HANDS-ON
1. Click on the seed, and whatever note you’ve just played will become the starting point for a new set of branches.
2. The branches can be different, or they can all be clones.
3. For more musically conventional sounds, keep the atonality slider over
to the left. Increase it, and the usual result is sonic mayhem!
4. Select from the large set of intriguing factory patches in this menu.
5. Undo and Redo buttons let you step back and forth among your recent experiments.
6. Click the double helix to get in and mutate Synplant’s sonic “DNA” by hand.
7. Depth of mod wheel response is important, because the sounds are so unusual.
NEED TO KNOW
What is it? A two-oscillator modeled analog/FM soft synth with some unusual features.
What does it sound like? Weird. The factory sound set includes folders
with leads, pads, and basses, but even the most “normal” presets are
unconventional.
Do I need to be an expert? No. You can create your own fresh sounds
with Synplant with one mouse click, thanks to its clever random patch
generators.
What’s so cool about it? The mod wheel mutates the sound, and each key can have a different type of wheel response.
Isn’t that a lot of trouble to program? No, because the mod wheel response is not user-programmable.
Is it MIDI-controllable? Just the onscreen sliders.
What does it run on? Windows or Mac, in VST or AudioUnit (Mac only) formats.
PROS: Fun to use. Lots of fresh sounds. Every key in an
octave can produce a note that might as well be from an entirely
different synth patch.
CONS: Not fully user-programmable. Skimpy on built-in effects.
INFO: $89, www.soniccharge.com
Synplant’s analog-meets-digital sounds will mainly appeal to experimental and glitch artists. They’ll have a field day. The factory sounds also include some synth pads and basses that might work well in a dance mix, especially if that mix has a novelty edge, but if you’re looking for meatand- potatoes fare or even conventional fatness, look elsewhere.
Synplant’s design makes clever use of the metaphor that its sounds are not programmed, but “grown.” (Syn-plant, get it?) Like any plant, it has a genome (Sonic Charge’s term) that dictates how a seed germinates. As the plant grows, a dozen different branches — one for each chromatic note in an octave — will sprout, and each branch can have its own distinctive sound. You can “prune” them back and take “cuttings.” And while you can dig down to a subterranean level (the genome — see image below) where you can edit more than three dozen parameters, creating new patches by editing pretty much misses the point. Like evolution itself, Synplant flowers through random rearrangements of the genome.
Unlike a plant, however, Synplant knows nothing of seasons. It’s always the first day of spring, when new growth can sprout and branch out in any direction. Did I mention that it’s weird?
THE ROOT OF THE SOUNDUnder the hood (oops, wrong metaphor!), Synplant is a two-oscillator synth with analog-style resonant filters, variable wave shapes, and frequency modulation (FM) of oscillator A by oscillator B. It has a sine wave LFO, a couple of noise generators, a couple of sample-and-hold circuits, a sub-oscillator, and a single envelope generator whose output passes through a couple of different shapers so that the filter and amplitude envelopes can end up being somewhat different. There’s a basic reverb and a chorus.
A handy block diagram in the PDF manual shows how these components are wired up, and tells you where the parameters of the genome are applied. Synplant is not fully user-programmable — no more than a vegetable garden is. You plant seeds, then stuff grows. You get to choose the seeds, but what happens after just sort of . . . happens.
Synplant has cool random patch generators, and the voice design is ultimately aimed at making good use of these, not at putting you in control. I’ve had no trouble coming up with exotic and evocative Synplant patches — but none of them was the result of my planning anything.
BRANCHING OUTTo start a new garden of Synplant sounds, right-click (Windows) or controlclick (Mac) on the seed — that’s the little thing in the middle that looks like a coffee bean — and choose “New Random Seed” from the menu. This command also generates a random patch name, using words drawn from a Latin dictionary to create a sort of college botany class vibe.
You may or may not like the new random sound, but don’t give up. Push the mod wheel all the way up. Twelve branches, one for each key in the chromatic scale, will visually and sonically grow outward from the seed, and each branch will have its own tone color. Play the keyboard and watch the branches wave gently, as if in a breeze. If you hear something you like, left-click the seed, and the branch you played most recently will become the new seed.
Push the mod wheel up again and repeat to start growing a new seed. Each time a seed is generated, all of the chromatic keys will sound the same when the mod wheel is down, but slightly or radically different when it’s up. Moving the wheel while holding one or more notes will give you varieties of expression you’ve never heard from a mod wheel, because sustaining notes will start out sounding the same, then diverge in tonal character.
If you want the wheel to make the same sound on all keys, right-click and choose “Clone Selected Branch.” Now parameters of the most recently played key will be assigned to every note in the chromatic scale.
THE GENETICS
Synplant’s actual voicing parameters are displayed as a DNA-style double helix (see image at left). At first I found the animated gyrations of this display disorienting, but in fact it’s easy to use. It’s less easy to understand how all the parameters interact. A few are obvious (“fx_mix” and “flt_freq,” for instance), others less so. Because each of the 12 branches can sound different, it’s all but impossible to anticipate how changes in a given parameter will affect them. There’s only one set of parameters, which all of the branches share, so you may find, for instance, that “a_noise” adds noise to only one or two of the notes in the scale, while “b_mod” alters others.
Synplant doesn’t have conventional analog synth goodies such as ADSR envelopes or filter mode choices. There’s also no way to start from an initialized patch — you’re always mutating something that already has complex characteristics.
CONCLUSIONS
Synplant makes computer music fun. It not only fits right into mixes on top of 808-style analog drumbeats, but gives experimentalists a soft synth that mutates and evolves its own sounds — almost as though it were a living thing. (It might even spawn a whole new genre: hothouse music!) Plus, the $89 price makes Synplant a steal even if it’s only once in a while that you take advantage of how truly different it sounds.