I’m sorry but every time I hear Bazille I see this. It has no relevance and should not appear in a review but damn it, that’s just the way it happens. (Of course in German it would sound more like Bat Zilla.)
I have bad vibes about modular synthesisers. But it’s been pointed out that Bazille looks a lot like the old Roland System 100m which is not too messy. Urgh, it has droopy software patch cables. But then (I say to myself) there’s not too many of them, so it’s a bit like Reason. That’s OK. Bazille is a semi-patchable machine a bit like the Korg MS20 – it’s quick to get a good sound without too much clown wig.
Having bought this a while ago in a sale it’s taken me quite a bit of time to get driving it properly. I’ve learned features I hadn’t reviewed in detail – and so need to update the review.
The oscillators are complex. Each starts with a sinewave which passes though Phase Distortion by one of eight selected waveforms – e.g. choose a PD saw wave and increase the PD’s level to morph the sinewave into a saw. Using the more complex PD shapes provides a wide range of tones. The PD can actually have two parts – you can bend the sine with one PD shape at the front and one at the end to apply 64 different Phase Distortion forms.
Next there is a switch to replace the original sine (named as ‘cosine’) with a more complex wave. Two are available as bar graphs – in which you can hand draw a waveform or pull down a menu to create familiar shapes. An exotic choice is to draw a spectral chart and covert that into a waveform.
Now the signal travels to Fractalise which creates many smaller replicas of the waveform. The pitch goes up as we keep subdividing the wave, and it’s comparable to the phase screech on an analogue synthesiser.
So your oscillator waveform goes through quite a lot of bending before it gets to any other module. It may already be a wall of white noise from too much mucking around. You can certainly just run cables from oscillator to oscillator (on the principle of “Any Cable Anywhere”) – Bazille doesn’t mind at all – but I feel you will get more out of Bazille by mastering this oscillator section.
I suppose different users can try many pathways to get results. You could keep each oscillator as a sine and then patch cable them into simple FM algorithms. You could carefully draw a spectral image and just pass that over to the filters for a bit of polish. You could always blast the hell out of it and see what grunge you get. There’s a wide (overwhelming?) variety of technique here – but if dedicated to a classic 70’s Moog way of working Bazille might not be your first choice.
Now the effects. Perhaps because this is supposed to be an old modular synthesiser you are given 1970’s style effects. Like a spring reverb. But as you have very recent digital processing going on with the oscillators (admit it – spectral waveforms are not 1970s anything) there’s no good reason for this nostalgia bollocks. Just use external effects.
Final word – there’s a bunch of settings to lower the quality so that your 2015 computer is not overloaded. You may have a 2015 computer… but actually I bet you haven’t. Turn all that off.