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The XILS 3 VST from Xils-lab, whose LE version is currently being offered to the SteinbergUsers community at an amazing special price, takes its inspiration from the British analog synth, the EMS VCS3.
SteinbergUsers.com's close relationship with the Keyfax Buyer's Guide author Julian Colbeck enables us to reproduce Julian's original review of the VCS3 for one of the Keyfax books, Omnibus.
All synthesizers have an element of toys for the boys about them and the VCS3 is the quintessential gadget for spotty Herberts who were no good at sports and liked to spend their free time in the science lab playing around with bits of wire and bunson burners.
The VCS3 looks like a nice piece of laboratory equipment with its large control knobs and pin matrix patchbay encased in a real wood frame, and its penchant for spacey, whoop-whooop-blip-swoosh type noises that are totally unusable in any musical setting - aside from rhythm or sound effects at which it is totally brilliant - reinforces that image still further.
Over its long and frequently illustrious life the VCS3 found favor with most of early synthesis' shakers and movers: Eno during early Roxy Music days, Pete Townsend who had the VCS3 trigger the organ sound on The Who's seminal 'sequencer synthesizer' track Won't Get Fooled Again, Todd Rundgren, and Jean-Michel Jarre who still has a phalanx of them in his armory. Shunting forward a few decades, the likes of Julian Cope The Aphex Twin, and Chemical Brothers, continue to mine new sounds from this unique creation.
Designed in the UK by Dave Cockerell, who would go onto giddier heights with Akai's S Series samplers, the VCS3 was instantly popular amongst the European avant-garde for a number of reasons. It was affordable. It could supply an endless and unrepeatable selection of high quality, interesting electronic bleeps and blurps. And though not exactly portable due to the unique L-shaped design, which does make it awkward to pick up or to box, it was comparatively small.
With its independent three oscillator design - independent not only in range (frequency), and level, but also in their waveforms and applications (VCO3 can be used as a sub audio LFO) - plus white and 'variable colored' noise generator, self oscillating low pass filter, ring modulator, envelope shaper, and even a dual spring-line reverb unit, the VCS3's basic range of tools exudes high quality in their scope and performance.
Except, it has to be said, in terms of oscillator stability. If all you want to produce are 'interesting' noises, then drifting oscillators can be part of the sound but for an accurate pitch performance this problem makes a VCS3 a high-risk animal.
Though the oscillator and filter panels should seem familiar to anyone with a degree of subtractive synthesis experience, the envelope shaper panel, featuring a pair of attack controls, decay/'off,' plus 'trapezoid' and 'signal' level controls will probably fox most - including me. With its variety of triggering modes, and decay time settable from the patchboard, this simply has to be viewed as an area for experimentation by modern, ADSR-inclined users.
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Much of the pleasure in playing a VCS3 lies in the small flat part of the panel's patchboard pin matrix, which allows you to connect up each of the instrument's 'modules.' It's a bit like playing solitaire, and, for most, with equally unpredictable results. But it is the VCS3's ability to be cross patched in an almost limitless number of permutations and routings that accounts for its enduring mystery and enduring appeal.
It'll probably come as something of a shock to discover a reverberation unit, which offers delays of 25 milliseconds up to 2 second reverbs, again voltage controllable via the patchboard, and the stereo outputs which effectively let you set up and deliver two separate but simultaneous sounds. In the days before MIDI the only way to expand your sonic horizons beyond the wire-covered lump of metal you actually purchased was to drive or be driven by other audio sources. External signal inputs let you process signals from a mic, or a guitar, and the control outputs let you trigger external sounds using the envelope shaper or third oscillator LFO.
The VCS3 was one of the first instruments to offer joystick control, governing independent parameters on its X and Y axes. Joystick or not, unless your live performances do not entirely depend upon defined Western musical pitches, the VCS3 cannot be recommended for live use. Tuning is inherently hairy, and the prospect of a hard-working musician under stage lights sweating profusely into the patchboard as he leans over the controls is frightening. Frankly, the VCS3 is most at home at home, and to this end there's even a small internal speaker system.
The VCS3 was also made available in 'briefcase' form as the Synthi A. The KS Sequencer keyboard can be fitted into the lid of a Synthi A (thus making it into what EMS sold as the Synthi-AKS). This 2 1/2 octave touch keyboard (no movable keys) even throws a 256-note sequencer into the proceedings. The many illustrious Synthi AKS users include Alan Parsons, and Pink Floyd.
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