Many thanks to all the people who stopped by the table at Knobcon 8. It was a great experience to be at Knobcon.  I fell just short of having Sea Dragon Filter Mixing Console ready to demo. It was actually working in debug mode, but it all went bad in real-time and there wasn't time left to get it working. This is particularly bad since I don't want to release something controversial without being able to demo it to non-believers first. Sea Dragon allows the effects of filters to be mixed to create an ultra filter. It is a dragon because it is something that can't be done in analog or DSP (digital signal processing).

So where to from here? 

This will be a single instrument version with limited polyphony. It will include the Sea Dragon Filter Mixing Console, a good selection of filters, and most if not all of the other modules. It will have all the Sea of Wonder features like sinusoidal envelopes and extensive modulation options. This will give anyone interested a chance to experience much of what will be available in the full version. Patches created in the free version will either work directly with the full version or be importable into the full version. There will be regular updates with fixes for any reported bugs and probably the occasional new module or feature.

Making this version free should address the controversial features problem. Anyone who thinks that Sea Dragon it is impossible because it violates the rules of DSP, will be free to download it it and try it out.

This release will be scheduled around Knobcon 9. It will include 3 big features:

1. GPU support to allow for extensive polyphony and multiple instruments. GPUs are ideal for doing the calculations needed for Sea of Wonder.
2. Another Dragon. Hopefully this will be Dragon Fire (sound more complex and alive than analog, comparable to physical instruments and natural sounds). Not 100% sure that I will be able to catch that dragon next year, but there is another dragon out in the bushes that should be catchable if Dragon Fire can't be ready in time.
3. A Solution for the Knob Problem. Working with on-screen knobs just doesn't compare to the feel and control of using real knobs on analog synthesizers. It certainly isn't as much fun. I have had a number of ideas for fixing this, but so far they have all proved impractical. On the long drive to Chicagoland for Knobcon, I had a new idea that looks very promising and may actually be fun to use. Since this new concept may ultimately not work out I don't want to give too many details just yet, but Sea of Wonder will come with a small hardware controller that will have real physical knobs.

The expected price for the full version of Sea of Wonder with the hardware controller should be less than your average Eurorack module. It will depend on the cost of the hardware controller. Multiple language support will be available later in the year in a free update.

1. Keep adding more dragons until even the analog purists have to reconsider their stand on digital.
2. A full orcherstra of synth instruments using multiple GPU cards
3. Computer aided music composition

Will try to have a Module of the Week feature describing one of the modules in Sea of Wonder. Some people asked if the colors used mean anything. Yes, they do. There never seems to have been a real color standard so I tried to follow what had been used and expand it.

Knob Colors:

• Blue - Frequency and Clocks
• Red - Envelopes and Modulation
• Green - Waveshape and Width
• Yellow - Resonance, Skew, and Pan
• Violet - Volume and Level
• Orange - Other

Jack Colors:

• Yellow - Audio Input
• Green - Audio Output
• Blue - Control Input
• Red - Control Output
• Violet - Trigger or Gate Input
• Orange - Trigger or Gate Output