Polytouch® Pads

The perennial pursuit of musical instrument manufacturers is to find better ways for musicians to express themselves. Options have been limited for keyboard players; we've had to settle for a velocity-only approach to emphasize one note over another. Pressure-sensitive keyboards could only change all of the notes at the same time.

Not any more!

Enter ASM, with our patented Polytouch® technology. The semi-weighted keybed on the Hydrasynth Explorer provides fully polyphonic aftertouch, as well as Note On / Note Off velocity sensitivity and the monophonic aftertouch found on other keybeds. Finally, variations in key pressure can affect notes individually. It feels great, too: the 37-note Polytouch® keybed on the Explorer features high quality, mid-sized keys, and you will feel right at home, right away.

The revolutionary Hydrasynth Explorer Polytouch® keyboard helps you be more in touch with the music you are making. Now every note you play can ebb and flow like the tide.

Oscillators

The tone generation capability is the heart of any synthesizer, and the 3 Hydrasynth oscillators are alive with potential.

Each of the oscillators lets you choose from a selection of 219 single-cycle waveforms. And on top of that, two of the oscillators have powerful wavemorphing capabilities. Wavemorphing is a feature usually found on synths with preset wavetables. But creating user wavetables on those products is arduous or downright impossible. Unlike most wavetable synths, our oscillators 1 & 2 have our easy-to-use WAVELIST mode.

This mode lets you select any 8 waves from our diverse collection of 219 waves, arrange them in the order you want, and then morph from one wave to another. This can be done automatically with any modulation source, such as an LFO or an envelope, or manually with a physical control such as polyphonic aftertouch or a Macro. And now in version 2.0 you can choose the bit depth of each oscillator, which puts those sought-after vintage or grungy sounds at your fingertips.

Filters

If oscillators and tone generators are the heart of a synthesizer, the filters are the soul.

The soul of a Hydrasynth is a complex thing; it can claw or caress, scream or soothe, mangle or melt. It has been known to speak. The multi-faceted Hydrasynth filters are right in the thick of it. Filter 1 has 16 different models ranging from 1 to 8 poles, many with high-, band-, and low pass options. There is also a flexible vocal filter with formant control. Even if Filter 1 were the only filter the Hydrasynth had, it would take a lifetime to exhaust the possibilities.

But it is not alone.

Filter 2 is a 12dB per octave state-variable filter, which means it can sweep continuously from either low pass > bandpass > high pass or low pass > notch > high pass. It is similar to the classic SEM filter in many ways. These two formidable filters can be configured in series or parallel.

This means the one can feed and be sculpted by the other (series), or they can complement one another (parallel). With careful use of source panning in the Mixer module, the left and right outputs can be completely different or rich in unified complexity.

Mixer / Filter Routing

The 3 Oscillators are fed into a mixer along with the Noise generator and Ring Modulator.

The mixer gives you independent control over the levels and stereo positions of those 5 sources.

After this you are able to choose how much signal from each source is routed to filters 1 and 2.

The filters can be routed in parallel or series for ultimate flexibility.

Battery-powered operation

The Hydrasynth Explorer is highly portable! In addition to its compact size, it can be powered by 8 AA batteries for hours of music-making anywhere you want to go.