Starsky Carr’s Erica Synths Resonant Filterbank Review: Not Your Nan’s Graphic EQ

Starsky Carr opens the show by immediately trashing any idea that the Erica Synths Resonant Filterbank is just a glorified graphic EQ. Right out of the gate, he slams the input gain and cranks the resonance, showing off the box’s vicious side. This isn’t a polite studio tool—it’s an analog street weapon with attitude, dripping with nasty self-oscillation and feedback options.

What really jumps out is how the Filterbank looks like a relic from a forgotten Radio Shack rave, but absolutely refuses to behave. Starsky’s no-nonsense style cuts through the hype: this is a machine that can be as musical or as mental as you want, and that’s just scratching the surface. The intro alone tells you this box isn’t here to politely shape your EQ curves—it’s here to cause trouble.

Starsky pulls back the curtain on the Erica’s roots, tracing its DNA straight to the legendary Serge Resonant Equalizer. Unlike your run-of-the-mill EQs, the filter bands here are tuned in major sevenths—not octaves—which means frequencies don’t stomp on each other. The result? A musicality and harmonic richness that’s more instrument than utility box.

When he dials up the feedback on each band, the Filterbank spits out a staggeringly fat sawtooth that demands to be sampled. This isn’t just a tribute to the Serge—Erica Synths have supercharged the idea, slapping digital control and wild modulation on top of old-school analog grunt. If you want clean and clinical, look elsewhere; this is filterbank funk at its juiciest.

Where the Erica Synths box really leaves the Serge in the dust is its arsenal of modern tricks. Starsky highlights per-band feedback routing—something the Serge could only dream of—plus dual resonance, attenuverter controls, and stereo channel selection. This means you can route and mangle each filter band independently, creating textures that go way beyond vintage limits.

And then there’s the digital sauce: snapshot pools with MIDI-clocked morphing let you shift entire settings in sync with your beat, while LFO and envelope mods are as deep as you care to go. Macro pages make live tweaking a breeze—well, at least when the firmware behaves. These are the kind of features that turn a studio filter into a rave bunker performance tool. For all the menu-diving, you’ll want to see Starsky’s video to really grasp how bonkers this gets in action.

Starsky closes with an honest take: the Erica Synths Resonant Filterbank is much deeper and more experimental than expected, with only a few minor firmware quirks tripping things up—most notably, parameter pickup issues and macro bugs. Still, he finds these annoyances minor compared to the sheer sonic firepower on offer.

This isn’t a device for the faint-hearted or the ‘set-and-forget’ crowd—it’s an experimental playground that rewards poking, patching, and pushing past the obvious. If you want to really hear what this beast can do, you’ll need to watch the video and crank the sound. As Starsky says: pick one up if you want your rig to go from sensible to savage. Don’t let the conservative looks fool you—this thing kicks like a drunken horse.