Wavetable oscillators are all about movement. There’s the perpetual morphing from waveform to waveform, the dance of harmonics, the journey from tone to tone. It’s about the modulation that breathes life into the static and engages our senses. Osiris offers everything a wavetable oscillator should and then stacks on top level after level of interest, crashes into unexpected change and presents itself as an instrument rather than a mere source of sound. This thing is the business.
Modbap Osiris.Osiris has four banks of 32 wavetables, harbouring 32 waveforms each, that you can browse and smooth between with a turning of the two main knobs. Whichever direction you choose to go you’ll find a fascinating route through tones and formants that could give you many hours of enjoyment. But Osiris is just getting started.
If your wavetable is feeling a bit thin and feeble then you can engage the sub‑oscillator for some different forms of beef. There are five choices of sub. You can dial in a square wave, sawtooth or triangle sub, or you can mirror the chosen wavetable waveform at either one or two octaves below. Each option gives a definably different type of oomph and, like everything else around wavetables, it likes to move. Modbap have made a bit of a feature out of it by including a sub level knob and its own output. But more remarkable is the independent 1V/oct sub‑oscillator input, which effectively turns Osiris into a 2‑voice synthesizer.
Then we have Timbre Mode, which gives you six opportunities to take your waveforms to a whole other party. You have bending, folding and sync modes which reinterpret your chosen wavetable in exciting new directions. Unison mode goes from some delicious detuning to a full octave above, giving you three tones if you count the sub. You can mix in some noise or, if you’re feeling very daring, dial round to the FM section for ratios between 1 and 8.
Lastly, we have the Fidelity knob that takes us from pristine 96kHz down to some junkyard lo‑fi where you spend your time trying to find your waveform amongst the bins.
Osiris is a different class of Eurorack oscillator. It somehow manages to sound fabulous whatever you try to do with it.
Osiris is a different class of Eurorack oscillator. It somehow manages to sound fabulous whatever you try to do with it. In use and performance, you can keep tweaking and adjusting it to find new points of interest like dropping out the sub, or winding it up an octave while detuning, switching up to a new wavetable, folding it in on itself and all the while pumping through its own VCA. And of course, everything is modulatable. What really impressed me though was how creatively expressive it can be without being remotely complicated. Bravo.