{"id":1749,"date":"2023-08-06T07:51:04","date_gmt":"2023-08-06T07:51:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/?page_id=1749"},"modified":"2026-04-06T03:44:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T03:44:08","slug":"europa-%f0%9f%a7%bb%f0%9f%a7%bb%f0%9f%a7%bb%f0%9f%a7%bb","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nilamox.com\/mancave21\/europa-%f0%9f%a7%bb%f0%9f%a7%bb%f0%9f%a7%bb%f0%9f%a7%bb\/","title":{"rendered":"Europa \ud83d\udc80"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s a damn shame that Reason Studios pulled back from the VST market. I get that they didn’t want to distract from Reason<\/em>, their main product<\/a>. But if you want to use just one of their instruments and effects (which are all pretty good) it’s now a two step process, and not everyone wants to buy a whole new DAW to go inside their forever DAW.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m lucky to have bought Europa<\/em> when it was a VST, but you’ll now need to buy the whole of Reason<\/em> at $500US. You do get more presets if that’s your fancy and a lot of plugins for that price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Europa<\/em> is a wavetable synthesiser with some spectral effects – which currently puts it in competition with Vital<\/em><\/a> <\/em>– not a healthy place to be. It does have a more familiar interface, by which I mean Vital<\/em> is capable of many things all vying for attention and at times causing some confusion. Europa<\/em> is also better with sampled sounds. BUT it’s an awful BRIGHT RED which is not such a great idea for long work sessions. In my younger days I’d hex edit that damn red if I could find it*.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Working from left to right, top to bottom, we have three layers, each with a pre-set wavetable, user sample or drawn waveform. Samples can be trimmed and looped in a pop up editor – but not specifically made into wavetables. The manual suggests that WAV samples specifically formatted for Serum<\/em> will be recognised as wavetables, while others will be made into ‘grains’. Another option is draw the start and end waveforms in Envelopes 3 and 4. You can then dial time through the SHAPE of the contents as desired. A ‘smooth’ setting uses a cross fade loop on the sample.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two MODIFIERS follow on from here, similar to those in Serum<\/em> and Vital<\/em>. Less choices but the most useful. Now the SPECTRAL FILTER is mostly made up of familiar low\/mid\/high pass etc. but can also use Envelope 4 as a graph, or the User Sample as a vocoder. A useful HARMONICS control then deforms the filter in a variety of ways to make the it more lively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notably you get only one go at each source format, so you can’t e.g. filter a sample with another sample. And that one sample will be used on all three of the layers, which seems a bit churlish. I also see no good reason why there’s four envelopes all up, when you could hide\/employ more for the power user.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The three layers arrive at a mixer, where they combine and can nominally use another filter, and then on to the amp and FX. The flow is quite close to traditional subtractive synthesis. A control matrix down the bottom is self evident (and a little old fashioned).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Europa<\/em> first came out around 2018 it was ahead of the pack. Now you have some stiff competition from the Purple People Eater<\/a> and I guess the Big Pig<\/a> as well. I also have to mention T<\/a><\/em>horn<\/em> <\/a>which is at times much discounted and even closer to traditional subtractive work flow if that’s what you’re after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n