SOLSTICE Review
I finally got around to demoing Minuit Solstice. The second I saw this synth I was intrigued by the graphical spider web of a UI. The main window of Solstice is a collection of cells distributed heterogeneously with large and small cells clustered near one another. Each cell is a frozen spectral slice of your analyzed audio. You simply load a sample in, some sort of process is performed, and you get a map of the overall tonal structure of your audio.
The engine behind Solstice is spectral, not granular, but it is a spectral take on granular synthesis. The results however sound nothing like granular synthesis, and in many ways behave much more like a spectral version of concatenate synthesis. Each cell plays back a spectral slice of your sample, so a single moment, but just the spectral image of that moment. The cells are arranged by quality, not by chronological position, so dragging through the cells has a very blurry and smeary quality. If you play back the sample, you’ll see the cells jump around sporadically.
Spread and random controls can be used to jump around cells automatically, with random being pure chaos, and spread preferring neighboring cells. A path mode lets you draw a motion for the cells to follow. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to add nodes to the path, but this may be a limitation of the demo.
Drift mode prefers to play cells in chronological order, giving you results that sound like a stretched version of your sample. I really like this mode as it gives you a much more recognizable output,
Solstice gives you a few controls over the synth engine, a typical ADSR to shape your voice amp, a basic filter (with no modulation), and a reverb. It’s a pretty setup, but the magic is really from the sample interpretation. You can also play back the sample from the waveform at the bottom, this can be scrubbed through manually for some cool textures.
I think Solstice could use a little work, a lot of the performance needs to be manually recorded, though you can automate the X and Y positions of your cursor AND the path nodes (likely why you can’t add more). I couldn’t find anywhere to rescale the UI, it’s a little small on my screen. I think Solstice could really use a resonator, perhaps a second call matrix for another sample, one acts as an exciter, the other as a resonator. I’d also love to be able to load in a handful of samples, and get different groupings of cells all at once to blend between samples. All that said, what is on offer is quite unique and fun, there are plenty of creative uses and I love seeing original ideas like this.