Pentaphonic: resurrecting one of the rarest synths ever built
Cherry Audio just resurrected one of the rarest synths ever built and I have thoughts.
The original Gleeman Pentaphonic was a 1981 oddity. Fewer than 70 were ever made, and one of them sat in Depeche Mode's Martin Gore's rig. It had three DCOs per voice spitting out these stair-stepped waveforms, called Complex 1 and Complex 2, plus a few pulse, ramp, triangle and sine shapes. That was it. A beautiful dead end of synth history.
Cherry Audio kept the weirdness and wired it through a Curtis CEM 3320-style 4-pole resonant filter, the same chip family that gave the Prophet-5 its bite. They added a 12dB 2-pole mode and keyboard tracking, then cranked the polyphony from the original's five voices up to sixteen, with unison and detune on top. The raw oscillators have this grainy, almost digital-stepping character that sits somewhere between analog warmth and FM-adjacent bell tones. Run it through a big reverb or the galactic reverb they bundled and it gets properly vast.
For the industrial side of things, the sequencing tools are the real draw. There is a syncable arpeggiator with four pattern modes including Leap and Random, a 16x4 polyphonic step sequencer with humanize, and a Parameter Animator that routes sixteen steps across four patterns straight into cutoff, resonance, oscillator pitch mod and oscillator gain. That is a lot of rhythmic modulation firepower for driving, mechanical sequences. Add the 22 built-in effects, five at a time in a reorderable chain, with the BBD flanger and tape echo doing exactly what you want for grinding textures, plus polyphonic aftertouch and a joystick-style mod stick for performance.
The honest caveat: this is a $59 paid plugin with no free tier, though there is a 30-day demo so you can decide for yourself. One early reviewer called it more of a collector's piece than a must-have, and I get that. The original was a curiosity, and this is still a faithful revival of a curiosity. But for dark, rhythmic electronic music, those stair-stepped oscillators through the Curtis filter with the animator running are a genuinely different flavor than the usual virtual analog suspects. And you get 375 presets in fourteen categories, including all fifty of the original's factory patches, so you are not starting from a blank slate.
Price: $59, with a free 30-day demo. There is also an optional Translucent preset pack with 100 extra presets for $9.99, and it is part of the Build Your Own Bundle (pick 3 for $99) until October 19.
Company site: https://cherryaudio.com
Product page: https://cherryaudio.com/products/pentaphonic-synthesizer