A few months ago, Baby Audio contacted me and asked me if I was a vailable to provide some preset patches for the first ever software synth, BA-1.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t at the time but, after I’d completed the projects I was working on, I gave BA-1 a test drive and had lots of fun with it. In no time, I’d created a whole bunch of fun sounds, so I went back to them and asked them if they’d be interested in some belated patches.

As it happened, they were already working with some other great synth programmers to create some new expansion packs and were all too happy to have one from me as well.

So that is why Neon Black now exists. And I’m very happy for people to have the opportunity to play with the noises I made with BA-1.

It’s a fun little synth, based on the curious little portable analogue synth Yamaha made in the early 80s, the CS-01 – famous users apparently include OMD, Underworld and Richard Barbieri.

It’s something of a cult classic these days but, does have some rather limited capabilities. Baby Audio’s recreation keeps pretty faithful to the original, with just a couple of extra ideas added on, including the very cool “battery drain” effect – a unique trick that used to give some curious results on the original hardware units!

If you’re a Newsletter subsrciber, I’m about to send out a discount code that will get you 15% off both the soundset and the synth itself. Hope you dig the “new” old sounds!