I am firmly behind innovation. The endless regurgitation of 20th century analogue sound-alikes is cowardly, ineffectual and tedious. We have enough Jupiter 8 and Space Echo clones to populate a small village. Where able I will congratulate the very few people that keep the original spirit of electronic music. But innovation involves risk – to be new is not always to be good.
In the main the plugins developed by Dawesome are excellent. They challenge the traditional interfaces, they offer a high level of control and most importantly they produce sounds that inspire new music. But sadly I find their new release Kontrast is lacking in the third aspect.
When you scan through a traditional wavetable you can reproduce a wide variety of flowing and lively oscillator shapes. Each slice of the wavetable is the same set duration so you can portray it as either a landscape graph, or a 2D field with colour being the third indication.
Quite rightly Dawesome say the landscape is a silly old fashioned way to show a wavetable – and once you show it as the colour chart it’s obvious that you can traverse this 2D map in many different ways – not just rolling from one end to the other. The resulting waveform could be built from a circle, or a flower shape. The wavetable is just the beginning of the synthesis.
This is not new. An open source Terrain synthesiser has a similar process. That software has been further developed into a hardware synthesiser.
Great idea! But what does it sound like? Well, to be polite – Dawesome’s synthesisers are usually love at first listen. Very complex but flowing and emotive. But this sounds like a ruler held in a fan and you can turn the ruler in different directions. Changing the shape of the path through the 2D space can make changes, maybe not, or enter a realm of pain that has no clear exit. To make it a circle or a flower shape is guesswork – as is changing the wavetable. It just doesn’t have a musical intuition.
When I reviewed KrishnaSynth I was cool with the clunkiness of it because it was an old dog inventing new tricks. 2007 was a time when you could throw shit and see if it stuck. Maybe that’s still true, but we’ve had a lot of shits and sticks that we can compare, and say … nope. Needs more work to match the theory with the agency.
But also… Madrona Labs Sumu
While I am being cranky dad I should revisit Madrona Lab’s Sumu. The last time I looked at it, it was near useless, demanding the computing power of ChatGPT on a busy day and producing scratchy overloaded CPU noises that might have been what was intended? Who knows. Deleted.
I can hear there’s been an attempt to clean up the code or something like that – it descends into cyber farts over a longer time. But the affordance is still awful – just a menagerie of what the fuck goes where and why does this do what? I get that it’s an additive synthesiser. There are others, and they don’t look like a map of the New York train system. I get that it’s rendering in 3D space. It get that it’s experimental. What I don’t agree that it’s a inspiring interface – which Dawesome does so well. Maybe they should share a beer and talk about it.