What's actually inside OBSIDIAN?
OBSIDIAN is Vannes Devices' first fully self-made instrument, and it wears that West Coast lineage on its sleeve. The oscillator section is built around a waveshaper, a wavefolder and cross-modulation rather than a straight subtractive saw wave, tracking 1V per octave across eight octaves with a sub-oscillator sitting underneath for low-end weight. That is the Buchla-descended toolkit: fold and shape a simple wave into something harmonically dense before it ever hits a filter.
The filter is where OBSIDIAN tries to earn its keep against a crowded boutique-synth field. Instead of a fixed low-pass, it morphs continuously between low-pass, high-pass and band-pass, with mode, cutoff and resonance all under voltage control, plus a two-channel mixer with external inputs so it can filter outside sources too. Two envelope generators (a full ADSR and a faster AD(R)) each take gate and velocity input and offer voltage-controlled slew and level, and there's an LFO running from 0.01 Hz to 100 Hz with saw, ramp, sine, pulse and random shapes, synced to tap tempo, MIDI clock or an external eurorack clock with rhythmic divisions down to a sixteenth. A tape-style digital delay and a five-step West Coast sequencer, switchable between four and five steps and patchable to the oscillators, filter or any CV destination, round the instrument into something that can run a full patch on its own.
Why is a solo Dutch builder betting on West Coast synthesis right now?
Vannes Engineering has existed since 2017, but OBSIDIAN marks a turning point: it's the company's first instrument designed and built entirely in-house, and it comes after founder Koen's earlier run as co-founder and owner of Majella Audio. He's now doing this solo, and putting his name behind a complex, multi-section instrument rather than a smaller module is a real bet in a market where most one-person shops stick to a single function box.
West Coast synthesis has spent the last decade migrating from Buchla collectors' circles into mainstream semi-modular gear, and a continuously morphing multi-mode filter is a genuinely useful, less common feature even among the boutique makers chasing that sound. But OBSIDIAN isn't shipping yet. Vannes Devices' own site describes it as still cooling: the final PCB layout, enclosure and firmware are being finished, with no confirmed price or release date. For now it's a prototype worth watching, not yet a synth you can order.
