Unashamedly Digital
The other day I saw a review that complained the Tone2 synthesisers were ‘unashamedly digital’. Which introduces shame into how you make bleep-bloop noises. Could we just say ‘proudly digital’ or better still not clutch our analogue pearls about this odd little woody\tinny dichotomy? Bloody hell people.
Tone 2 seems get a lot of stick from the bleep-bloop community, partly for some copy protection which is very very unfair to thieves. A larger stick comes from some bombastic claims they make in their advertising. Does Icarus2 really have 54 unique methods of sound creation?
‘Harmonic Content Morphing’ was mentioned back in 2008 for Gladiator, which seems first to offer the technique later popularised by Serum in 2015. It starts with wavetables – up to 256 harmonic snapshots of an evolving sound wave. The harmonics of the wavetable can then be modified by two modulations into sonically interesting shapes – one can for example impose a ‘supersaw’ and a ‘harmonic boost’ over any existing table. A second wavetable can then be combined using numerous techniques such as interlacing odd and even harmonics, and the result passed through a third modulation. That is complicated and I think a skeuomorphic interface is justified in understanding the flow. Gladiator is skeuomorphic to the gills – straight out of the Reason camp. But it works, I quite like seeing the waves on the little screens and have some insight into what I’m creating.
Icarus2 is definitely a response to Serum. It comes a year after and picks up the currently cool flat interface. ‘Harmonic Content Morphing’ is now ‘3D wavetable synthesis’ – much the same process – wavetable and modifications, but all in real time. (Note that Tone2 counts ‘3D wavetables’ and ‘classic wavetables’ as two kinds of synthesis, which starts to put the ‘bom’ in the ‘bast’). There are three oscillators, two filters, a plethora of modulators and reasonable effect rack, the most interesting aspect of which is that it has a feedback path. There are similarities to Serum, Pigments, Dune, Europa et al. I will only note the differences.
Resynthesis is quite clever in Icarus2. I have a sample of a guitar pluck with a strong 7th harmony, it causes Serum to bleat helpless warbles but Icarus2 managed to figure it out. Same with a small section of Andy Williams singing Old Man River which ended up a bit watery but fixable. There are also additive and granular modes which so far haven’t worked as well for me. When you use the resynthesis macro, it sets up the main LFO to move through the wavetable at the correct speed.
A special case of resampling, Vocoder loads a voice sample and processes it to sound like a traditional 70’s vocoder sound (like the Radias). There are other things that vocoding can do that are not clearly supported.
Many of the other alleged techniques are performed by the filters, which in some ways are the best bit of Icarus2. These appear to be convolution impulses, and include standard types, vowels, combs, ring modulations, and one called ‘boobs’ (which surely is designed to appeal to female synthesists). For some reason we are told it’s “a best-of selection of over 300 filter-algorithms that were developed by Dipl. Inf. Univ. Markus Krause”, in which case 237 of those must have sucked. My highlight are the fractal filters. These aren’t described in the manual but possibly are the same as in Tone2’s Electra – the explanation of one is “Models a real crazy analogue circuit which cannot make up its mind! It simply can’t decide if it wants to be a square wave, a sine, a sawtooth, noise or feedback. PW controls it’s undecided mood. The tuning mostly follows oscillator pitch.” Which seems accurate.
A few filters aspire to emulate physical modelling with some success, which is counted as another of the 54 synthesis techniques… I should really just pause for a moment and answer the question – no, Icarus2 does not have 54 unique synthesis methods. Tone2 also has a nasty habit of claiming that no other tool can do this or that – which is bullshit. Instead Icarus2 is able to achieve a wide range of sonic outcomes that compares well to many other one process machines.
I haven’t space to do more than mention the arpeggiator and a glitch sequencer which you can see on their website anyway.
I really like Icarus. It’s more pleasant to use than most of the other comparable boxes, in that your fingers will go the right direction most of the time to make the changes you expect. Serum is very close, Pigments nowhere near. If I was forced to recommend only one wavetable synthesiser it would be a high contender. Just stop sticking the cucumber down the pants.
