KV331 - Synthmaster One

  • Share
  • KV331 was founded by Digidesign software engineer Bülent Bıyıkoğlu back in 2004, but it has only had one product on offer—the ambitiously named Synthmaster. This deep plug-in has evolved over the years into an instrument that supports pretty much any type of synthesis. Couple that with a price lower than many of its competitors and the result is a steadily growing level of popularity. It even landed the number one spot on MusicRadar's best software instruments of last year. After 13 years, it seems that KV331 is ready to start branching out. The new Synthmaster One plug-in was released in February and marketed by KV331 as a more straightforward younger sibling to the original. With that goal in mind, Synthmaster One was built with a simplified design and a brand new wavetable-based synthesis engine. A common complaint about the original Synthmaster was its user interface. It's a menu-laden affair that was required to support the myriad options that Bıyıkoğlu and co. packed into the instrument. Synthmaster One's UI takes a more traditional approach, using dedicated panels adorned with the knobs and faders we're all used to. This includes a pair of oscillators (each with an associated sub oscillator) sitting above two filters, with a set of LFOs and envelopes near the bottom. What you might not realise at first is that what appear to be visual displays double as menus or parameter controls. For example, in the oscillator panels, clicking on the waveform display opens the wave type selection menu, and in multiple different panels there are slope displays that allow you to change the curve by clicking and dragging on them. While KV331 did away with a good portion of the menu-diving required on Synthmaster, it's not gone completely. The centre panel of Synthmaster One houses three different sections: the effects, arpeggiator and filter/amp routing. The routing section in particular took some getting used to. There are no obvious indicators of what the different visual waveforms are really showing you. Figuring out what they actually do takes a bit of trial and error. More menus can be found at the bottom of the display, where you can switch between an on-screen keyboard, two modulation matrixes, preset tags and overall instrument settings. Finally, there is a preset browser that overtakes the synth panel, providing a nice way to select from Synthmaster One's large library of presets by filtering by author, instrument type, attributes and style tags.
    Synthmaster One is powered by wavetable synthesis, which uses recorded single-cycle waveforms rather than pure maths to generate the oscillator sound output. You get the typical sine/triangle/square/sawtooth/pulse options but you'll find a number of waveforms and wavetables sampled from classic hardware synthesisers. These are curiously named (I'm assuming for legal reasons) to allude to the original instruments they were sampled from. One can gather that the list includes the Alesis Andromeda A6, Korg MS-20, Oberheim SEM, Roland SH-101 and others. Once you have decided upon a waveform, you can further tailor the sound of the oscillator with 16 different waveshaping algorithms for applying varying degrees of spectral filtering. When you combine this with the powerful unison options, you can generate a wild variety of unique sounds even before you take the filters and modulation into account. When it comes to modulation, there are a few fixed routings built into Synthmaster One but most connections are made with the two mod matrix panels. Here you can choose from a set of modulators, including the envelopes, LFOs, MIDI CCs and randomness, and assign them to pretty much any control by clicking and dragging. This is by no means a bad system, but there are a few ways it could be improved. Primarily, it would be nice to have overall visual feedback for all modulation routings. As it stands, you have to go to the mod matrix and click one of the slots to see where it's been routed to. Also, I was surprised not to see the oscillators themselves listed as modulators, which can be handy for Filter FM and other advanced synthesis techniques.
    Where Synthmaster One really started to wow me was the one place you wouldn't normally expect to be impressed—the settings panel. In addition to the things you'd expect to be here, there are a set of features that do wonders in pushing Synthmaster One's sound closer to that of a hardware analogue synthesiser. You can change the engine quality both for realtime and offline processing, choosing to sacrifice CPU utilisation for better sound via oversampling. You can also introduce nonlinearities into the filter for a more authentic feel or set the oscillator tuning to a custom scale measured by KV331 from the hardware they used for the waveform samples. If you want to go the extra mile, you can even add the background noise sampled from the synthesisers into your signal chain to give it an extra level of realism. Synthmaster One's combination of workflow oddities and powerful options had me thinking of it as the Linux of software synthesisers. It may take a bit of getting used to and it may not give you the ideal package of settings right out of the box. But if you spend some time tinkering under the hood, you can get a expensive sounding instrument at an affordable price point. Ratings: Cost: 4.7 Versatility: 4.2 Ease of use: 2.9 Sound: 4.2
RA