this small synthesizer was built by chris hugget's company 'electronic dream plant' and is essentially a scaled down version of the infamous 'wasp'. just like its bigger brother, it is battery operable and features a plastic housing with built-in speaker and capacitative keypad.

the gnat offers a single dco, with an octave range spanning from 32' to 2'. waveforms are sawtooth, square, pwm and noise. the unique feature setting it off from the 'wasp' is the selectable pulsewidth modulation, though always running with fixed rate and depth, it produces a huge sound right at the source. next comes a fully featured lfo with selectable waveform (sine, square, ramp up, ramp down, noise/random) and speed running just into the audio range. the lfo can modulate both the dco and the filter. the gnat's 12db lowpass filter can be set to give plenty of resonance and has its own 'one knob'-envelope, which can be set to produce everything in between a slow ramp up, a sharp 'spike' at the center position or a slow ramp down at maximum position. the filter can be modulated by the lfo or the filter envelope with variable intensities. self-oscillation of the filter is not possible. final stage is the vca, with an attack/decay envelope. there is also variable portamento for the dco. the gnat's envelopes tend to produce click noises in the beginning of the attack phase, which can be annoying sometimes. nevertheless, no one should be fooled by the gnat's tiny sounding name, physical size or feature list, though. it packs a very impressive sound, the filter sounds great and envelopes, lfo and noise give some remarkable possibilities. most impressive when hearing it for the first time is probably the incredible fatness of that pwm-wave, it just blasts off. generally, the gnat is suited very well to produce fat and deep bass sounds, it goes down low indeed, also the filter helps generate nice sequencer lines or monophonic blips.

the sound is of course best heard not from the built-in speaker, but routed through your mixer from the 1/4" jack output on the right side, were you can also find access for a power supply and the essential 7 pin 'link' socket, the same as on the 'wasp'. this offers a connection to the midi-world, if you have the right interface (f.e. kenton electronics).