Catalogue No. 1Atelier Ondes, LyonShips spring 2027
A four-voice analog polysynth with walnut cheeks and a ribbon you play like a voice. Four hundred of them, built by four people in Lyon.
Reserve one · €2,890Flip power, or simply press a key. Sound starts only when you do.
Slide a finger across the keys for glissando. Drag the ribbon to sing between notes.
In the winter of 2021 the Lyon conservatoire sent us a 1937 ondes Martenot with a snapped ribbon and a handwritten note: “Faites-la chanter.” Make it sing. It took four months. When it finally did, none of us wanted to give it back.
So we built our own. Not a replica, but the instrument we kept wishing for: a polysynth that fits on a kitchen table, with the Martenot’s ring-and-ribbon stretched above the keys, so a melody can slide between notes the way a voice does.
The Martenot arrives at our bench in the Croix-Rousse. Its ribbon is a silk thread on a pulley; the ring that drives it was worn smooth by one player’s finger for sixty years.
Forty-one ribbons in velvet, steel and conductive silicone. The winner: a resistive strip under a tensioned wire, played by a brass ring or a bare fingertip.
A walnut tree falls in a storm near Nyons, in the Drôme. We buy the trunk, saw it into boards and let it air-dry for three years before cutting a single cheek.
Why four voices? Enough for a chord under a ribbon melody, few enough that every voice is calibrated by ear and scope, by the same person, on the same afternoon.
The tree gives us four hundred matched pairs of cheeks. So there will be four hundred ONDES-1, and then the run is finished.
Recorded at 14 rue des Fantasques, Lyon 1er, in a silk weavers’ workshop with ceilings built tall for Jacquard looms.
Each of the four voices runs two discrete VCOs with a sub-oscillator one octave down. Pulse width sweeps from 5 to 95 percent, oscillator 2 hard-syncs to 1, and a drift control lets the tuning wander as far as you will allow.
This trace follows the WAVE selector above.
A 24 dB/octave transistor ladder low-pass, self-oscillating at full resonance, with bass compensation so the low end survives. Behind it, a 12 dB state-variable high-pass for thinning chords under the ribbon.
Turn CUTOFF and RESONANCE above; this curve moves with them.
A 61 cm ribbon spans three octaves above the keys. Wear the brass ring to pull the pitch along the wire, or press the strip with a bare finger to jump. On the left cheek, a velvet touche d’intensité shapes volume under your other hand.
The ribbon on the panel above is live. Drag along it.
Solid walnut cheeks, finished in linseed oil. A 3 mm brushed aluminium panel, screen-printed in two passes. A folded steel chassis with an internal power supply, so there is no brick on the floor and no wall-wart on the stand.
Hover the drawing to take it apart.
First run · 400 units
A €290 deposit holds your serial number. We refund it in full, no questions, any time before your instrument ships in spring 2027.