Electronic Sound July 2015 (Regular Edition) | Page 45

iVCS3
apeSoft
An iPad app that puts one
of the most desirable vintage synths
into your cash-strapped hands
for the price of two pints of craft beer
Words: MARK ROLAND

When you have the desire to own something as rare and expensive as Peter
Zinovieff’s EMS VCS3 (Electronic Music Studio Voltage Controlled Studio 3), the
less well-heeled among us have two options: 1) Set up an alert on eBay and weep
every time one comes up as the price tag will be well north of £5,000; 2) Buy
an iPad (an iPad Mini is around £200), and download the iVCS3 app for £10.99.
Bingo!
The iVCS3 appeared a year ago, but with the release of a retrospective of Peter
Zinovieff’s early electronic compositions, and our interview with the man himself,
it seemed a good moment to take a look at what has become one of the more
celebrated synth apps on the market.
The attention to detail is impressive. The VCS3 was a modular synth, with the
elements packaged together in an awkward, but still somehow elegant, L-shaped
box. Where Moog’s modular system used patch cords to connect everything,
EMS developed a patchboard matrix that used pins. It’s all present and correct in
the app, and it needs virtual pins sticking in its virtual matrix before it’ll make a
sound. Luckily for us impatient types, the iVCS3 comes with a stack of presets,
and you can easily lose an entire afternoon loading them up and fiddling until the
thing starts screaming at you to stop. Or just blipping and clicking, fuzzily – this
method of synthesis is what is technically known as “intuitive”.
If you actually want to understand the iVCS3, and you don’t already have a pretty
thorough grasp of how to patch a VCS3, you’re going to have to put some time in
with those YouTube tutorials. But the interface is relatively simple once you get
the hang of it. Three oscillators generate tones that can be fed into the filter and/
or the envelope shaper (or the ring modulator, or the… actually everything can be
patched into everything, pretty much). The interface has, as you’d expect, gone
the full skeuomorphic nine yards, with shiny knobs (you can change the colours),
screws and wooden sides.
This gets a bit uncomfortable when you hit the button that swivels the app
around to present its rear end, where a sequencer and sampler section live.
While it’s a decent addition to the app (of course, the real thing didn’t have
such functions), the way it’s been tacked on, all 21st century glowing buttons
and clean text on the wooden base, looks somewhat out of place. I’m not quite
sure how the designer might have gone about doing it differently; by inventing
an entirely fictional 1969 sampler maybe, like some kind of steam punk reimagining? Then again.
And the sounds it makes? Well, I don’t own a VCS3 so I can’t testify as to its
accuracy, but the original’s unpredictability seems to be intact. The tiniest
alteration can lead to a wild new texture or filter pulse throwing you back into
your seat. On the other hand, every now and then you find yourself reaching
for the white noise knob, dialling it in, and being surprised that nothing is
happening... until you remember that you have to patch the white noise generator
in if you want to hear it.
The only criticism I can make of the iVCS3 is that it’s not actually a VCS3, which
is churlish at the very least. Playing with it builds a pretty strong desire to have
the real thing in front of you, so you can reach out and touch it, and drop the
little pins between the cracks in the floorboards by accident. The app might
just be a gateway drug, a portal to a life spent chasing the dwindling amount of
vintage VCS3s out there. You have been warned.

iVCS3 (iPad only) is £10.99 from the Apple App Store