MUSEWIRE – Music News / Music technology innovators, Conductive Labs, have recently announced and shown their latest endeavor, a brand new hardware music synthesizer instrument using what they call “Terrain Oscillators.” The aptly named TERRAIN synth creates sounds with what might be called 3-D morphing wavetables.

First, to be upfront about availability, the Terrain Synthesizer is being launched and funded via Kickstarter. While this has been a gamble for various things, Conductive Labs have a superb track record of realizing their ventures such as the MRCC MIDI controller, and originally the NDLR sequencer (I actually was early crowd funder for both, and love them!). I personally have zero fear of risk on this one.

According to the company, “This is an altogether different kind of synthesizer, where you shape your sounds both visually and aurally. You can see and hear the waveform change as the path and terrain parameters are adjusted or modulated. The terrain oscillator is center stage and you may find yourself neglecting the filter and cutoff because of the rich and varied sounds that can be made while designing patches with the terrain oscillator parameters alone.”

The centerpiece of the Terrain Synth is a 7-inch display. The large size was driven by the visual nature of terrain oscillator sound design. The synth features Terrain oscillators, is a four-part multi-timbral synth with 8 voices per timber, LFO and ENV per parameter, effects, and stereo out.

Based on the promo and development videos, it sounds pretty slick and reminds me a little of the beetlecrab.audio Vector synth in the tactile bits as well as a now defunct “wave-scanning” PPG-type virtual instrument that completely escapes my recollection.

With the four distinct multi-timbral synth parts, this will likely pair really well with the NDLR.

Beyond their Kickstarter page, and their well established website which offers their various existing products, Conductive have shown the prototype working unit at music industry trade shows and meet-ups, including Knobcon 2025.

As of October 11, 2025, they have acquired roughly $80K of their target $35K funding, so it’s a go! Right now the available early-bird offers have been claimed, and the final offer looks to be $949 as a “backer” until Oct. 19. I am guessing the retail price after backers taken care of, might be $1299, but a total guess.

It’s always hard to tell if new hardware is a viable option vs simply buying virtual instrument plugins anymore, but it’s pretty cool to see something arguably totally new, vs yet another virtual Moog clone or recreation of a 40 year old bit of kit that had a crappy interface to begin with.

By contrast, the TERRAIN sounds fresh, and has a really nice interface for knob twiddlers like me. Looking forward to playing with it.

Terrain Synthesizer Features:

• Unique terrain oscillators
• 32 note polyphony (8 per timbre)
• Four timbres (layers) that can be split or stacked
• Two morphable terrains per voice
• Up to 7x unison for each voice
• Two additional sub-oscillators for each voice
• White, Pink, Blue and Brown noise
• Oscillator sync, Phase distortion, Mirroring and Windowing
• 17 math-based terrains with infinite resolution
• Dozens of image-based terrains
• User loadable image & wavetable terrains (.jpg and .png, .wav)
• 18 morphable paths with infinite resolution
• Dedicated mixer for timbre layers
• LFO, Envelope and Expressive matrix per parameter
• On board effects: Delay, Ping-Pong Delay, Reverb, Shimmer Reverb, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Stereo Phaser, Overdrive and Decimator
• Dedicated sequencer, arpeggiator and audition buttons
• Hundreds of sortable presets and onboard preset librarian
• 36 quick access patch favorites (6×6)
• Multi-level patches, Init, Copy & Paste
• Infinite Encoders – mixer, menu, modulation and user modules
• A 7-inch IPS display for full color sonic visualization
• Selectable terrain view angles and color schemes
• MIDI-I/O via 5-Pin DIN, USB Host, and USB Device ports
• 6x CV/Gates and 3x expression pedals.
• Left/Right balanced stereo and headphone (w/ vol control)
• Desktop / 4U rack configurations

The USB Host port (type A) enables direct USB only keyboard and controller connection. Also, USB HID compatibility enables the use of non-MIDI controllers to be used to manipulate parameters, such as USB class compatible mice, gaming controllers, trackpads and trackballs from the expressive-matrix.

The filter types are:
Ladder A – morphing / compensating
Ladder B – discrete modes / non-compensating
Ladder LP – variable slope / compensating
SEM – morphing
Diode – fixed
Comb – fixed
Formant – vowel (A, E, I, O & U)
Formant+ – vowel (A, E, I, O & U) + all pass

(Deeper dive technical specs can be found on the Kickstarter page.)

LEARN MORE: https://conductivelabs.com/terrainsynth/

Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/terrainsynth/terrainsynth?ref=clabsts

INTRO VIDEO FROM CONDUCTIVE LABS:

About Conductive Labs
Established in 2017, Conductive Labs is a Beaverton, Oregon-based company. The company is well known as a maker of music solution technologies, including the MRCC – MIDI Router Control Center, and The NDLR Four-track MIDI Interval Sequencer – Sequenced Arpeggiators, Chord and Drone Player (both previously launched on Kickstarter prior to retail availability). Learn more at: https://conductivelabs.com/

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This original article first appeared on MuseWire.com and is Copr. © Christopher Simmons. No fee or any other consideration was paid to the author for creation of this original opinion article. Images courtesy Conductive Labs. No AI was used in authoring or editing this content.