As a long time Kyma user (nearly two decades), I am absolutely thrilled to see what they’ve come up with. As ever, it’s far more powerful than previous versions (it’d have to be - they only come around every decade or so), but more importantly, there is sleeker, more modern integration and an eye toward portability. Expect to see a bunch of my gear go up for sale, 'cause I am gonna move heaven and earth get one these new units!
note to self: rewatch this intro video when next on shrooms, ayahuasca or acid. Then explain APUs as if someone else is paying for it.
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Ooh, very interesting! Is there any way to try the software before taking the plunge?
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Nope. Unfortunately, you can only run the Kyma software with attached hardware. However, it’s a bit like Max, etc, so if you are familiar with that, you can easily find your way around Kyma. I find Kyma much, much easier to use than any other graphical patching software like Max, Pure Data, and the like. It isn’t… pretty, but it is staggeringly powerful. I love it.
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I have no idea what’s going on but I’m very intrigued
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Every ten years or so, Symbolic Sound introduce new, more powerful hardware for their Kyma system. Today is that day. The new Pacamara Ristretto ($3200) and Pacamara Ristretto Pro ($3800) are the new boxes that replace the old Paca and Pacarana units. These boxes provide the DSP to run their Kyma 7++ software, in which you can create, manipulate, and process sound in many, many ways, some of which can’t be found elsewhere.
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The price for a 4-processor Pacamara Ristretto is $3,818 (US)
An entry level, 2-processor system is available for $3,302 (US)
compared to Irridium not that stellar increase, but sounds very interesting, i havent seen the kyma software yet, how does it connect to the apu ?
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EDIT: if I am understanding it correctly, Ethernet for the data transfer, USB for the audio and MIDI. You can also use Ethernet for the data transfer, and plug a class compliant interface directly into the Pacamara to get sound in and out (which is kinda the way it worked on the previous generation).
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Glad to see they’re still around and releasing updated products.
Kyma is one of those things that you only need, if you have a really good idea of what you want to do and it can’t be done with anything else.
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I can see that, yeah. For me, I am not sure I really need it, but I sure enjoy it. I am by no means an expert on it, but I can usually make whatever I dream up, and it offers plenty of ways to get inspired when I’m not.
It’s certainly not for everyone, but I personally can’t imagine being without it. For me, it is at the top of my desert island list.
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Which type of sounds do you make with it? Can kyma be sequenced by a DAW?
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Me? I can’t narrow it down… I use it for lots of stuff, from additive resynthesis to ambient soundscapes. I especially like to use it to chop up, mangle, manipulate tracks for remixes. For example, I used it on a remix of the title track for Darling Kandie’s last album, where it was used to do many of the vocal treatments, weird ambiences and noises, many of which were created using snippets of Groovie (My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult) Mann’s vocal track.
(oh, and yeah, you can sequence it from a DAW)
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You do strike me actually as someone who knows what he wants from Kyma.
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Sometimes Kyma tells me what I want from it. And I listen, 'cause I get a bit nervous when my gear talks to me…
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Sounds wide without sounding like reverb, wow. Maybe the breathing sound covers this up.
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Very very interesting. The price is not very high, but still high.
Curious how the limit of basic version with 2Gb RAM and 2 processors translates to the actual perfomance / capabilities… (sounds a bit like MPC One, heh). Are there any articles or benchmarks describing what is possible and what is not? In words like Y tracks with X instances of effects…
Or like - nevermind, this is a big upgrade anyway from already powerful platform? 
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I’m not aware of any benchmarks. From what I can see, the ‘standard’ Pacamara seems to be 2.5 x faster than the ‘big’ Pacarana (as opposed to the smaller Paca) that they used to sell. The “Pro” seems to be twice the DSP/RAM of the standard (if I’m reading that right). That would be in keeping with the approach they’ve maintained all along.
Now, to put that into some perspective, I have never hit the wall with my Pacarana, no matter what I was trying to do. I recently came close, using some custom NeverEngine Labs things, but those are super-powered designs and I was admittedly being a bit cavalier with them.
I can’t imagine hitting the wall with 2.5 x the oomph, but I am more than willing to try… 
I can’t look now - and I may be wrong - but I believe the Pacarana shipped with 2 GB RAM and the Paca had 1 GB, so again, the bottom of the current line is on par with the top of the former. It can’t really be compared to an MPC One, where the RAM is meant to handle graphics and all sorts of other processes - resulting in some limitations when things like plugins came into play. That’s not the case here. Kyma just doesn’t work like that. You control how many parameters you want a given patch to have available, how many files it should access and from where (RAM, computer hard drive). For this reason, I have never really given the RAM a second thought.
On the other hand, the ‘Pro’ Pacamara is only $500 more than the standard, so it’s kind of a no-brainer to go for the bigger version, if you ask me.
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Cool, thank you very much! (This platform is still something obscure and also a big investment, just trying to understand the details)
I don’t understand why would anyone buy a Kyma system when they can buy an SP404 mk2 instead! What am I missing here?!
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In both money and time. However, it is less expensive than past versions, even while inflation rises. $3200/$3800 puts it in range of any number of flagship synths these days.
The investment in the time it takes to learn it is another matter. Personally, I’ve come to think of it as an ongoing pursuit. After 20 years, I’ve only scratched the surface. I consider myself a novice Kyma user. There are people with far greater knowledge of DSP and, gulp, mathematics, than I, and they can dig a bit deeper. However, such depth of knowledge is not required to get a lifetime’s enjoyment out of it and as my knowledge expands, so do Kyma’s capabilities. It has decades worth of pre-fab things that perform almost any function you can think of, so you can start making and playing with sounds from day one.
However, it should be noted that it does require a bit of adjustment to how you approach sound and processing. This has always been a system aimed at professionals who have a job to do (for instance, Ben Burtt used it to recreate the sounds of R2-D2 - among many other sounds - for the Star Wars prequels). As such, there are few monolithic all-in-one devices such as those you might find in Reaktor (though there are some and they are inspiring). For instance, you will find only a few things that resemble, say, a standard fully-formed subtractive synth with oscillators, filters, envelopes, amplifiers, effects, and a familiar interface full of knobs and sliders. They are there, sure, but you’re more likely to find, say a sawtooth generator with a vibrato that is meant to do that one job - it’s up to you to expand that as you like. And you can - quite easily.
These days, Kyma seems less oblique and esoteric, thanks to the proliferation of both modular synthesizers and the inclusion of Max For Live in Ableton Live. A lot more potential Kyma owners will come in with some familiarity of patching synths and creating devices in a graphical programming environment such as Max. (I’ve actually come at it from the other way around, having been a Kyma user for nearly twenty years, I find that helps me to approach Max and Pure Data with less trepidation).
It’s a great system. As I said, it isn’t for everyone, but I think there are far more people that might appreciate now than ever before.
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