Announced back in May, UDO's Super 8 remains one of 2024's most impressive synth releases: this 16-voice instrument sits in the middle of its Bristol-based manufacturer's product line-up between the 12-voice Super 6 and the formidable, 20-voice Super Gemini, squeezing many of its big brother's features into a smaller and lighter chassis with a reduced price tag.
Described by UDO as a "hybrid-analogue" synth, Super 8's architecture is based on high-resolution, FPGA-based digital oscillators and two analogue filters. We're particularly taken with its Binaural Mode, which pairs up its 16 voices into 8 true stereo 'super voices'; by assigning left and right channels their own synth voice, Super 6 can create lush binaural sounds that are alive with texture and movement.
Taken from the album of the same name, Caribou's Honey is a high-voltage slice of bassline house that's been near-inescapable on the DJ circuit this summer, its wub-wub bassline and AI-warped vocals popping up in sets from Four Tet, Fred Again, Ben UFO et al. In a video demo uploaded to UDO's YouTube channel this week, musician Hazel Mills walks us through how to recreate two sounds from Honey, one of 2024's biggest tracks, using one of 2024's biggest synths: the Super 8.
In the video, embedded above, Mills takes on both Honey's rowdy bass patch and the chord stabs that appear in the build-up to its face-melting drop, cooking up imitations that sound impressively similar to the original sounds. Even if you don't have a Super 6 at home (we wish we did) you should be able to follow along with most software synthesizers.
Pairing up the synth's two oscillators with dual sawtooth waveforms, Mills captures the staccato articulation of Caribou's chord stabs with careful application of the filter envelope, before dialling in pitch modulation and detuning and recreating the glitchy, ratchet-esque ornamentation using Super 6's onboard delay. The bass patch is a slightly simpler affair, shaping a bolshy square wave with the synth's envelopes and polishing it with a touch of filter resonance.
Subscribe to Hazel Mills on YouTube or watch our video review of Super Gemini below.
