Rob Papen Predator

Mr. Papen’s latest offering, Predator, is an analog-style synth loosely based on the Minimoog’s three-oscillator configuration without being a me-too knockoff of other soft Minis on the market. After spending a few weeks with this synth in a variety of musical settings, here’s what we discovered.

OVERVIEW AND USER INTERFACE

Like a Minimoog, Predator’s architecture consists of three oscillators followed by a filter bank, then an amplifier section. From there, the similarities end. The oscillators are shockingly full-featured, with tons of amenities that make extremely dense and complex sounds possible with a minimum of effort.

The filter section is equally extensive, with two multimode filters in series. Modulation options include four envelopes, four LFOs, and a dual-purpose sequencer/arpeggiator. All of this runs into an effects section that provides far more than the usual chorus, delay, and reverb found on many competing soft synths.

Predator’s interface is cleaner than much of the competition, too. Except for the step sequencer and effects chain, pretty much every parameter has its own dedicated on-screen knob or button. While this tends to take up a lot of screen space — especially when using Predator with certain DAWs — it’s great to be able to assess your patch at a glance, without having to sift through lots of tabs, pages, and drop-down menus. Installation is a breeze too, with nary a dongle in sight. Amen!

OSCILLATORS

The elegance of each oscillator’s knob array belies the power lurking within. For starters, there are 128 single-cycle waveforms available, including the usual analog suspects such as sine, saw, square, and triangle options. Less usual waves include numerous organs and vocal cycles, as well as seventy-three digital spectra options, ranging from metallic to crystalline.

Next to the waveform selector is a knob labeled “sym” for symmetry. Accordingly, this controls the overall symmetry between the two halves of the wave cycle. The concept here is probably most familiar in relation to square waves — it’s the source of pulse-width modulation on many synths. Here, it’s much more powerful. Since symmetry can be applied to any waveform, it becomes possible to radically change the harmonic spectrum of a given wave by making tiny adjustments to this setting. The sound is flanger-like on certain waves, and has changing formants on others. Ultimately, it expands the sonic flexibility of the available waveforms by an order of magnitude. Upping the ante, each oscillator includes a dedicated sine or triangle wave LFO . . . labeled PWM! This lets you animate this parameter. Oddly, this LFO cannot be synced to tempo, though Predator’s other LFOs can, so you can always modulate symmetry with one of them if rhythmic effects are what you’re after.

Fine and coarse tuning controls are as expected, with one nifty wrinkle: Above each oscillator’s semitone knob is a tiny “trk” button. This switches keyboard tracking on and off for that oscillator, which is useful for exotic effects as well as drum sounds. All oscillators can be set to free-run, emulating a less perfect, more analog sound.

Two more knobs — sub and spread — add to the flexibility of these oscillators. Sub will be familiar to vintage synth buffs, as it adds a square wave sub-oscillator one octave below the fundamental pitch. Spread functions as a pseudo-chorus, adding a duplicate, detuned stereo oscillator, much like Roland’s trancey supersaw waveform from their JP-8000 virtual analog synth.

That’s just the first oscillator. Oscillators 2 and 3 also include several powerful amenities like hard sync, ring mod and FM. The ring mod and FM options include a single amount knob, which is shared by both functions, only one of which can be active for a given oscillator. All in all, the sonic possibilities on hand far exceed those of many competing synths, and are wonderfully easy to exploit once you get your feet wet.

FILTERS

Predator’s filter bank shows no less attention to detail. The first filter is a resonant, multimode type with its own dedicated envelope and LFO section. Thirteen available filter modes include low-pass, high-pass, band-pass and notch, in a variety of slopes ranging from 6dB to 24dB per octave. Also included is a comb filter mode, which is terrific for flanger-like effects.

A few dedicated modulation options are available, like LFO amount, envelope, velocity, keyboard tracking, and mod wheel. It’s great to have hardwired knobs for these, as opposed to searching for a pull-down elsewhere. Dirt lovers will dig the distortion knob for adding grunge to the filter’s sound.

The filter envelope is based on the classic ADSR format, with a fade knob for either a smoothly decaying sustain segment or an adjustable ramp into full sustain from the decay break point. This is great for adding subtle motion to a sustaining patch.

The LFO can be tempo synced and includes the usual set of waveforms: sine, triangle, saw up, saw down, square and sample-and-hold (random). A knob with an associated pull-down menu makes it painless to add controllers to the LFO amount. Again, ease-of-use is the key here.

The main filter output feeds a second filter with only two controls: cutoff and mode. The six available modes are lowpass and highpass only, with 6dB, 12dB, and 24dB per octave slopes. All in all, these filters are big, fat and flexible, capable of sounding clean and “digital” or hard and gnarly, depending on your objectives.

MODULATION

Envelopes. In addition to the dedicated filter and amplifier envelopes, Predator includes two “free” envelopes that you can assign to pretty much any synthesizer parameter, allowing envelope-based modulation of exotic functions like waveform symmetry, amount of spread, or volume of the sub oscillator. Both envelopes include keyboard and velocity modulation of envelope times, with both positive and negative amounts available. The only difference between the two envelopes is that the first has a selectable modulation depth source, which is good for controlling the envelope depth via a mod wheel or other MIDI controller.

LFOs. There are three additional LFOs available for motion and rhythmic effects. These are identical to the filter LFO described above. The first LFO is dedicated to pitch modulation effects for vibrato, trills, and the like. The other two LFOs are freely assignable to the various synth parameters. As with the free envelopes, the only difference between them is that LFO 1 includes an additional modulation depth source.

Modulation matrix. To route the LFOs, envelopes, or various MIDI controllers to multiple destinations, Predator employs a four-way modulation matrix. Each of the four sections includes source, destination, and secondary amount settings, so you can wire up relatively complex routings in short order.

Step sequencer/arpeggiator. Rounding out the modulation options is a sixteen-step sequencer that can also function as an extremely advanced programmable arpeggiator. Each step includes options for tie, slide, coarse tuning (in half-steps), and velocity. There’s also a “free” setting for using the step sequencer as modulation source for the various synth parameters via the modulation matrix functions. Step sequencers are becoming a de rigueur component of modern soft synths, and the implementation here is quite well thought out. I had a blast applying it to the various oscillator parameters, in combination with rhythmic LFO routings, with impressive results.

SOUNDS

All of these synth parameters may seem a bit daunting to newcomers, so Papen and his team have programmed 13 banks of presets organized by genre. Dance, hip-hop, trance, breaks, ambient sounds, drums, sound effects, and classic synths are all well-represented. Each bank can contain up to 128 patches, though not every bank does. This synth is clearly intended for the electronica and club production market, and overall, the patch design is top-notch, especially for trance fanatics. See “Sound Hound” on page 67 for a handful of our favorites.

For novices — or really busy producers — Predator includes two novel features: variation and patch morph. The variation knob has four settings per preset. A, B, and C are effectively “macros” that modify several of a preset’s parameters at once; D does the same for that preset’s effects. If this doesn’t get you closer to your target sound, you can head over to the patch morph section. Here, you can select any two presets, then adjust the balance between the two sounds and generate a new, hybrid patch with characteristics of each. In practice, this was a terrific way to create stunning new textures with a few mouse clicks. It’s light years ahead of the patch randomization parameters found on some other soft synths, since you can hone in on exactly the type of sound you’re after, just by doing a little sifting through the extensive array of included presets.

CONCLUSIONS

In the weeks I spent with Predator, I experienced nary a bug or crash and found myself turning to it frequently for a wide variety of sounds. Basses, leads, pads, exotic electro effects . . . Predator excels in pretty much every area of subtractive synthesis. Its overall sound is cleaner than soft synths that strictly bill themselves as “virtual analog,” but it can certainly be warm and grungy. It has a certain presence that makes it cut through a dense mix when used in conjunction with other soft synths in your collection, which to me is a sign of character. As a bonus, since there’s no copy-protection dongle involved either, it’s a terrific choice for laptop users with a limited number of USB ports. If you’re casting about for a punchy, versatile soft synth to add to your arsenal, it’s definitely worth a very close look. At $179, Predator is a shockingly good value. Good enough for a Key Buy, in fact.