It’s a damn shame that Reason Studios pulled back from the VST market. I get that they didn’t want to distract from Reason, their main product. But if you want to use just one of their instruments and effects (which are all pretty good) it’s now a two step process, and not everyone wants to buy a whole new DAW to go inside their forever DAW.
I’m lucky to have bought Europa when it was a VST, but you’ll now need to buy the whole of Reason at $500US. You do get more presets if that’s your fancy and a lot of plugins for that price. Chrome users can try the instrument online here.
Europa is a wavetable synthesiser with some spectral effects – which currently puts it in competition with Vital – not a healthy place to be. It does have a more familiar interface, by which I mean Vital is capable of many things all vying for attention and at times causing some confusion. Europa is also better with sampled sounds. BUT it’s an awful BRIGHT RED which is not such a great idea for long work sessions. In my younger days I’d hex edit that damn red if I could find it*.
Working from left to right, top to bottom, we have three layers, each with a pre-set wavetable, user sample or drawn waveform. Samples can be trimmed and looped in a pop up editor – but not specifically made into wavetables. The manual suggests that WAV samples specifically formatted for Serum will be recognised as wavetables, while others will be made into ‘grains’. Another option is draw the start and end waveforms in Envelopes 3 and 4. You can then dial time through the SHAPE of the contents as desired. A ‘smooth’ setting uses a cross fade loop on the sample.
Two MODIFIERS follow on from here, similar to those in Serum and Vital. Less choices but the most useful. Now the SPECTRAL FILTER is mostly made up of familiar low/mid/high pass etc. but can also use Envelope 4 as a graph, or the User Sample as a vocoder. A useful HARMONICS control then deforms the filter in a variety of ways to make the it more lively.
Notably you get only one go at each source format, so you can’t e.g. filter a sample with another sample. And that one sample will be used on all three of the layers, which seems a bit churlish. I also see no good reason why there’s four envelopes all up, when you could hide/employ more for the power user.
The three layers arrive at a mixer, where they combine and can nominally use another filter, and then on to the amp and FX. The flow is quite close to traditional subtractive synthesis. A control matrix down the bottom is self evident (and a little old fashioned).
When Europa first came out around 2018 it was ahead of the pack. Now you have some stiff competition from the Purple People Eater and I guess the Big Pig as well. I also have to mention Thorn which is at times much discounted and even closer to traditional subtractive work flow if that’s what you’re after.
- I know that Padshop is also red when you are using grains and both are very very naughty.