Synths Without Onboard Editing pt.3

In the late 80's & early 90's, synthesizer UI experiences changed for the worse - in the eyes of most synth fans, that is! I'm perfectly happy with a stark, menu-driven display full of numbers, but even I will admit that certain instruments could benefit from meaningful visual cues, perhaps a few knobs & sliders?

Editing sounds on computer became a common sight in contemporary studios, so therefore, a few manufacturers decided to nix the controls altogether! Consumer-grade MIDI sound modules often followed this minimalist approach, offering comparable sounds to bigger, fully-editable units. Today we'll take a look at an example from 2009.

Use Audio Plugiator

This one has an interesting history. Creamware's Scope platform was a combine soft/hardware combination; a plethora of impressive effects and soft synths, running off DSP-laden PCI cards. The innards made their way into a range of products, including dedicated, knob-laden Hammond B4/Minimoog/ARP Odyssey/Prophet 5 emulation boxes.

The small, grey Plugiator runs all of these 32-bit 176kHz(!) emulations, only with far less on-board control. Instead, there are 8 macro-style knobs, and deep-editing is delegated to a computer editor.

As a Plugiator owner, I think the effort is worth it; watch out for those overly-bright LEDS though! The Plugiator hosts the following synths, and I've added my thoughts:

Minimax - This one sounds pretty meaty, and I enjoy using oscillator 3 to FM the filter and oscillators.

B4000 - I enjoy the rotary effect on this one!

Lightwave - A two oscillator wavetable-adjacent synth. There's no wave-scanning, but the nice variety of 128 digital waves can be sent to two different filters and the "grunge" control creates a variety of unique, lofi, textures.

Vocodizer - A fairly comprehensive vocoder with many bands (controlled via a matrix system) and the option of unvoiced input.

Prodyssey - Some really nice modulation routing on this ARP clone.

PRO-12 - There's lots of fun to be had with the Poly Mod section!

FMagia - A 4OP FM synth with various waveform, overtone and phase controls, plus variable LFO & velocity depth per operator.

Drums 'n' Bass - Really tweakable analogue drum sounds, plus a bass synth with filtering & formant control.

As you can imagine, there's a huge scope (lol) of sounds available. Once you've loaded up the machine with your creations - (up to 800 of them!) you could keep it as a little standalone tweak box. Here's a demo I made a decade ago, enjoy! There's some added vocals, guitars and acoustic drums here & there but it's mostly the little grey box.

Posted by MagicalSynthAdventure an expert in synthesis technology from last Century and Amiga enthusiast.

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