Pittsburgh Modular Taiga

The culmination of years of research, Pittsburgh Modular’s Taiga is a colorful array of analog circuits packed together in an incredible desktop semi-modular synthesizer package—combining the best elements of their work with Cre8audio. With three oscillators, a rich filter, a Dynamic section, BBD echo, and a whopping 60 patch points, Taiga is a highly exploratory musical instrument that excels both as a solo piece or among a larger modular ensemble. Additionally, you can even remove Taiga from the chassis and mount it up in your Eurorack case: so there are plenty of ways to incorporate Taiga into your studio.

There are a lot of circuits squeezed into Taiga, so it makes sense to give a full run-down from left to right. At the left is the sole digital module: the Control section, which handles MIDI to CV conversion, tap tempo clocking, sequencing and arpeggiation, and more. With the included Type-A MIDI TRS adapter, you can plug in your favorite MIDI controller or sequencer to play and modulate Taiga’s sounds. From there, Taiga’s three analog oscillators may be internally controlled by MIDI or decoupled for traditional oscillator behaviors. Each oscillator has a selectable waveform, which can then be modified further with the waveshaping found via the Shape control—offering multiple cascaded shapers, with six-stage wavefolding for extreme timbral effects. All oscillators are summed together in the Mixer section, along with the noise generator and external preamp.

Combining a little bit from both the East Beast and the West Pest, Taiga provides different ways to shape the raw oscillators into something magical. Pittsburgh’s filters have always been held in high regard, and the PGH filter found on Taiga is no exception. Beautifully resonant, this state-variable design allows for various combinations of lowpass, highpass, and bandpass responses to carve and sculpt sounds as you’d like. The Dynamics section operates as either a VCA or a lowpass gate, with the ability to shape the response and resonance of the latter. With the BBD-based Echos section, you can add dark and murky analog echoes and swimming chorus to your sound, or explore the weirder sides of delay with Karplus-Strong and other synthesis techniques.

To tie everything together, Taiga features an LFO, two ADSR envelope generators, and several utilities like sample and hold and signal mixing/splitting. Taiga could be the only thing you need—it has an output section with a built-in headphone amp, but it plays tremendously well with others! For an all-encompassing modular synthesis playground, look no further than Taiga.