2024 update.
Hey look they include stickers in the box! I haven’t seen that since the early 80s. It looks like a Roland Jupiter 8 bonked a Nord, it works a bit like a SQ80, but three oscillators with some inscrutable wavetables and built in tweaks – a bit like the Nova as well! Such thoughtful presentation (except when you rack it you can’t read the labels on the outputs. Which ones are line out?)
First Impressions
A jumble of patches included, all Thai Food (various names but same curry). Bang away at the colourful buttons on the front – poly-aftertouch is fun but it’s not for me – the rack will be just fine. Tap INIT twice and get a plain patch – I like the ability to clean everything out and start from scratch. The default sound is very plain and you will quickly learn to go to VOICE button over at the right and introduce some oscillator drift and perhaps turn on the warmth setting.
Go to the MODULE SELECT and click on OSC 1. Just pick two waves for now – maybe a pulse and a sine. Morph between them with a ENV – ok that’s the basic wavetable sound, very clinical. Now add a MUTANT, maybe FM-Lin, set the operator to Sine and tweak the frequency with a knob on the front, just move it slightly off 1.00 … eh … slight movements still can’t get it to .998. Poo. Set it to OSC2 instead and detune that a little … that does it, sounds quite upset, now another mutant, WavStack … right so that’s a supersaw, a FILTER, let’s use an MS20 filter and a touch of drive, pretty good. Let’s change OSC 2 use a wave table waveform and pulse width mutate it, OK some FX. Hmmmm.
This is an excellent hardware interface, like Ensoniq came back from death and brought gifts. You just touch the button for the bit you want to adjust – OSC, FILTER, AMP whatever and get going. Modulation is particularly cool, touch the thing you want to mod, touch the thing to mod it – good to go. Everything flows. My first lessons are in subtlety. The knobs are very good at bold, but don’t have quite the resolution needed for the tiny adjustments I would like to try. Early days. I like this thing.
Updated 2021
While I was quite happy with the beast for the first few weeks I found a few definite flavours kept on popping up. It feels like the features that make HydraSynth not just another virtual analogue tend to produce very specific outcomes. The first flavour is “ye olde FM synthesiser“, an artefact of the FM-Linear Mutant. FM is a bit like chilli – there’s only a certain range of application. The FM-Linear Mutant seems to have more potential than the three kinds of Pulse Width and the WavStack, but it’s easily overdone and has seemingly few sweet spots. The second noise I keep reaching is the exact opposite – “Prog Rock Mellotron” which is that combination of very tight Pulse Width and WavStack.
And HydraSynth really is that analogue traditional layout, with a lot of emphasis on the oscillators. The filters are not that exciting – I can’t ever seem to get the subtle result I want. Not super disappointed or anything but not singing praise on high.
Updated 2024
I recently pulled it out of the rack and got ready to sell. It just seemed to hold no endearing flavour, particularly in comparison to the wilder animals in my zoo. But the resale value wasn’t that good so I held off.
Just the other night I resurrected the unit on the desktop and tried again. I went back to first principles – this is a virtual analogue, it has knobs and you can patch things by touching them. Just treat it like a old Moog or something – feed a saw wave in to the filters and twiddle shit. No wavetables or mutants. This went surprisingly well – just tweaking and pushing things around to get a basic noise going. Just above the Hydra sits the Novation PEAK – both have wavetables but the PEAK doesn’t accent the idea. I began to see that I’d jumped straight to that aspect of the Hydra without spending enough time on the basics – which came out better than I’d remembered. Actually quite a rival for the PEAK, without even pulling out the special effects.
After a bit of thought I see that the Hydra is really covering a broad spectrum, where I had wanted it to be a powerful specialist. It certainly can be powerful, but my continuous arrival at a few similar sounds came from starting near the end of the fabrication. It has a large bank of wavetables, they can be mutated – but get the basics sorted first and then start this part of the process.
I’m not moving the rating just yet. But I am rewriting this review with kinder words.