The too hip for school cousin of our very own East Beast desktop synthesizer, West Pest is a pesty cornucopia of simple complexity. What?

The West Coast folks couldn’t be like everyone else. They had to go all yoga mat, kale smoothie, and alfalfa sprout on the synth world. West Coast style is typically characterized by additive derived, rich and complex sounds. Often more traditional user interface elements are replaced by the abstract and experimental. Perfect for you sophisticated folks.

All that said, West Pest is actually not a deep dive into the abstract. It provides a wide array of sonic capabilities while maintaining a quick and easy workflow. You’ll make fresh & inspiring sounds in a flash without having to think about kale smoothies, unless that’s your thing, in that case, yes tons of kale smoothies, pitchers full of them. Anyway, West Pest’s huge sonic capabilities emanate from its modest bento box-sized (sprout-free) exterior.

If eurorack is your thing, feel free to pop West Pest out of its enclosure and transform it right into a 40HP eurorack module, or keep it in its case and use it anywhere for your West Coast style pleasure..

Folding waves, space, time & laundry?

Our not-so-very wacky colleagues at Pittsburgh Modular Synthesizers love to drone on and on about wave folding/shaping, you’d think they’d invented or something. Seriously, never ask their founder Richard Nicol about wave folding, that is unless you are looking for a fast track lulling to sleepytime. That said, what wave folding does to your sound is super interesting. So we’ll give you just the short important bits…

West Pest utilizes a custom wave folder to shape the sound. It adds additional dimensions to West Pest’s already unique sounding oscillator core.

A wave folder shapes sounds differently than a filter. Instead of removing harmonics, the wave folder increases the harmonic content of the oscillator by folding the wave in on itself to create sonically rich waveforms. 

West Pest’s wave folder takes what traditional wave folding circuits have done for years and ups the ante, allowing the user to fold previously unfoldable waveforms. We’re not gonna get into the how’s and why’s. Richard would feel the need to jump in with too many boring facts. We’d frankly rather go on a juice cleanse than listen to another lecture on wave folding/shaping, so just suffice it to say, it’s super cool and we’ll leave it at that.

In addition to being able to send all of West Pest’s waveforms through its wave folder/shaper, you can also input external sound sources. So go ahead, get weird with it. We do.