réactions à la news Commentaires sur la news : Buchla dévoile le Ziggy

Le manque de contrôles directs est-il pénalisant ?

Alors est-ce que quelqu'un ici a pu l'acheter ?

Il n’est pas encore en stock, si ?

Le manque de contrôles directs est-il pénalisant ?

Est-ce que vous arrivez à faire des trucs bien barrés ?

When we announced our new instrument Ziggy last May, we estimated that we would be able to ship it this fall. It is almost fall, and while Ziggy is firmly in a production state, we now expect shipping in December.

Why the delay? While Ziggy was well received when we first showed it at Superbooth in Berlin, we had a lot of feedback to digest and realizations about where the product was at that time and where it needed to be. So we’ve spent this summer improving the features, firmware, and hardware to make a product that responds to that feedback, is easier to manufacture, and has adapted to a supply chain that is timely and sustainable.

Hardware-wise, there’s been a lot of work laying out the internals of Ziggy to make it easier to manufacture, and keep the price in its original target. This is one of the more challenging builds we’ve taken on, so we’ve learned a lot to make sure this can scale to the demand we are seeing. We’ve changed parts to match what is available, and improved the power and signal-to-noise to make the product better. Mechanically, we had to customize some slider and button parts, which added to lead times for mold-making and quality assurance.

One of the great things about Ziggy is the digital control over the endlessly rewarding sound source of the Complex Oscillator. This enables a lot of modulation possibilities and interesting routings you can’t get with patchcords or analog control. It all seems limitless, until you hit those limits! So we’ve spent a lot of time refining how modulations are controlled, improving the speed of the firmware, and improving the storage capabilities for presets. With hundreds of presets available, it’s not only possible for us to ship with a lot of great sounds and examples, but you can create a long crumb-trail of all your sonic experiments and discoveries. We’ve even added a second LFO for additional modulation, and added simplified interactions for all the modulation assignments.

We initially showed Ziggy with USB MIDI, a feature that was often followed up with “does it have USB audio?”. The more we worked with Ziggy, the more it became apparent that this would, in fact, add a lot to the product. While it works wonderfully as a standalone instrument, as we developed the web app capabilities (more on that later), augmenting Ziggy with a computer connection opens up a different dimension. Now a single USB connection offers power, USB Audio, and MIDI (including clock sync) with a host.

As part of development, we used a web app to remote control many parameters on Ziggy to test and calibrate many features. This has blossomed from an internal tool to a public tool to act as a librarian, alternative interface, and a good example of all the MIDI controls in one place. Making Ziggy fully MIDI-controllable required a good amount of refactoring to allow for the space, speed, and memory on the microcontroller.

Thanks again for your support to help realize this new instrument. We look forward to our first shipments in December!