I guess it's pretty fateful that I finally got me a copy of Synthmaster. It's a VSTi so those not interested can pass. Synthmaster's a rather modularized synth that's got a niche following. I'm assuming it's been around a while due to it's well developed expansion packs. I mainly got it so I could do quick modular-esque things and not rant about how there isn't a simple drop in solution for modular in native land.
Base rundown: You have 2 layers of 2 osc (basic waves + a bunch of variant waves, waldorf style wave cycling, vector, additive, and audio in) and 4 modulator osc each. Each pair of osc does sync, phase mod, freq mod, AM. (with modulator osc as input ala 1, 2, 1+2, etc) 2 filters that you can serial or parallel each osc into. For each layer you have 4 adsr, 2 2D joystic style control, 2 multistage, 2LFO, and 4 keyscale (fade by keyrange). Then you have a matrix thing to assign controllers to whatever param, you get the idea. Pretty good stuff. The master goes through distortion, delay, chorus, reverb, usual suspects.
The sound of the presets isn't that astounding. To me, it sounds "as is". Which is kind of why I liked it in the first place. No mystery magic coming from anywhere. Zebra 2, which I kept trying to compare it to (not exactly apples to apples) in contrast, has some sort of magic going on that makes it sound super slick. It's a good thing, but not what I was looking for.
As a modular synth tool... well, first thing that stood out to me was that I got 4 adsr. That's pretty cool, but why not simple AD? That was kind of strange, I might have to actually read the manual. (laugh) And the decay on the adsr is kind of weak. No curve setting, so I couldn't get a good snap on kicks even at shortest setting. So that means no zaps, no snaps, no clicks, and yes to claves. Strictly speaking of percussions, that is. I am kind of bummed about this tho, since I was planning on doing more sfx/percussion type stuff than typical synth patches.
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I actually figured this out. Each modulation assignment can be either multiply or addition. By multiply I think it means scale from 0 to 1, and add it an offset of some sort of range (full range?). So by setting the second pitch modulation (for snap) on the sine to addition instead of multiply resulted in a good snap, or basically modulation behavior that I'm used to.
The filter section is pretty awesome. It has a built in waveshaping saturator that you can put pre, post, and "IN" the filter. You can design the saturation curve yourself, and bam, awesome overdrive. I wished there was an easy way to make my positive and negative curve symmetric rather than hand adjusting both sides. Great for if I wanted it asymmetric, but that's kinda rare. I also didn't grasp what saturating "IN" the filter meant. I assume it's saturating as the filter is getting applied, and results in a well rounded sound. To me it sounded softer and more gentle than a post filter waveshape. Quite usable. So the filters are great. It's got some interesting filter modes as well, like "Dual", that does a peak+lowpass, peak+peak, highpass+peak, etc.
The EG / controller block is what houses the adsr/multisegment/etc. So sort of back to the EG topic. The ADSR I already covered. All EGs share a bit depth and drift amount, which is a nice touch. Drift I can imagine uses for, bit depth not so much.. maybe to force create stepped transitions. Anyway, nice touch. The 2d joystic control thing does what you expect it to do. You have good control over designing and how it draws your curves in xy space. (starts playback on keypress or free run) The multisegment eg I wasn't too happy with. In my mind, multisegment is really great for rhythmic stuff, but the curve design is very free form, and also zooms in and out of the sync grid depending on the spacing of all the control dots, so it makes aligning curves to time very difficult. I think it doesn't work as a percussion curve design tool. So, it's probably built with just pad animation in mind. Also, all controllers can be "sync"ed to DAW clock (of course), but I think it only syncs at quarter note resolution. I can't seem to change that, how unfortunate. LFOs have all the standard bells and whistles. You an even add noise, though the visual wave representation doesn't reflect it. It also has a built in fade in / fade out delay so you dictate how the LFO kicks in. Nice to not have to do it with an EG. The controller section is beefy, but overall I don't think it's as powerful or well built as it should be for a synth labeled as a "modular" synth since this is what it's all about.. the control signals.
The OSC section isn't really eye opening. Basic does single waveforms or load SFZ. Comes loaded with single cycle waveforms from a bunch of synths and what not. Cool, does what it's supposed to do. Additive is a bank of 8 waves that you can pick. Can't really imagine doing additive with other than sin, and hard to imagine controlling all of them manually.. for me additive is more for resynthesis but that's just me. Wavescan is a bank of 16 wavelets that you pick yourself. So you can do SID / nintendo style blips and wavestation type stuff. Vector.. well, Vectron.. And I already had an overdose with Alchemy. You can also set any OSC to audio input, and it has a prefilter, envelope follower and an audio trigger. Now that's cool stuff to have built in. The man knows what audio input's good for.
Master effects: it has Vocoder, chorus, 2x comp, tremolo, echo (delay), and reverb and you can map them to 2 internal bus channels. Frankly tho, the bus channel assigning and controls remind me of hardware workstation days so I'd rather deal with those things on the DAW side. Why a vocoder? Dunno, vocoder is eternally cool so just it being there, always being bypassed is still cool. I guess I can do some vocoded drums or some robot voices now and then. I like the comp. It's no nonesense gives it to you as it is comp that does what it's told to do. Chorus is good. I'm no chorus aficionado so I'm not too particular about choruses. As long as it sounds "chorusy" I guess. Tremolo doesn't accept waveforms. I'm like wtf. I think it's set on sin, which I guess covers a good deal of contexts, but should also do square and triangle. Echo's a fairly normal pinpong / mono delay with feedback and filter, with built in distortion. Reverb's actually pretty neutral sounding "multi FX" style reverb. Can't point out which algo it's based on, but it sounds quite standard.
Overall, my impression is that this is meant to be a synth. Like play some pads or leads, that kind of synth, and not so much a "make some crazy shit you can't make sense out of" kinda synth. I mean, sure, you can with any synth, but the author's intent seems to lean towards the conventional. You make keyboard synth patches and play it as such. It has a very honest sound where you can be fairly sure there is little or no voodoo going on behind the scenes, which reminds me of Nord mod series. Modulation/controller side was a bit of a let down since I wanted more of a "out there" sorta synth like it was a crazy man's machine that just so happened to accept MIDI as input. Unfortunately for my wallet, I'm probably going to check out u-he zebra too.
oh, and I'll add before someone else does.. "or go back to scope modular." I'm just surprised ever since my first days of messing with Nord Mod, how much the modular vocabulary has made it into my every day vocabulary. And now without a dependable modular environment I find myself reaching for a drawer that doesn't exist anymore.