Frap Tools has carved out a niche as a manufacturer of impressive Eurorack modules like the Brenso and CUNSA. Engineers at the company imagined what it would be like to merge their modular units into one single playable instrument. The instrument they dreamed of is Magnolia, and it’s beautiful.
Magnolia is a West Coast analog FM synth which evokes the era of Bob Moog, Dave Smith and other towering founder/engineers who built companies for creating instruments that they themselves wanted to use. Frap made an eight-voice polyphonic synthesizer with through-zero linear FM that is “actually fun to play,” in the manner that a Lamborghini is “actually fun to drive.”
“Our main goal was to make an instrument with a good sound and a good playability,” Frap Tools writes, “an instrument that could fast-track the musician to some sonic territories that would be otherwise harder to reach in the analog domain, and to do so we meticulously designed every circuit from scratch.”
Magnolia features an all-analog signal path with two oscillators per voice, 16 modulations sources, 38 modulation destinations, 65 modulation slots per part, a per-part arpeggiator, per-part 16 step sequencer, 200 slot capacity for saving presets, pitch and mod wheels, expression pedals, three LFOs, three envelopes and “most importantly” something Frap calls “The Polymove”: a refined random generator that creates a random control signal for every voice and every destination within that voice. “If you’re in search for a quick way to animate your sounds, from subtle variations to complete chaos, look no further!”
It’s not just the circuits that make it shine: Magnolia is a tank in an era dominated by the rise of the mini-synths. Its warm, honey-colored casing evokes a distinctly ’70s aesthetic (if they had LEDs in the ’70s, that is), and Frap’s insistence on quality extends all the way down to the keyboard. Rather than buy something cheap off the shelf from a common parts supplier, Magnolia contracted out for a 5 octave, velocity sensitive keyboard with polyphonic aftertouch from Fatar, the Italian company known for 75 years of manufacturing quality keybeds.
Magnolia is possibly as close to a work of art as any utilitarian instrument can, or should, get. Accordingly, it’s priced for most of us to covet, not for most of us to own — $5,000 which places it in the professional or synthporn category for most of us. I don’t think you’re going to see too many priced at a discount on Reverb a year or two out — it’s more likely you’ll see them spike in the opposite direction.
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