I’m sorry but every time I hear Bazille I see this. It has no relevance and should not appear in a review but damn it, that’s just the way it happens.
Also a bit unfair to review three in one, but c’mon everybody has Zebra and these other guys are for the Black Friday sales. Which is now.
DIVA
There was a time when DIVA was one of the few software synthesisers to sound like ‘the real thing’. In fact several of ‘the real things’ and furthermore ‘real things’ that had got into a muddle with each other’s trousers and coats. So if you could not afford an actual MOOG in 2012 you could buy this, and then find your computer was too slow to run the damn thing. Here we are in 2023 – computers can easily handle DIVA. But you can now get an awful lot of other hardware and software that makes the same noise for less.
I’m kind of interested in the switching of MOOG, Roland and Korg bits to make hybrids. That’s a fun thing, but not unique. It does tend to be a game of recognition (ooh that’s a JUNO that bit) that whiles away an hour or so. But when making music I don’t really care. Making a bass sound I don’t tend to go ‘I need a software MOOG mixed with a JUNO to go here’ – more likely I’d think of the sound and attempt to craft it in any of many available tools.
I never really lusted after DIVA, happy to use the cheaper Brand X over the years. Now it’s tending to Brand X and in need of a rethink.
HIVE
Hive is newish thing – well at least compared to DIVA. It’s funny to see the 2015 review which positions it as ‘a Sylenth1 slayer’. Who? What? Again it’s a case of ‘things have changed alright’. There’s a whole host of good faux-analogue plugins. Cheap and cheerful, or expensive and expansive – they’re all pretty good and once you pick one you just have to get adept at using it.
Hive is perfectly good machine. If you master it you have plenty of range and you are probably in the same ballpark as the hardware Virus. That’s a complement. But even with wavetables added in the more recent version I’d say that Vital could give it a real run for its money. It’s not like Zebra, which is a thing in itself. Or Bazille, which we will look at next.
Bazille
I have a bad vibe about modular. But then it’s been pointed out that Bazille looks a bit like the old Roland System 100m. OK cool, not too messy. But urgh, they’ve got patch cables – I hate droopy software patch cables. But I say to myself there’s not too many of them so it’s a bit like Reason. That’s cool. And initialising a patch and just patching a little here and a little there it’s quick to get a good sound without the clown wig. OK l like this.
It’s supposedly FM in nature – but that’s every patchable synthesiser, you’re wobbling the wobbler in most cases so it doesn’t need for a FM badge. There’s fractal oscillators as well, which sounds a lot like synch so shrug. Let’s keep this simple – Bazille is a patchable machine like the MS20. There’s much that can be done before any spaghetti – it’s fundamentally different in tone already. That’s the thing – different in tone = distinct – and therefore the first of three to really be interesting. Bazille is not trying to be something else, it’s being Bazille.