Koma Elektronik - Chromaplane

- Order number: 240544
Chromaplane by KOMA Elektronik — A novel electromagnetic instrument made for sonic daydreaming.
The KOMA Elektronik Chromaplane is one of those devices that instantly catches your eye. Its design, a sleek metal block reminiscent of early-2000s PowerBooks, houses a novel way to interact with sound. Instead of keys or dials, you’ve got two electromagnetic pickups, sort of like a pair of stethoscopes. You hover them over the Chromaplane’s surface, and thereby interact with the electromagnetic fields from its ten square-wave oscillators.
This certainly isn’t your average type of synth. You don’t play it like other instruments but rather coax sounds by moving the pickups over the array of oscillators spread out evenly on its surface. A screwdriver is all you need to tune each oscillator, letting you create your own special scale and mix of tones that’s unique to how you interact with it. The result is a blend of ambient drones or melodic sweeps, depending on how you approach it.
The panel itself has small markers showing where each oscillator’s sound peaks. Put in another way, it’s the center of each oscillator’s position beneath the silver panel. Moving your pickups closer to these dots makes the sound louder, while the spaces in between bring in subtler in-between harmonies as more oscillators interact at the same time. There’s a built-in low-pass filter plus a lo-fi echo/delay for some added atmosphere — who doesn’t love delay?
Is it a versatile powerhouse? No. But that’s not the point. It’s a tool for exploring sound in an open-ended way, a space for sonic daydreaming as KOMA themselves put it. With a physical tuner and an [online library](https://koma-elektronik.com/chromaplane/chromaplane-tuning.html) for testing and sharing tunings, the Chromaplane is for those who enjoy experimenting with analog sounds in an interactive and quite novel way. What can we say—this instrument is unique and looks really cool!
Features:
- Played using two electromagnetic pickups (like stethoscopes)
- Interacts with 10 tunable square-wave oscillators
- Hover or move pickups across the surface to create sounds
- Includes a low-pass filter and lo-fi delay
- Visual markings for each oscillator’s center position
- Comes with a physical tuner and access to an online tuning library
- Focuses on sonic exploration and meditative sound creation
Chromaplane @KOMA Elektronik
Founded by Wouter Jaspers and Christian Zollner, Koma have been no strangers in the synth-scene in Berlin. If the SVF201 filter has been glowing on many racks already, their release of the Field Kit (and Field Kit FX) have catapulted them into well-deserved recognition.