My DSM03 arrived today. After picking it up from UPS, I had to wait a few hours to install it, because work. But... no work tomorrow, because DSM03!
The DSM03 is a challenging module. Its controls are non-orthogonal; they all act in different ways, depending on how the other controls are set. Modulation might do nothing, or it might produce extreme effects, and it's going to take a little while to find the sweet spots. The sweets spots that I
have found are awesome, and hint at fascinating sounds that can be achieved through study and practice: Artificial echoes, transient blips, organic plucked or struck surfaces. Lots of wonderful
motion is possible.
My impression so far is that it's mostly a sound shaper. It does have the ability to
produce sound with a trigger input passing a bit of noise through an internal VCA, controlled with an Attack/Decay EG. The untuned noise goes into the tuned signal path, and the result is theoretically tuned sound. Realistically, this is of pretty limited use. The cutoff frequency of the internal filter significantly affects intonation, so the volt-per-octave is totally out of whack when the filter is fully-open. If I tune one note to an oscillator, the DSM03's pitch is audibly out of tune a minor third (!) from the starting point, and about a semitone off at one octave. So, pretty bad. The volt-per-octave behaves itself when the filter is half-closed (if you very carefully tune it); unfortunately, the most interesting plucked sounds come from a fully- or close-to-open filter, and the half-closed filter really isn't that interesting. It also takes filter modulation pretty much off the table if you want to stay in tune. In short, the DSM03 isn't going to be adequate for Karplus-Strong synthesis, unless one has the ambition to sample it.
I put in a support email to DSI to see if there's a calibration procedure ("Manual online at
www.davesmithinstruments.com" says the sticker on the box, but... not yet). I'd like nothing more than to find out that she can be tuned up in a useful way. But for now, I plan to explore the "sound mangling" aspect of the module.