6-Trax – Hideaway Studio

In 1984 Dave Smith and his team at Sequential Circuits released the Six-trak which was one of the first instruments not only to feature the then new MIDI control system but was an early multitimbral offering. This was quite a technically advanced feature to be seen on what was a relatively affordable synthesizer in those days.

Although everyone knows that Dave Smith is a master of analog synthesizer design, whilst working on his designs, Loot Audio was often left thinking that in fact he really should be better praised for his programming skills!

Fitting a whole multi-timbral synth control system with patch recall, an arpeggiator, a sequencer, a stack facility and an extremely full midi CC implementation into a humble Z80 microcontroller running at 4MHz with its code residing on one tiny 16Kbyte EPROM is really quite an accomplishment!

Polysynth

Loot Audio was quite surprised by what they managed to get out of what on paper is quite a humble 1-OSC per voice polysynth. Loot Audio think there are a few reasons for this – firstly they found the Six-trak to have quite a dark nature to its sound and the filters are great with the whole self-oscillation thing launching it into sometimes complete instability but on other occasions rendering bells and percussive sounds aplenty. The way the VCAs are also set up permits the filter to be somewhat overdriven which adds another dimension to its sound.

The decision was made to capture almost all of the material directly from the Six-Trak as the instrument has quite a warm nature right out of the box. A small handful of the patches were post-processed by feeding the audio through the wonderful triple chorus stage of the 1972 Eminent 310U to impart an extremely rich texture.

It is worth noting, as with all of Loot Audio’s sampled vintage synth collection, that although the raw captured material is totally authentic many of the instruments in the library explore many new avenues. That said, Loot Audio think many would be quite surprised what I managed to conjure out of this little wonder.

Features

• 871 24-bit Samples
• 69 Example Instruments
• 31 Example Layered Multis