New Gear Review: Summit by Novation

Boasting a 16-voice, bi-timbral architecture, Summit is Novation’s flagship synth—can it find a place in your rig?

The Summit is Novation’s new top-of-the-line synthesizer, introduced in the last quarter of 2019. As suggested by its name, the Summit picks up where the Novation Peak synthesizer leaves off, effectively putting two Peaks into a single package and pairing them with a high quality 61-key keyboard, along with a few other important upgrades.

The original Peak desktop synth came out in 2017 and immediately caught on. Offering a compelling combination of digital and analog it showed that Novation was willing to do new things that its competitors just weren’t thinking of. So, how does the Summit fare in comparison to its earlier brother, and other options on the market today?

Features

Summit is a 16-voice, bi-timbral synthesizer that, as mentioned, is essentially the combination of two Peaks with Novation’s high quality 61-keybed. There are four banks of 128 single patches, and an equal number of Multi patches, which contain their own individual patches.

The signal architecture of the Summit is impressive in that it takes cues from previous designs but also adds its own touches. If you’re familiar with the Peak, the Summit will be easy to jump into. The feature set is quite massive: there are three Oxford oscillators per voice, an analog filter with 12 or 24dB cutoff slopes, three envelopes (one for amp, two for modulation), four LFOs, and three built-in effects (more on those later).

There is also an overdrive before the filter, and then another source of overdrive after the filter. Both sound great and can be used in tandem to get some really gritty sounds out of the Summit. The filter can be high pass, band pass, low pass, or a new “Dual” mode where it’s possible to combine two filter modes at once, or set different cutoff points across the stereo field. Both envelopes can also be set to “Loop” mode with dedicated buttons, unlike on the Peak where this operation requires menu diving.

Peak was Novation’s first use of the Oxford NCO’s (Numerically Controlled Oscillator). These oscillators run on an electrical component called an FGPA, which allowed Novation to make the resolution of the oscillators much higher compared to previous DSP chips. The Oxford name comes from Chris Huggett, who has contributed to many of Novation’s designs and was the original designer behind the Wasp and OSCar synths. Despite being “digital” (yes, that nasty buzzword), the oscillators sound great, even with the filter wide open.

When diving into the Oscillator menu, Novation has added two features called Diverge and Drift, which increase the harmonic and tonal variation typical of analog components. These can be subtle or extreme, and work well to increase the overall tonal capability of the Summit.

A view of the Summit’s back panel.

The rear of the synth shows just how much thought went into the Summit’s connectivity. There are main stereo outs as well as an aux stereo output, a headphone output, stereo audio inputs, a CV mod input, two expression pedal inputs, full-size MIDI in, out, and thru jacks, and a USB port and IEC power socket.

The Summit both feels and plays like a substantial instrument. The keybed is one of the most expressive I’ve ever used, and really allows the Summit to be played and experienced properly, as the Peak was a desktop module.

In Use

The Summit can be used as one 16-voice synth, or it can be used bi-timbrally with two patches at once. These patches can be layered, split across the keyboard, or played separately by choosing which part you’d like to play via dedicated A/B buttons by the modulation wheel. Selecting “Layer” plays both patches at the same time, and as expected can result in some truly gigantic sounding leads, or some incredibly deep pads with shifting textures that turn corners abruptly. It’s also possible to send MIDI to each patch on separate channels.

There is an extensive modulation matrix that works the same way as it does on the Peak, with a healthy assortment of both inputs and destinations. The two “Animate” buttons, which are essentially assignable modulation amounts to your destination of choice, and multiple modes of playing, make using the Summit intuitive and easy to navigate. The larger knob for cutoff also helped with really digging in during performances.

The arpeggiator is another area where the Summit really shows its power, as it is incredibly flexible and has much more hands-on control than that in the Peak. There are knobs for Tempo, Rhythm, Gate, Octave, and Type (with seven different variations!), as well as a Key Latch button. Inputting a chord, hitting the Key Latch button, and then simply playing with the arpeggiator functions yields a lot of dynamic content that would be hard to recreate on the Peak’s more menu-dependent arpeggiator. It’s these differences that make the Summit really feel like more than just the sum of its parts.

It’s hard to touch on every single feature of the Summit as there are quite a few, but the effects are worth detailing given their quality and elasticity. There is chorus, the aforementioned distortion, delay, and reverb. Each of these has several parameters that can be tweaked with knobs directly on the synth’s front panel, already giving them an advantage over most effects tacked on to the end of a synthesizer. The Summit’s effects can also be modulated from within the modulation matrix or directly from the FX Mod button, allowing them to be more deeply tied into the routing of the patch.

The delay is able to be tempo-synced and does those pitch-shifting time tweaks well. The reverb in particular is a strong point of the Summit and offers a near-infinite decay time, making the instrument deftly suited for ambient or drone music. Taking the Summit’s usefulness even further is that the audio input can be routed directly to the effects engine, totally bypassing the signal path of the synth.

To Be Critical

There were a few small complaints that I had after using the Summit for several weeks in my studio. The menu system can be a bit confusing to navigate given the placement of the knob. I often found that the screen was obscured when I was tweaking various parameters.

What’s more is that the Summit’s preset patches and categories don’t do a great job of illustrating the synth’s power, and quite frankly feel underwhelming. It wasn’t until I dove into programming my own patches did the power of the Summit really reveal itself.

Summing it Up

Novation have created an instrument with serious power and breadth with the Summit. It feels, plays, and sounds luxurious, rich, crisp, and deep. It’s the kind of instrument that is a sound designer’s dream, though the Summit is equally roadworthy given the depth of hands-on control and its multi-timbral capability.

While the Summit is a serious investment at $2,199 MSRP, it is really a sonic workhorse that could be the focus of your studio for many years to come. Bravo, Novation!

Leo Maymind is a producer, DJ, and writer living in Los Angeles, CA. He is obsessed with sound, and you can reach him at lmaymind@gmail.com.

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