Sound Workshop Flexur T2 revives Trautonium touch control for modern players

Sound Workshop’s Flexur T2 does not announce itself with a keyboard. It comes with two floating touch bars, spaced at 15 mm semitone intervals across a 23-semitone range, and that immediately puts it in the Trautonium lineage instead of the usual subtractive-synth lane. The company previewed the instrument on June 9 as a compact modern synth that treats gesture, phrasing, and pitch bend as the point, not an accessory.

That lineage matters. Friedrich Trautwein invented the Trautonium in Berlin in 1930, and Oskar Sala later developed the Mixtur-Trautonium after World War II, earning patents in Germany, France, and the United States. The Deutsches Museum dates Sala’s Mixturtrautonium to 1952 and says he used it mainly in his Berlin studio, where its sounds included the bird cries for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Sound Workshop calls the Trautonium a mostly forgotten synthesizer and pitches the floating-bar interface as a way to control loudness or filter and pitch with the hands instead of a piano grid.

Flexur T2 tries to translate that idea into a player-friendly box. Rather than burying the user in menus, it is built around a streamlined knob-per-function subtractive engine with preset handling, autotune, mono, poly, and arp modes, plus a 6x12 modulation matrix. The hardware also leans into real-world integration, with audio in and out, TRS MIDI in and out, USB-C MIDI out, two expression or gate inputs, and four CV outputs for pitch, gate, envelope, and force. That makes it look ready for a studio that mixes modular gear, MIDI rigs, and standalone hardware without forcing the T2 into one camp.

The preorder pitch was just as concrete. Sound Workshop said it had made four prototype units and let more than 100 early testers try them, then set a goal of preselling up to 100 units to raise at least $75,000 for tooling, test fixtures, consulting fees, and minimum-order quantities. The presale price was $1,399, down $200 from a listed full price of $1,599, and the company said preorder buyers would get lifetime access to its paid Patreon feed, a two-year white-glove warranty, and shipping in 6 to 24 months. As of June 10, the campaign was fully funded at $115,526, with only 7 units showing in one snapshot.

That is why the Flexur T2 stands out in a crowded synth scene: it is not just borrowing the look of old hardware. It is trying to make the Trautonium’s continuous touch control, first imagined in Berlin nearly a century ago, usable again for players who want expressive hardware that still plugs cleanly into a modern rack, desk, or modular setup.