PocketTone

PocketTone is a love letter to the little calculator-synths of the early '80s: a tiny keyboard, a green LCD, ten rhythms and a working calculator in one strip of cream plastic. Every switch, fader and domed cap is drawn, not photographed, and the digits on the white keys really are the calculator's keypad.

No saws, no samples. Piano is a pulse that stays high for about 70% of each cycle, Fantasy is a square an octave up, and Violin is five uneven pulses per cycle. My first violin had even pulses and sounded far too clean. The uneven spacing is where the buzzy reed comes from.

The drums are only three sounds: a low click, the same click an octave up, and a short burst of noise. All ten rhythms are built from those three, from a two-beat March to an eighteen-beat Rhumba, and they never stop the melody.

The first versions had sliders for the ADSR voice, and a two-star review called it terrible. It was right. The original sets that voice with an eight-digit code typed on the calculator keys, one digit each for the wave, attack, decay, sustain level, sustain time, release, vibrato and tremolo. So since 1.1.0 PocketTone does exactly that. Try 61079130 for an English horn.