w e i v Re SynthMaster by dmbaer
Just Another VA Synth ... Not! I suspect that a lot of you find yourselves in the same situation as I do. In a few short years you've acquired a large number of synths ... far more than you could ever realistically learn well enough to even do some meaningful preset tweaking. Fine instruments are to be had these days for not much more than a hundred dollars and by exercising a little patience, quality synths can sometimes be purchased in sales or group buys for fifty dollars or even less! At least some of us accumulate instruments just because we can do so cheaply, not necessarily because we need them or even have a plan on how we want to use them. Eventually, though, we wake up to the fact that we've simply pigged out and say "no more". Or at least we say "no more" unless a new instrument has a unique story behind it (Harmor and DIVA come to mind as recent examples). And that thought brings me to SynthMaster. I have been aware for some time that there was a synth of that name available, but why, I thought, should I be remotely interested in yet another run-of-themill VA-type instrument when I own far too many already? Then I got my hands on a copy of SynthMaster to review, and before long I was wondering why it had never appeared on my radar. 20
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From the very start, I was wowed ... literally. I read through the manual and once I got past the installation and generic user interface material, I don't think there was a page that didn't cause me think "wow, that's powerful" or "wow, that's elegant" or "wow, that's flexible". SynthMaster is a seriously inspired creation. SynthMaster is the brainchild of Bülent Bıyıkoğluwho founded KV331 Audio. The initial version of SynthMaster was released in 2007. In late 2011 the latest version, 2.5 debuted which is what we're looking at here. SynthMaster 2.5 runs as a VST instrument/effect on both Windows and Mac OSX, and as an Audio Unit instrument/effect on Mac OSX. The purchase price is $129.
Conventional Architecture, Luxurious Furnishings From the 30000 ft. view, SynthMaster (Fig. 1) looks fairly vanilla. We have two layers, each with two oscillators, two filters that can be configured in serial or parallel and five effects slots. Additional global effect slots are available for the combined signals of the two layers. There are reasonable numbers of ADSR envelope generators, LFOs, M-seg envelope generators, and the like. From afar, there's nothing here you haven't encountered before.
April 2012
It's only when we take a close look at the components that we begin to appreciate how much consideration and effort went into the design and implementation of this instrument. In fact, there are so many features throughout that I can't possibly cover them all in a few short pages. Despite the feature-rich nature of this software, however, the logical and thoughtful design makes it easy to grasp how everything fits together. The current manual is only about 42 pages long, the first quarter of which