What’s the buzz? Meet Yellowjacket, Cherry Audio's recreation of EDP’s trend-setting Wasp from 1978

Following a lengthy tease beginning earlier this month – promising fans on their socials that “There’s a certain buzz surrounding Cherry Audio’s next synth” – the ever-popular synth maker has released its latest beast.

And, after all that yellow and black branding and talk of “buzz”, anyone with any knowledge of synth history will hardly be surprised to find that their synth emulation is… Yellowjacket, a synth based upon British synth pioneer Electronic Dream Plant’s Wasp.

Designed by the late Chris Huggett, the EDP Wasp won over fans with its quirky design, completely flat two-octave membrane keyboard, distinctive, simple-but-effective nasal sound, ease of use (with battery-powered, built-in-speaker portability) but, perhaps most of all, its super-keen pricing.

"One of the biggest advances in synthesizer design – an ultra low‑cost, high‑performance instrument unmatched by synthesizers several times the price,” claimed the ads at the time, delivering a full synth for just £199.

Synth designer Hugget would subsequently go on to play his part in the creation of the similarly scene-setting OSCar monosynth and still-going-strong Novation Bass Station.

Part of the family

Special mention at this point to EDP’s range of insectoid inspired products, including the 252-note (or 84-note real time) Spider digital sequencer – being the perfect partner to take charge of your Wasp – and its three-octave ‘real’ keyboard-equipped Caterpillar which allowed the user to connect four Wasps for flour-voice polyphony – a mighty breakthrough at the time, perilously used by The Stranglers Dave Greenfield live.

And if that £199 entry point was still a little too high, you could always go for 1981’s Gnat, an even smaller, even cheaper single oscillator version of the Wasp, coming in at a wholly appropriate half-as-much £99.

Special editions of the keyboards, placing them in more stately and Moog-like wooden cases (although not actually improving their pretty-much-unplayable flat keyboards) followed soon after.

Famously, the Wasp featured an early digital VCO to keep the cost down (and tuning accurate) teamed with an all-analogue amp and filter. The result is a synth able to really cut through (once you bypassed the tiny internal speaker and DI’d it properly) which, in later years and in the hands of artists such as 808 State and David Holmes would give the Roland TB303 a run for its acid money.

Cherry promise that their Yellowjacket has “faithfully recreated [Wasp’s] unique buzzy tone and drone”, yet enhancing it with 16-voice polyphony, an emulation of the integrated speaker (with adjustable hiss and hum), built-in effects including reverb, delay, phaser, chorus, and a new Octafuzz distortion, an advanced arpeggiator with probability and humanization controls, and a multimode filter.

And, free of that revolutionarily cost-cutting (though awful) keyboard there’s never been a more playable Wasp. Yellowjacket now offers diatonic scales, transpose functions, a customizable pressure control, and polyphonic aftertouch support for expressive play.

And – for the first time on a Wasp – presets!

Plus, in a smart nod to the modular mono-to-poly nature of the original system’s Wasp-plus-Caterpillar set up, there are multi-voice modes that chain adjustable "mini synth panels" to provide more complex tones, stereo effects, single-fingered chords and arpeggiated patterns.

“Yellowjacket is genuinely unlike any plugin we have created to date,” Cherry Audio enthuses.

And given the relatively affordable nature of the original machine back in 1978 the boffins at Cherry Audio are continuing their reputation for great value by similarly following suit, offering Yellowjacket for a “non introductory price” of just $49.

Yellowjacket is available now from Cherry Audio online.