discoDSP Vertigo 4 🧻🧻💩

There was once a time when additive synthesis was the next big thing, around the same time that the programmer designed the interface and wrote the manual. Here is an image that sums that all up.

This is the fourth incarnation of discoDSP’s Vertigo additive synthesiser. It was the first VST to re-synthesise an audio sample (or even a hand drawn image) into a mass of sine waves ready to bend and twerk in exceptional ways. Since then we’ve had Chameleon (became Alchemy) and Harmor and Razor and Spectra – each now fenced away in their own little ecosystem and therefore lacking universal application. Loom 2 is a close relative, but essentially a modular than has a different flow to the classic additive flowchart of say the Kawai K5000. Cube 2 is a nearer rival and we’ll look at that soon.

Vertigo is old and looks it. But the underlying engine is up to date. If you start with a resynthesised sample you’ll get a decent facsimile playing across your keyboard – sounding nowhere near as good as PadShop which has its own magic – but with all the sines directly accessible. You are capable of any sound, but the complexity is great. In this early era of additive most of the action was in dragging your mouse over a graph of partials, to trim and grow the frequencies that add up to the sound. I think this primitiveness is actually an asset in the way that analogue synthesis is considered an asset – it is the bare bones, rough and ready and able to get into trouble. Where there are macros you are being conformed as much as the sound.

Alongside two traditional filters you can also draw and sweep a spectral filter or set up morphing of the partial levels with familiar modulation. Unusually Vertigo allows the partials to be detuned and dephased – which breaks up their coherence and forms a cloudy inharmonic sound. The provided effects are reasonable but you will be better off adding external treatments. I also like to take the sound from Vertigo and clean it up as a patch in PadShop.

You can also vocode the sample, but I admit I haven’t quite worked out how. Here I have to comment on the manual which reads more like a series of notes with updates by the programmer. There’s parts which seem to be typos, others where they know what they mean but you don’t and just a whole bunch of ain’t finished. In Understanding Vertigo you are first told “Synth parts are explained detailed below” but there’s not much of either. The front panel has a bad case of Dephs and Ens. You look at other discoDSP titles and wish this one got the same love. I think I can morph sounds but it’s just not made clear how.

I still really like this – because it’s raw. Like moog raw.