Hikari Instruments Duos

Offering cute glitches, swirling textures, and gnarly drones comes Duos from Hikari Instruments, a flexible soundscape synthesizer offering tons of cross modulations for delightfully random tones and rhythms. Remarkably small for producing monstrous sounds, the Duos sound source is all over the place with tons of routing that goes in and out from one section to another—in the best way, it can be difficult to keep track of everything! However, Hikari Instruments has intelligently laid out all the features in a parallel manner to keep track of how each control affects one another while still offering tons of randomness to where you can’t always predict what the Duos will create.

The core of Duos is two VCOs, each running into their very own low pass gate with individual resonance controls, outputting as their own mono channel or as a stereo pair balanced with the volume controls. Simple as that may be, the magic happens in the modulation section of Duos, hosted by the everchanging chaos modulation source. Chaos produces one of three pseudo-random stepped CVs to frequency modulate both VCOs, while the LFOs offer clock to the chaos as well as modulation to VCO 2’s LPG. It gets even more intense when you introduce chaos into the LFOs or by routing the LFOs frequency back into chaos, creating complex and completely wild modulation sources that change how the frequency of the VCOs and LPGs work.

The LFOs each have independent rate controls as well as a three-way switch to determine the range of speed at which they run, offering a large range from sub-audio to audio rate modulation and clocking that can occur. The large frequency knob in the middle controls both frequency centers of each VCO, but introducing the FM α and β produce another layer of cross modulation from the VCO to the LFOs—that’s one big feedback loop of modulation! Not only can Duos work on its own, but it can also integrate smoothly into the Eurorack realm with CV inputs controlling LFO and VCO frequencies as well as clock and CV out for syncing and modulating your other Eurorack modules.

The Hikari Instruments’ Duos is a fantastic source of inspiration that’s great for laying out ambiences, glitchy rhythms, sampled hits and transitions, or really anything a sonic explorer could dream of.

Duos Features

Stereo soundscape generator
Dual oscillator setup with a shared frequency control (big knob!)
Low pass gate per oscillator with individual resonance and final level controls
Chaos modulation source affecting both VCOs pitch, applying one of three pseudo-random stepped CV patterns
Dual LFOs with three-way rate control that cross modulate with the Chaos modulation
Both FM α and β are VCO modulation of the LFOs rate
Chaos opens LPG 1 while LFO 2 opens LPG 2
Individual audio outputs as well as a stereo summed out
CV inputs controlling VCO frequency and individual LFO rate
Chaos CV output and LFO B’s clock output