Cre8 audio West Pest

West Pest by cre8audio is an analog desktop synthesizer with semi-modular design and West Coast borrowings. The signal flow is typical for an electronic sound generator, close to the Buchla philosophy. The tuning stable oscillator offers sine, triangle, and rising sawtooth, which is perfect for working with the following wavefolder. The wavefolder creates new sounds from the incoming audio signal, ranging from subtle overtone enhancement to total spectral devastation. Often these sounds have a rather metallic character, but this should not be confused with ring modulation. The final shaping of the rich basic sound is done in the VCA, whose control behavior is determined by sustain and release parameters. There is also an LFO whose frequency extends into the audio range. You can hear the years of experience of Pittsburgh Modular, who have contributed significantly to this compact instrument.

Sequencer, Arpeggiator and multi-functions
The buttons in the lower third of the user interface promise much more than 13 notes with octave selection and shift button want to reveal at first glance. Here you have access to the sequencer with its 13 patterns, the arpeggiator, clock dividers and multipliers, clock sync for the LFO and the multifunction generator. The latter can be used as MIDI CC output (e.g. modulation wheel), as second LFO with triangle waveform, as random voltage or decay envelope. For quite a few features there are variants respectively changeable values in the shift menu. If you prefer to use all the functions directly in the Eurorack system, simply remove West Pest from the case and put it in a Eurorack case, where it takes up 40TE space.

The patch panel
Often one or two cables are enough to turn the sound completely upside down. If you connect the Fold output to the FM input, you get hard and chaotic sounds. It also gets exciting when the VCA is modulated by the fast LFO in the audio section, which creates amplitude modulation respectively sideband modulation. Since the MIDI CV/Gate interface also outputs control voltages, the wavefolder could also be played with keytracking while the envelope is animated with the multi-modulator. These examples cover only a small part of what West Pest alone is capable of.