The Story Behind the 3D Dreamsynth

Our video for an imagined hardware version of our popular Dreamsynth is a hit! We hope that between the date of the post (April 1st) and the closing text ("As soon as we have the chips") that most viewers figured it out fairly quickly. As much as we would also enjoy a desktop version of Dreamsynth, we will have to be satisfied with our brilliant software version for the foreseeable future.

But where did these images come from? What's the story behind them?

Meet Mikko Niiranen (aka Nirude), a professional media content creator from Finland. Shortly after the release of Dreamsynth, we ran across some remarkable images on his Instagram account.

We were blown away. Our first impression was that someone actually had quickly built a desktop synth or controller based on Dreamsynth! Once we realized these were computer-generated images, our next thought was, "Well, here's our post for April Fool's Day." This was much better than our original plan.

We contacted Mikko, and he was gracious and happy to participate. We were astounded to find out that he had done all of this based on a single image of Dreamsynth from our website. As it turns out, he's been doing fantastic work similar to this for quite some time, visualizing Reason software.

Mikko creates his models in Autodesk 3ds Max and renders them using Corona Renderer. As we started talking, he suggested providing a complete animation using Unreal Engine 5, a tool commonly used for high-quality games, films, and other visualizations. Within days, he presented us with what we needed to create our short video. We added the exemplary Dreamsynth track "Deckard's Last Dream" by sound designer Huston Singletary, and tagged our mischievous "chips" joke onto the end. At midnight on April 1st, we posted the video to YouTube and our social media channels. 24 hours later, the video had been viewed over 3,000 times!

We were thrilled with the end result, and hope to work with Mikko again in the future. And we hope our followers were in on the fun as well, even if we are all a little disappointed that it is just a "dream" after all. Then again, who knows what the future might bring?

For now, be sure to check out the real thing! Cherry Audio's Dreamsynth synthesizer (software version!) is available now for the incredibly low price of only $39, and is available in AU, VST, VST3, AAX, and standalone formats, for macOS and Windows. A free 30-day demo is available, so take it for a test drive now!