Novation has announced the release of Summit, their new flagship synthesizer for studio and stage. Built on the same innovative foundations as the critically acclaimed Peak, Summit’s deep sound design capabilities, 16-voice two-part multitimbral engine and intuitive, tactile workflow add up to a synth that’s far more than the sum of its parts.
With its multitimbral architecture and 16 voices of polyphony, Summit is like two Peaks in one instrument, enabling two completely independent patches to be split or layered across the keyboard, or switched between on the fly. The addition of dual filters, greatly extended front panel controls, audio input and, of course, the same premium-quality five-octave keyboard introduced with the SL MkIII MIDI controller, put Summit in a creative league of its own.
At the heart of Summit is the digital New Oxford Oscillator, three of which are employed by every one of its 16 voices. They’re hosted on the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chip, which not only helps to generate authentic analogue waveforms at incredibly high resolution (24MHz), but also facilitates FM and wavetable synthesis for rich, complex and highly textural raw tones.
The FPGA feeds into a true stereo analogue signal path, comprising dual 12dB/octave filters (switchable between six paired combinations of low-pass, high-pass and band-pass modes), analogue VCAs and three stages of distortion (pre- and post-filter, and post-VCA).
Summit also boasts modulation sources and assignment options, three effects, audio input for routing external sources into those effects (while still using the other multitimbral part as a synth), and an auxiliary output. And the front panel expands greatly on Peak’s layout with the addition of dedicated controls for FM, all LFOs, effects and more.
To learn more about the Novation brand, visit novationmusic.com/synths/summit
