Did Paul shed any light on the midi troubles? I haven’t tried any midi stuff yet but I don’t use midi much so I probably won’t find out if I have sync troubles for a while.
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No, I didn’t bother him with that since it seems like he is the only one troubleshooting right now.
And it works, great even. The wild nature of everything leads to the perception of drift, and also the encoders are not very precise, so I may have them dialed in just enough to sound in sync for the first 20 bars, then I finally hear that’s it’s not.
The signal is constantly moving, so it may just clash with a clock signal at certain times.
I agree on the envelopes of the BS2. Maybe it is possible to mod them to make them more snappy?
I wonder if it’s because they were low resolution digital control. I think everything on the BS2 is 1-128 except for the filter being 256.
Malevolent through a Moogerfooger Phaser over an AJ Hall drum loop.
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This sounds awesome. I love that characteristic rough sound Malevolent has. Like pieces of it are falling off or something.
Does anyone know if Malevolent outputs Midi Clock when the arp is going? Some sales sites like B&H say it does but I don’t get anything when I try to sync anything with it.
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Are you on the Owners group on the PWM website?
I found this posted there. I think it’s about incoming, so not sure about outgoing.
You may need to patch to clock out, unless you are trying to trigger another arp sequence on a different device.
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Mine takes incoming midi clock fine. But no clock sent on midi. Although receiving seems to still be related to the arp rate. So I can still tweak the arp rate from Malevolent and also tweak it from the master midi clock at the same time like they’re added together or something. Strange. I much prefer the simplicity of analog clock. Midi has been nothing but woe for me for 20+ years. 
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What a wild synth! The resonance gets bonkers real fast and we don’t need to speak about the overdrive…
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my review:
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Hah - just found this thread after a fair amount of time away from here, thank you for all the nice words and in case of any complaints, we hear ya! If anyone’s got questions re. the analogue design, I can most likely answer 
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Damn, now I want one 
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I had one for a little while, great bit of kit.
One thing that really struck me about it was how many really useable nasty spots there are on the filter without much in the way of FM or other clever patching, which is kinda surprising given the relatively simple setup (compared to some of your Eurorack stuff at least). Even though I ultimately prefer the sound of my Polivoks, I’d definitely put the sound of the Malevolent’s filter up there with the best of the worst, like the Polivoks and the MS20 and such and it definitely reeks of your experience with building the gristelizer modules, it has that same feeling of a living thing that you’re trying to keep a lid on that I really look for in a filter. Pretty big achievement to have something like that on a full synth that costs about the same as a lot of Eurorack filters.
It’s a really good thing to see new synths on the market with that sort of horrible nasty character, but that aren’t just another clone of stuff that’s gone before (or a fucking Moog filter). Was there a temptation to add some of the more complex filter shaping stuff from your FSS filters, or was the aim to just keep it as streamlined (but nasty) as possible?
If yous ever make a desktop version (with a sample and hold on it) I’ll almost definitely buy it. And then probably sell it.
Then probably buy another one…
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really like this as well as the Korg MS20 FS and Erica Synths DB01 Bassline for melodic to gritty bass synths. If I did not already own a Virus, A4 and Moog Sub37, this would be on my must buy list for next year.
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sounds dirtier than the bass station II surprised that Sascha K of KMFDM and Trent Reznor of NIN have not bought one yet.
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Yo! Sooo the Malevolent really grew from our Brunswick kit synth - the VCOs, filter and LFO are very much grown-up versions of those circuits. Nevertheless, we wanted to keep a lot of the character from Brunswick - Paul at PWM was really into how absolutely gnarly that thing can be. I was also approaching the design work from a perspective of “how far can we try to forget what’s been done, and design this thing as though we were in the mid-1970s”, trying to get it into the realms of not really being like anything else out there. That’s why the VCO waveshaping is a bit weird, the filter input can be very easily overdriven (using the mixer as a feature rather than a utility), the resonance goes way further than most, the VCA can be overdriven no end, etc.
If we had gone for a more complex filter, like what’s in the Timbral Sculptor, the VCF section would be pretty much just as much electronics as the rest of the synth 
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Any plans to release a manual with descriptions of the patch points?
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That kinda thing lies with Paul at PWM, but do feel free to ask here if anything’s confusing. The ins and outs should be relatively self-explanatory…
Realised I haven’t posted this here, unsure if it’s much use to anyone, but this is all Malevolent apart from the hi-hats, handclaps and cymbals (and vocals of course)
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Report from Synthfest UK 2024 via SonicState.
They are now working on a new version of firmware for the Malevolent with some new features. ( Video ) What that is exactly has not been announced.
Also news from the show ! PWM has their new digital synth in development, and is now announcing they are planning for three more new synths after that ! ( Video )
So PWM is growing.
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