Vannes Devices, a Netherlands-based synthesizer maker, announced Obsidian on August 3 — the company’s first fully self-made instrument, and a semi-modular analog synth built specifically to blend two design lineages that most synths pick one side of.
Two coasts, one box
Synthesizer design has carried an informal East Coast/West Coast split since the Moog and Buchla era: East Coast synthesis (Moog’s lineage) is built around subtractive design — an oscillator generating a harmonically rich waveform, shaped down with filters and envelopes. West Coast synthesis (Buchla’s lineage) leans on complex oscillators, wavefolding, and low-pass gates, producing timbres that are harder to describe as “an instrument played” and easier to describe as “a process unfolding.” Most synths, hardware or software, commit to one lineage’s logic in how their signal path is structured, even when they borrow the occasional module from the other side. Obsidian’s pitch is explicitly building both approaches into the same signal path as genuine, equally-weighted options rather than treating one as the “main” synthesis method and the other as a bolt-on flavor.
Why a debut instrument making this specific bet matters
For a company’s first fully self-made instrument — as opposed to a modification, a collaboration, or a rebrand of existing designs — committing to a hybrid East/West architecture rather than a safer, single-lineage design is a real statement of engineering ambition. It’s a harder synth to design well: getting complex-oscillator wavefolding and classic subtractive filtering to feel like one coherent instrument, rather than two separate synths sharing a case, requires the signal path and the panel layout to genuinely support both playing styles rather than favoring one and tolerating the other.
For modular and semi-modular synthesists specifically — the audience most attuned to exactly this East/West distinction — an instrument that treats the split as a design problem to solve rather than a lineage to inherit is worth watching regardless of a new company’s lack of track record, precisely because it’s a genuinely different bet than most debut synths make.