I remember playing a hammer dulcimer for the first time. My father -in-law had one hanging up on his wall, and I picked it up, fudged around on it, and within minutes wrote a song for my band. After playing guitar for decades, it felt like a new way of hearing, a new way of playing, and this freed me from my old guitar-based songwriting habits to write something different. Of course I was a bit disappointed when I finally realized that the chord progression I was so enamored with, that sounded so unique on the dulcimer was merely C,G,F—all major chords—when I went to lay down some bass over it, but by that point the song was well on its way and we were all happy with it. I was reminded of this episode recently when I first played SOMA’s TERRA.
TERRA is a creation that defies expectations, understanding, and even a bit of reasoning; a very exciting accumulation of attributes for a musical instrument. SOMA has never been shy of showing their true feathers, and they describe TERRA as, “a sanctuary for a natural soul right in the middle of the rumbling plastic world,” and that it’s their “dream about a bright future… where machines and technology are not a prison for our feelings and spirit, but their extension.” Maybe it was this line of thinking, this juxtaposition between technology and nature, that was the motivation for making TERRA out of wood, and as it is each TERRA is one-of-a-kind, though the shape and electronics are the same for all. Even before playing, there is something elemental about TERRA, and its uniqueness—metal on wood—and flowy curves draw you in.
In keeping with that juxtaposition, TERRA’s au-natural wooden housing reveals beautiful innards (I just had to take the back panel off to see the pretty insides), which are all-digital, a DSP-based 32-bit floating-point polyphonic microtonal melange of additive, subtractive, and FM synthesis that includes some physical modeling as well and even a gyroscope!
TERRA’s brain houses thirty-two algorithms and ninety-six presets, all of which can be written over, divided into four categories: POLYPHONIC, EXPERIMENTAL, BASS, and SOLO, which are designed to make TERRA a plug and play instrument. The idea is that every sensor, knob and control is (gasp!) hardwired for any given parameter of a preset. This hardwire-ness is (by definition) unchangeable, and while this might seem limiting to some—there were definitely instances where I would have liked to change things around—I came to appreciate and understand this design consideration and I think this specific rigidity helps hit home that TERRA is much more about experience, about playing, about art and creativity, than about infinitesimal control. It’s a device meant to be played, not programmed, though, of course it was programmed, by the folks at SOMA. Well, whoever did the programming, TERRA sounds great, with strings, bells, organs, basses, distortion, and much more available. TERRA is also quite versatile; it can control or be controlled by other instruments via its MIDI in and out, and along with ¼” TS/TRS ins and outputs for mono or stereo use, a headphone output and a USB port for connecting a flash drive for saving and loading presets, there’s enough connectivity (though no CV ins or outs) for most utilizations. As for the tuning capabilities, in case you think “plug and play” means inflexible, TERRA actually has the same full range of sound as a grand piano and it’s possible to tune every note to be accurate of 125 steps per semitone. This is no microtonal instrument so much as it is a nanotonal one. The design is very interesting and evocative, but not too much of a departure of any traditional instrument to make it scary or unplayable—something SOMA seems to really care about—and it makes playing this powerful complex synthesizer easy and rewarding, even if it takes some time to know what’s going on.
TERRA’s playing field is essentially broken down into two parts: a Control portion (the top part), and a Play portion, which is the touch point/keyboard section. Seven controls found at the top of TERRA, denoted with elemental (and some musical/synthy) symbols are in charge of tweaking the various hardwired parameters of each preset (effects amount (there’s reverb OR delay), envelope, volume, effect time, etc.); but in keeping with the nature of TERRA, there are also mysterious controls: a Sea control for Water, and a Sun control for Light, that change with each preset and can control anything from distortion amount to filtering. Below these controls are a few other letter-based sensors and six touch-sensitive LEDs arranged in a triangular shape for loading and saving presets and other such navigation. Without any screen around, this part of its interface is unabashedly analog and definitely takes some getting used to. It was hard to remember what preset I had loaded without some manual help since there’s no screen (though I used my computer for the manual, so there technically was a screen), and even though it can be a little challenging, it really just means that you need to have the manual handy or a cheat sheet. Easy enough.
The bottom/main portion of TERRA has a twelve-note sensor layout found on the right of the instrument—SOMA’s keyboard, if you will—that has velocity and pressure sensitivity. Along with these, there are four sensors on the left side (A,B,C,D) for controlling various hardwired timbre changes, four other sensors for controlling pitch, and two hold sensors that will freeze the timbre and notes. The timbre preset sensors are a nice, quick way to change your sound and the pressure sensitivity of these is really interesting. With one of the sensors controlling a filter—with a gentle touch, you can elegantly shave off a bit of high end, but press your meaty paws on the sensor covering it completely and you’re smothering every frequency. No sound for you! In this way TERRA reminded me of playing a Theremin, where gestural control is important, lest the sound gets away from you, though TERRA isn’t quite as temperamental. The pitch sensors are a nice implementation for changing the pitch of a played note—or group of notes if held—and mastering the left side of TERRA—the keyboard-ish right side is pretty intuitive—goes a long way towards becoming one with the instrument. The hardest thing was remembering what A-D controlled for a given preset. Again, cheat sheet.
TERRA is definitely a lap instrument and it becomes part of you, a true extension of self, which I mostly think is due to the onboard gyroscope, an inspired addition to this synth. You can adjust the gyroscope’s sensitivity and, with a little flick of your leg or a body shake, add some pitch wobble to your sound, and dance around a bit. Playing around with the gyroscope is interesting in that it takes time for it to return to pitch when the sensitivity is set high, and that can be an odd experience, testing your patience, waiting for it to reset. If you’re swaying to the music you’re making, it will sway that much more with the gyroscope working its magic; the physical manifestation of playing TERRA is like playing a lap steel and rocking a baby to sleep simultaneously, two things that might sound ridiculous together, but might actually coalesce in practice better than you’d think. On TERRA they sure do, and this element of playing grounds you to the instrument, it connects your body to the playing like no other synth or instrument that I can think of, not even a Weissenborn guitar. Of course this is just one aspect of playing TERRA, and how you play it, how you have to play it, inspires music, creativity, and sounds in ways that other instruments don’t.
The sensitivity of the keyboard side, the touch points on the right, are incredibly expressive and in the same category that instruments like Expressive E’s Osmose and the Haken Continuum reside, even though the three are completely different in their approach. Analogous to its nano-tonality, the playability of TERRA is also nano, and the ever-so-slightest touch can create an ever-so-slight change, with TERRA responding to every nanometer of fingerprint on a sensor. I wasn’t surprised that a slight touch would trigger something in TERRA, but I was surprised with how incremental touches were translated. Nothing went unnoticed, nothing was lost.
Playing melodies and basslines is an interesting experience as the layout of the “keyboard” section is piano-ish, but not exactly so that notes in a given scale always sounded in key (and good in that sense), but sometimes surprising since I couldn’t just play it the way I would a normal keyboard-based synth. As a drone instrument, holding notes and tones and playing over them while shifting TERRA to trigger the gyroscope and create movement was like cranking an amp and holding a guitar in front to create a buzzy wall of feedback, without the day-after regret of the inevitable ring of tinnitus. I really value using TERRA in this fashion, of a drone/feedback instrument and there are so many ways, so many sounds to utilize it in this fashion; in fact, there may be no instrument that’s better for total immersion, complete interaction in this regard than TERRA. No hunching over a pedal board twisting knobs (snooze), no mashing a grid of blinking colored pads (yawn), no single pressing of a key or button to trigger a dozen simultaneous pre-programmed events (boo). Once you get comfortable with it, you can get lost playing TERRA, get lost in the music/sound, and get lost in the interface.
TERRA is an extremely expressive and versatile instrument. This expressivity is something that seems to be an enduring philosophy of SOMA, something I love about the company. Their ideas for instruments, sometimes odd, almost always seem to be centered around connection and expression—not just design or technology—and really, what more could you want from an instrument designer? SOMA is making a statement with TERRA: it’s not just an instrument they’re selling; it’s an idea, their MO, their musical mission statement, and it stands in direct comparison to the many mini computers disguised as musical instruments and devices that dot the landscape. TERRA is an inspired, wonderful wooden instrument with a modern digital brain and an old soul. It stands alone.
Price: $1599
somasynths.com