Here’s Retrologue 2, The First ELK-Powered Desktop Synth By Steinberg and MIND Music Labs

Last year we introduced MIND Music Labs and their innovative operative system for musical purposes called ELK. Now the Swedish company is proud to announce a continuation of its official partnership with Steinberg by bringing Retrologue 2, a brand-new, co-developed desktop synth prototype with full MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) support to SUPERBOOTH19 in Berlin, May 9-11.

Basically, Retrologue 2 is a VA (virtual analog) synth that uses Steinberg’s expertise in emulating classic analog synthesizers, with the added benefit of a tactile interface. It might not sound particularly exciting to some of you, but I believe it’s just a first step towards wider adoption of ELK (which could lead to much more interesting projects).

“Plug-ins and software synths have brought amazing power and flexibility to computer-based recording, but now musicians want to harness all that power without the computer; there are times when you want to twist real knobs, rather than wiggle a mouse.” So says MIND Music Labs CEO Michele Benincaso, before adding: “It’s really exciting to be empowering those users with ELK MusicOS.”

This sentiment is clearly shared by Florian Haack, Senior Marketing Manager at Steinberg: “We immediately saw the potential of ELK MusicOS, and that’s why we added it to the official VST SDK [Software Development Kit]. The development of the ‘Powered by ELK’ Retrologue 2 hardware prototype has further strengthened our belief that, with the help of ELK MusicOS, VST can become a standard for not only software, as it is today, but also for hardware.”

At the time of writing, we haven’t been provided with further details but from the picture above we can clearly see it’s a 3 oscillator synth, with a fairly basic structure and 8 extra buttons (presets? mini-sequencer?). We’ll update the article in the next few hours/days once we get more details.
That said, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, right?