It was claimed (at the time this was written) that this is “one of the very finest soft synths money can buy”. That’s like waving red underpants at a bull. I am that bull. The software is also on sale. I am a cheapskate bull. These two things are entwined – it seems to be on sale quite a bit.
Reading the manual (I always read the manual very carefully for everything I talk about here so that I’m not neglecting anything important besides I love manuals they … oh sorry never mind) ahem reading the manual was not inspiring. Oscillators la la plug into filter etc. etc. layers. It requires much prodding and pushing to see where there fun is, tucked away in a very 90’s workstation interface, complete with hidden pop up menus. Here’s the best bits.
Oscillators
There are numerous kinds of oscillators. The basic ones are single cycle samples, so a triangle is not a perfect triangle but a unique sampled one, and you’ll soon ignore that for the waveform from a ‘legendary’ analogue keyboard anyway. Once you have your ‘KORG MS20 #7’ wave loaded, you can dynamically bend it and flex it and distort it in many ways, so it’s not just sitting there idly. This is not a bad result at all, particularly when you add in some oscillator drift. You can instead load a SFZ file, a common multi-sample format used by a few but important titles including Alchemy and Falcon. Synthmaster doesn’t offer much in the realm of sample playback. The sample cannot be adjusted or bent, but runs through all the following virtual analogue path, so likely will be heard alongside a second oscillator doing the crazy stuff.
Then there are some types where I think the names are ‘aspirational’. Additive just means 8 basic oscillators. That’s nice, but not really 256 or more sine waves creating harmonics – it’s really a kind of organ mode, but each of the 8 can be a different basic waveform. The vector oscillator can blend between four basic waveforms in a square. It’s actually a different version of the additive, with less waveforms and the volume levels arranged as XY cross fades. Then there is wavetable, which has been updated in the last version to match the 256 wave formats on current software.
Virtual Analogue stuff
The filters and overdrives that follow the oscillators are very nice. Not exceptional – except perhaps the Drive knob which should be called I’m Losing My Shit as it sounds like something going horribly wrong inside the box. The overall sound is better than many competitors, and if you just want a comparatively low priced virtual analogue with some extras, it’s a good choice. So what’s the problem?
It’s interesting to see Roland’s Zenology come on the market with a similar interface and not dissimilar operation. Both have a lot of hunt and peck and fiddling which doesn’t convert into a source of wonder, compared to say Alchemy which actually is deep. They are not Dune 3 either. Synthmaster is currently $60, Zenology is $500 (with four ‘models’ included). If you take that as the standard to beat then Synthmaster is indeed the fox that jumps over the lazy dog.