The Crow Hill Company is proud to turn to its own extensive and rare collection of hardware to turn out THE SHT SYNTH — available as a compendium of 48 circuit-, wave- and sample-bent instruments inspired by some of the Edinburgh-based enterprise’s eclectic musical favourites (spanning the likes of Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada, Joe Maus, Jon Brion, Laurie Spiegel, Radiohead, Throbbing Gristle, and Yazoo) to create something that they collectively ask: is it just shit or ‘the shit’? — as of April 7…
Whatever way anyone chooses to read into the titling of THE SHT SYNTH as the latest entry into The Crow Hill’s ongoing ORIGINS series of sample-based virtual instrument plug-ins, one thing is for sure: it readily represents a broad selection of three categories of 16 workhorse instruments each, effectively wrapped up into a single plug-in designed to bring a cohesive approach to making music more edgy, lo-fi, retro, and — swimming against the technological tide of so-called progress — decidedly AI (Artificial Intelligence) slop-free. From pianos to strings, plucks, beeps, bass, and pads, the compendium that is THE SHT SYNTH has been lovingly sculpted by the Edinburgh-based enterprise’s media composer and ‘samplist-in-residence’ Christian Henson to take the hassle out of making existing sounds less refined, catering to those looking for an entirely new bank of Mellotron-style sounds as well as synths that have been long forgotten — for good reason, too!
That all being said, Christian Henson has not forgotten how THE SHT SYNTH ultimately came to be — admittedly quite some considerable time after an adventurous sampling journey first got going: “About 20 years ago, I made a sample instrument that broke all the rules; it had bad tuning, bad playing — was badly recorded, and it changed my life. Since then, I’ve made hundreds of sample instruments, but none of them were as badly tuned, badly played, or badly recorded. What went wrong? I’d been listening to some of my favourite albums and realised that a lot of them have bad sounds, but with good notes put in a good order.
So I thought: ‘Why don’t I go back to my roots and find another route with sounds that I make — actual instruments that start bad, have seen better days, or, indeed, go into the box already harmed, without the need of the contrivance of harming them digitally once they’re in there?’ So, as part of my ORIGINS series — building the sounds that I use, the tools of my trade, from scratch, I thought I’d make this, THE SHT SYNTH! There are 16 instruments, but each of those is made up of three different sets of raw materials — one from an ANALOGUE source, one from a DIGITAL, and one from a SAMPLED.” Specifically, those 16 instruments are: 01 PIANO, 02 EPIANO, 03 BASS, 04 BEEPS, 05 PLUCKS, 06 PADS 1, 07 PADS 2, 08 ORGAN, 09 BELLS, 10 GUITAR, 11 STRINGS L (long), 12 STRINGS S (short), 13 BRASS L, 14 BRASS S, 15 REEDS L, and 16 REEDS S.
And all can be immediately animated. Adds Christian Henson: “To manage expectations, analogue synths don’t make great piano sounds.” Speaking of which, synths sampled included the much-loved Roland JX-3P, a Programmable Preset Polyphonic Synthesizer — hence the three ‘Ps’ in its name — dating back to the dawn of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) in 1983, and a Sequential Circuits Prophet VS, famed for being the first to use Vector Synthesis in 1986, allowing users to mix four digital waveforms per voice via a joystick, combining that digital, overtone-rich sound with analogue Curtis filters.
For more information, visit thecrowhillcompany.com.