We live in exceptional times where a musician can buy (often low cost or even free) working replicas of almost every vintage synthesiser. Near everyone may afford a software OSCar or a hardware reproduction of a Moog. You may quibble about accuracy but you’re still far in advance of the ‘good old days’ when the individual musician would borrow, rent or nick an expensive piece of hardware, attempting to sample as many sounds out of it as possible in the few hours available. I was there – any hardware that came by would be sucked into the ASR for future use, stashed on floppies called MOOG FARTS or some such.
It really doesn’t seem that long since IK released the first edition of Syntronik – a sample library of expensive hardware wrapped in look-alike interfaces. 2018 feels recent, but technologically it’s a long way off.
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/ik-multimedia-syntronik
In 2024 it’s an oddity, and the current price $30 reflects this (“You save $1,500!!”). Was still hesitant with the requirement to download 200GB of samples in a locked format. Then I thought bugger it – get it before it gets turfed – even if to discover one or two unknown virtues.
Despite 2024 data rates the download was a long winded pain in the arse. Run it overnight, don’t forget to turn off the power save. The download interface is confusing and sometimes loses track of where it’s at. Despite my best efforts it put everything in my Downloads folder and unpacked it all there as well, but wasn’t too hard to move it all to an external drive once it was finally done. As well as Syntronik you get IK’s SampleTank which is the underlying engine, sans the replica interfaces. It offers up many other non synthesiser voices that can be used alongside these.
The replica panels are very cute but they are misleading.
Here’s the replica SH-5. Unlike any recent VST which would emulate the signal flow across the original machine, every instrument on Syntronik is exactly the same layout. Whether a SY99 or a PPG there’s two oscillators through a filter. The filters (Moog, Roland, Oberheim, Curtis and others) are all exactly the same on every instrument. Just like a sampler.
Obviously a vector synthesiser such as the Prophet VS is ridiculous when it has no vectors! However a bit of playing around turned out to be quite pleasant. Sure, it’s not accurate to the signal flow at all. But like that floppy of MOOG FARTS you’ve got the actual sound out of the machine and can hack away with good filters and such to get something quite usable. There are 4 layers, so stack a PPG on a Moog and muck around a bit with a curtis filter to get a hybrid sound with little effort. That’s why the software is billed as ‘hybrid synthesis’. Fair enough.
So if you see this sitting in a bargain bin go for it. But go for Arturia V Collection first.