SKNote/RedSound Sublymia

[DLC86]

Sublymia Guitar And Bass pedals | www.sknoteaudio.com

www.sknoteaudio.com

This page looks to be almost a year old but it seems they'll start selling these soon.

Here's what they wrote on TGP:

Ok, I'm trying to be back on track. We have had such heavy times with development that I didn't have time for communicating. Totally wrong.

Software amps and pedals: they are fully working and used in one million projects, currently (and finally, argh) releasing the Apple-native versions.
R200 is a classic. So much fantastic feedback.

Hardware pedal: here we go:

Sublymia Hardware Guitar pedal

It is being released by Red Sound (I think you know their brand). We are close neighbours, both companies here on Etna volcano. We (SKnote) decided to manage the hardware guitar and bass line together with them (Red Sound), both to get wider foundations for management of the project and to be stronger and more solid (guitar and bass world is not a simple one, so much to compete with, so much background noise).

The final format, as you can see, is a small pedal. I love this format.

The internal structure is:

• Amplifier.
• Cabinet (loads the DSRs and models from Celestion's SpeakerMix! Finally out of the computer).
• A simple, meaningful set of effects. Modulations (UniVibe, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Ra200, real tremolo), ambient (room, spring, Carbon delay), performance (wah wah, pitch-shifting).

It is NOT a pedalboard. You CAN'T put 44 amps in parallel with a complex grid of 102 cabinets.
Select one amp (from clean to blues to hi-gain to modern) and tweak it, select a cabinet and tweak it, add an effect and some ambience if needed. Just play.

• USB-MIDI in/out (e.g. extend the controls by a small MIDI floor controller).
• MIDI DIN in/out (e.g. synchronise cabinet changes with your pedalboard).
• Expression pedal port.
• 9V (Boss-style power supply).
• Two inputs (but ONE processing chain).
• Two outputs (managed separately, as stereo or independent, e.g. "live" to mixer, "life" to monitor).
• Outputs are electronically balanced and absolutely strong (go straight to FOH, no DI boxes on stage).
• Editor (for presets, etc.). Runs in a browser. No installations.

100% interested in discussion, please help me to be back in the discussions here.

 

[laxu]

Making it look that close to the Strymon Iridium is certainly a choice. While Strymon doesn't have exclusivity for "black boxes with Boss style knobs", it looks so similar on first glance.

The support for the Celestion DSR cabs is an interesting feature. Except the DSRs haven't impressed me in any way from what I've heard. I feel they are a bit like UA's cab sims where they are just IR + speaker drive sim which amounts to "meh".

I don't know if there's some second layer for control of the effects, but if not, then I could see that being a major problem, with only the speed and amount knob to do something but multiple effects built in.

Q.: Can I load my IRs (Impulse Responses) here?

A.: Yes, of course! You’ll discover that they’ll sound a lot better, though. There is no convolution in the cabinet module but physical models that get automatically tuned to your target IR. More “real”.

That's also interesting. It will somehow take your IR and fit some other system to sound like it?

Name is also pretty terrible. Sublymia sounds like a bad goth band.

I wish them success because this is a product that on paper should be exactly in my wheelhouse, but I'm always a bit wary of manufacturers I have never heard of coming to market. Often the amp modeling ends up not being that good and so on.

 

[Cirrus]

SKnote are a strange company in my experience of their plugins. Some really cool stuff, that sometimes acts in strange ways.

 

[DLC86]

A couple hours ago I had the opportunity to talk to the owner/developer of SKNote by phone, since this company is in my same region and I already beta-tested a couple of their plugins in the past.
We talked about that cab sim (he's the one who initially developed that plugin for celestion), he didn't give me too much details but he said it's based on physical modeling of speakers, IRs are used just to set the starting frequency response for the modeling which then accounts for the compression, distortion and, when paired with their amp models, also for the impedance curve and its dynamic behaviour.

I also asked him about the looks of the pedal and he confirmed the form factor is inspired by the Iridium but actually it's a bit larger in size than the iridium and has several additional features compared to it, namely a small display showing the preset number, usb-midi control, several amp models (even some high gain ones), several modulation effects (some of which derived from their plugins), delay, and compressor. He also plans to add more of all that via firmware updates in the future.

Anyway, once the pedal is ready to ship I'll probably go visit their headquarters and make a video about the pedal and, if they allow it, maybe some footage of their factory as well.

 

[Antipodes]

SKnote are a strange company in my experience of their plugins. Some really cool stuff, that sometimes acts in strange ways.

With his plugins - back in the day - it seemed like he had a zillion projects in development and, while coding frantically like a mad scientist, struggled to keep up with the admin/support side. A bigger revenue stream might solve some of the difficulties he had - assuming he can get more assistance with the admin side with more cash flow.

 

[Jarick]

I like the construction paper, bold choice.

 

[Alex Kenivel]

I like the construction paper, bold choice.

You mean the orange thing? Looks like some kind of stitched leather cover

 

[MirrorProfiles]

With his plugins - back in the day - it seemed like he had a zillion projects in development and, while coding frantically like a mad scientist, struggled to keep up with the admin/support side. A bigger revenue stream might solve some of the difficulties he had - assuming he can get more assistance with the admin side with more cash flow.

This.

Sknote have been around a while, lots of cool ideas with pretty dreadful execution, and even worse support/maintenance. I always want to support the “mad eccentric scientist” side of them as Quinto clearly means well, but you just can’t depend on the plugins working as they should.

 

[Cirrus]

I remember a few years back he put out a 1073 plugin that was really great - I thought it had the same kind of ugly, splatty breakup that the real things have, and the EQ felt solid. It was just unusable because every time you opened the session back up, there was like a 10% chance that one instance would be broken and making weird oscillating/buzzing/farting noises.

I mean, I guess they were modelling the reliability issues of using real 50+ year old preamps...