Dreadbox Artemis: Synth Wizardry Unleashed with Bonedo-Synthesizers

Dreadbox has been up to their old tricks again, this time at Superbooth 2025. Introducing the Artemis, a six-voice analog synthesizer that promises to shake up the soundscape. In collaboration with SineVibe, similar to their previous venture Typhoon, Dreadbox offers a synth with distortion, modulation, delays, and reverbs – the audio equivalent of a gritty night out. The architecture is as solid as a punk rock gig, with two oscillators offering variable wave shaping from sawtooth to square to triangle. VCO1 and VCO2 pack the same punch, each equipped with a crossfader and a dedicated pitch control capable of spanning four octaves, quantized in semitones. You can detune these voices, adjusting the harmony depending on whether you’re in polyphonic, monophonic, or stacked mode. And of course, what would a true analog experience be without a master glide control?

The Artemis isn’t for the faint-hearted or those who like their synthesizers tame. This beast comes with a low pass filter section that feels more like a bouncer at the door of a dodgy club. With a 24 dB resonant filter that can be tweaked down to 12 dB, it’s ready to tame those rambunctious frequencies. Dreadbox has thought of everything, allowing keyboard tracking with three states off, middle, and full, ensuring your sonic journey is a wild ride across the keyboard. The filter FM brings an interesting twist, letting you blend waves for a unique modulation, including the ability to mix square and triangle waves. Moving on to the envelopes, the Artemis boasts classic ADSR controls. With the flick of a switch, these envelopes can control both VCA and VCF. The biggest sound tweak comes from the modulation section, where polyphonic LFOs let you experiment with key sync, BPM sync, and wild arpeggiating patterns. According to Dreadbox, it’s about creating resonating sync sounds and letting your creativity loose on the hardest of sync sounds.

Artemis’s effects labyrinth is like stepping into a kaleidoscope of sound. Start with the distortion, where the sliders control mix, level, and gain, with a twist of bitrate reduction and bitcrash for good measure. This isn’t just a simple fuzz; Dreadbox has included a veritable smorgasbord of 13 distinct distortion algorithms. Imagine exponential, parabolic, and sine distortions to name a few. The modulation section takes things further with phasers, pitch-shifters, and various choruses—each a treat for anyone looking to swim in a sea of weird and wonderful. The delay section throws in some curveballs with random repeater options for a generative delay sound that’s as unpredictable as a Friday night out. Of course, no effects section is complete without reverb options, ranging from the ethereal cloud reverb to hall settings that envelop your sound in sonic grandiosity.