forward to the final product. There are few samplers on the market, especially those with a keyboard. And granular certainly makes the whole thing even more exciting.
More information here: Kiviak Instruments KI Instragram
I like the design and colours, looks like a little baby boys toy then with very good quality materials and knobs and a big screen. We al want a big screen. Now we want to hear sounds!
it looks very appealing 😍
Arturia midi keyboard but with a lot more features is what I’m getting from the picture
Wish manufacturers would stop using rubber buttons.
The designer behind this is presenting it in his portfolio here, very interessting indeed…:
https://www.alandry.com/portfolios/wofi/
More samplers needed.
It looks nice. Aesthetic wise it reminds a little of the modal synths. Apart from the article, I want to say thanks for all the work you do. I love synthanatomy. It’s the main spot on the internet I get my information about synths and music technology from. It must be a lot of work to have all the information about analog synths, digital synths, software and effects units in one place. May I ask, how you get all the information? By following all the manufacturers on facebook, instagramm etc. or will they send you the information by now?
Thanks for your kind words. It’s a mixture of news under embargo, random social media pop-ups, investigations, and daily press releases from developers.
“proprietary cloud platform”
That’s a hard no from me then.
Also no SD card, just a cartridge (a proprietary one at that).
The thing looks great, and probably performs great, but why lock your self into a proprietary eco system?
I wish them all the best and hope they succeed, but if they don’t that proprietary cloud platform won’t be around either. And buying additional proprietary cartridges long after will be very expensive.
Also, and I’m nitpicking here, the keys are white and the case is an off white / magnolia colour. It looks like it’s faded like my 40 year old Atari ST! Hopefully it’s just the prototype.