Review: An Unorthodox Look At Synthmaster 2.6 — by Nick Messitte

Since its release, Synthmaster—a semi-modular synth by KV331Audio — has garnered heaps of praise from audio critics: Rob Mitchell of Soundbytes wrote that it’s “tough to find something it can’t do.” Musicradar.com labeled the software, “Everything you need in one synth.”

A bit of full disclosure: I’m a contrarian, so when a product receives such a hardy write-up, my brain immediately swims to skepticle shoals: how could Synthmaster handle all of my synthesis needs? Indeed, might there be something Synthmaster couldn’t handle?

Recently I received a copy of Synthmaster 2.6, so I decided to put all the acclaim to a rather extreme test:

If all the praise is true, could a composer create an interesting (and possibly viable) piece of music using only Synthmaster? Likewise, if the sonic picture is so complete, could a producer fashion a well-rounded, credibly-mixed soundscape using only the parameters laid out within Synthmaster—eschewing, at every turn, external EQs and compressors, third party harmonic distortions, or spatial effects beyond those provided by the soft synth?

I tested the question by composing a series of instrumental pieces, some assembled through presets that I left untouched, some fashioned with presets further tweaked utilizing Synthmaster’s onboard effects, and some synthesized from scratch.

Eventually, I’ll ask you to be the judge of Synthmaster’s success in creating complete sonic landscapes—I’ve provided examples from my experiment later in this article.

But first, let’s take a cursory look at this soft synth. I tested the “Everything” version, which costs $359 USD. I think you’ll find that even the most basic peek under the hood will be enough to get you going.

The Basics

An instantiation of Synthmaster 2.6 offers you the ability to blend two independent sonic layers at your discretion. Each sonic layer, in turn, sports two distinct oscillators for generating tone.

Diving in further, each individual oscillator comes laden with options: in addition to the standard waveforms available for additive synthesis (square, sawtooth, triangle, sine), you can hunt within a huge bank of samples and mods, some of which seek to emulate classic analog tones.

There are, for example, five different Fairlight CMI samples nestled within a vast dropdown menu (which also gives you the option to import samples from your own private collection).

Depending on the method of synthesis you employ, you can program individual waveforms into various frequencies. You even have the choice to divvy up these frequencies as you see fit: “integers” gives you the ability to plug waveforms into assigned slots of the standard overtone series, while “semitones” divides the frequency spectrum even further, offering you 95 slots; all of this offers an unconventional way to synthesize (and mangle) your finished sound.

The results are mind-boggling, especially if you’re prone to synth-addled eureka! moments: since you can dial scores of sound-sources into many intervallic locations, Synthmaster is basically a digital-alchemist’s dream.

To make matters all the more complicated (and all the more cool) the preceding rundown of Synthmaster’s synthesis only covers the “additive” section—one of five ways you can choose to manipulate your tonal oscillators.

There are four others, including “basic” (offering one tonal oscillator as opposed to “additive”’s eight discreet oscillators) “wavescan” (allowing you to blend up to 16 waveforms using a dropdown menu and a “wave-index” knob), “vector” (giving you four oscillators programmable through an X/Y axis, which, in turn, can be assigned to envelope filters, LFOs, modulators, and other parameters), and “audio-in” (allowing you to pass Synthmaster’s incoming audio through any of its filters, oscillators, and effects; useful for the vocoder, among other applications).

Once you’re done fashioning your multi-layered sound, direct your attention to the bottom of the GUI:

Getting started with the Synthmaster’s intricate GUI.

Here you have options to increase or decrease each layer’s volume, stereo-panning, degree of detuning, pitch, and phase.

You’ll also notice the panoply of envelope options (located in the bottom right of the layer screen), modulator options (housed at the bottom left, in the same square as the oscillators), filtering options (the upper right quadrant giving you high pass, low pass, band pass, comb, and many more), and effects options (the upper left square).

There’s a lot going on, but there are clues to keep you on point.

As you can see, there are a plethora of variables for shaping your sound. Keeping track of them all is a little difficult at first—you will get lost—but to help you stay oriented, direct your attention to two banners in the upper left quadrant.

The first reads, Layer 1, Layer 2, LFO, FX, Browser, and Preset.

Go macro with these controls.

This banner will orient you on a broader scale, allowing you to switch between layers, LFOs, and your global effects (pictured above).

Another banner, pictured below, helps orient you on the local level; it reads, “view: Layer, Arp, FX1, FX2, FX3.”

Go local with this part of the menu.

When coupled together, these two banners provide a good compass for wandering the sonic forests of Synthmaster: the broader menu allows you to switch between global features, while the localized menu provides a more specific romp through the woods, including a visible path through each individual layer, an adequate glimpse of your signal processing (i.e., filters in parallel or series), a peek at your voice options (poly, mono, legato), your arpeggiating section, and three localized effects banks; these effects enable you to mix/mangle your signal path even further (decent EQs, distortions, ensemble patches, and phasers, are housed here).

While each effect works quite well—or at any rate, does what it is supposed to do—It might take you a while to figure out the numeral depiction of your effect’s application (i.e., the frequency you’re attenuating with an EQ, or the amount by which you’re boosting/cutting it); these numerical values are only displayed in very fine print at the top of the GUI.

Keep your eyes peeled!

This is a drawback, to be sure, but once you figure out where everything is, the process becomes easier.

Making the engine even more powerful, virtually any parameter can be controlled by any other parameter via the Matrix window, located at the far right of the GUI.

The Matrix window exponentially increases your options.

Achieving technical mastery of Synthmaster will take a while. Though it is fairly intuitive (I was able to get beyond the presets and start synthesizing my own sounds within an hour), it’s packed with more ways of generating sound than one can count; unlocking its complete potential will undoubtedly take time, and indeed, might never be fully accomplished; this synth could keep you generating unique tones for years.

There is something philosophically gratifying about this: the more you play with Synthmaster, the more you’ll find there is to do. Sure, you can fashion quality sounds quite quickly, but as your understanding of the synth deepens, the sounds you create become more complex. And since there always seems to be something new to discover within Synthmaster, it seems there is exponential room for sonic growth.

Aurally speaking, any Synthmaster sound—be it programmed from scratch or found within the lofty bank of presets—is rich and pleasing to the ear, definitely more three dimensional than most of the other soft-synths I’ve come across.

I do, however, find myself sporting one sonic criticism: the presets seem inclined to the mournful, the reflective, and the melancholy. While there are other timbres offered–a bunch of EDM presets, for example–most of the time, they don’t feel believable in context; an EDM patch will invariably need doctoring up to hang with entries from Massive.

In other words, this synth would be the perfect tool for fashioning the soundtrack of a movie like Drive. It would not, however, lend itself to scoring the next installment of The Fast and the Furious.

The Experiment

I decided to test other critics’ assertions–namely, that this synth can do just about anything–by opting to compose, program, and mix a series of soundscapes using Synthmaster alone. Some of these pieces were assembled through untouched presets (balanced, in the mix, with volume alone), some were fashioned through presets further tweaked and calibrated in the mixing stage, and other were synthesized and mixed from scratch.

The only caveat I allowed myself was a limiter placed on the stereo bus. I used the limiter for catching peaks while maintaining competitive level. However, its threshold remained untouched, so no artificial juicing came from the L2.

Here are the results.

EXAMPLE 1 – UNTWEAKED, UNTOUCHED PRESET

To my ears, this example demonstrates that it is possible to generate workable material using Synthmaster’s presets and nothing else.

This example also demonstrates that in using only Synthmaster’s untweaked presets, you can still achieve about seventy percent of a polished product.

There is definitely room for sonic improvement, so the question becomes, if we tweak the presets, can we get there? Can we approach a more finalized sound?

EXAMPLE 2 – TWEAKED PRESETS 1

Here I’ve taken stock Synthmaster presets and tweaked them using in-house EQs, compressors, distortions, and spatial effects. I believe this example demonstrates that Synthmaster’s onboard effects are indeed quite workable when it comes to fitting aural pieces into sonic puzzles; a comprehensive amount of mixing can be achieved without touching another plugin, or twiddling another hardware knob.

EXAMPLE 3 – TWEAKED PRESETS 2

The same criteria were applied to this soundscape: Synthmaster sounds from the preset bank all tweaked into place with in-house mixing options. This time, I also utilized envelope filters and LFOs to create some sweeps here and there.

I believe this example to be another good illustration of Synthmaster’s comprehensiveness.

However, after three such soundscapes, we can begin to see the melancholy problem: these stock sounds do lend themselves to more morose explorations than to jauntier fare–at least, they do to my ears.

Of course, there is a subjective quandary laden in the preceding statement: Who is to say that I’m not a fan of downtempo, sad, and slightly menacing music? Who’s to say I don’t compose that stuff innately?

There’s a bit of objective evidence to suggest I don’t: A foray to my website will show that the music offered there, while not necessarily to everyone’s specific taste, does sprawl across an emotional spectrum; it doesn’t just stay sadly put in a cloudy world of frowns and naval-gazing.

So the question now becomes, is Synthmaster generally a better fit for darker music than livelier explorations?

In that spirit, it’s onto the next set of examples: soundscapes fashioned from scratch. Pure synthesis – none of these presets, which seem to offer nothing but enigmatically bleak inspiration. Let’s see if we can establish something less despondent in the rubble of pure waveforms.

EXAMPLE 4 – BUILT FROM SCRATCH

If this example is anything to go by, we’re still steadfastly in the realm of the sad, the rainy, and the menacing. Creating and mixing soundscapes from scratch is quite rewarding in Synthmaster, but it seems the medium still inclines me curiously towards the dark side.

One last example from scratch should do the trick: if we consciously make ourselves compose something upbeat in tempo and major in key, perhaps we can buck the downward-spiral trend.

EXAMPLE 5 – BUILT FROM SCRATCH 2

Here, the beat’s slightly faster – 160bpm – and the key is major. Yet the sounds generated still trend darker, still feel more complex, more ambivalent–I know, a subjective extrapolation drawn from a subjective experiment, yet one that leads to some worthwhile conclusions.

Conclusions

Any experienced producer can tell you that in the music business, certain sounds achieve a trendy status, trumping other timbres in cultural dominance on pop charts, within indie movements, and elsewhere across the front-lines of any musical scene.

In today’s digital age, the sound of an era is less likely to come from a brand of guitar or a type of recording technique than from a soft synth. Indeed, reFX’s Vanguard seemed to be everywhere when Justin Timberlake released “My Love.” Omnisphere and Stylus seemed inescapable in film-scoring circles around the time District 9 publically employed those Spectrasonic engines in its soundtrack. Later, NI’s Massive seemed to be the go-to synth for those looking to do their best (or worst) Skrillex imitation.

From the tests that I’ve done, Synthmaster doesn’t seem to fall into the camp of epoch-changing soft-synths. But perhaps that’s a good thing rather than a drawback: synths like Vanguard and Massive, though powerful, tend to be overtly recognizable. Synthmaster, on the other hand, seems to blend into more situations without calling attention to itself.

And though its timbres seems to resonate with darker emotions (at least for me), this doesn’t feel like a drawback either, at least for musicians operating within New York’s indie, new-new wave, noise or free music scenes.

The synth lends itself well to the kinds of music found in Gowanus these days, and it’s sturdy to boot; Synthmaster never crashed my system in Logic or Protools, and it worked equally well on my laptop as it did on my tower.

When it comes to Synthmaster, perhaps the best word I can leave you with is this: this review was a long, long read, and yet there were features that we couldn’t even begin to cover, from the cosmetic (changing the skins for a more pleasing, retro GUI) to the tonal (that beast of a vocoder); there is simply so much that Synthmaster offers, and all of it housed in a sturdy, CPU-friendly system. It’s definitely worth the price tag.

— As a composer of musicals, Nick Messitte has seen his work enjoy the stages of Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival and New York’s Musical Theater Festival to critical acclaim; as a guitarist, he’s played with internationally renowned musicians, including Sam Rivers, Hawksley Workman, Gary Thomas, Devin Grey and Daniel Levine. Nick is also a sound designer of theater and film (with credits such as the award winning I Hate Myself 🙂 and Sumi) and a producer/engineer of records (credits include Bullet Proof Stocking’s critically acclaimed EP Down To The Top, which Nick mixed, mastered, and supplied with additional instrumentation). Lastly, he is a writer/cultural critic, whose musings can be seen regularly at Forbes.com.

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