Audio examples coming soon!
PROS
Huge, lush, authentic sound. All the
plug-ins rock. Huge bang for buck.
CONS
Not multitimbral. Effects and synth
LFOs currently don’t sync to MIDI
tempo. No tap tempo.
INFO
Base: $549 list/$500 street; Loaded:
$698 list/$600 street; upgrade to
Loaded, $149 list/$130 street.
use-audio.com
NEED TO KNOW
What is it? A compact hardware
synth that runs up to eight plug-in-like
virtual instruments.
What do you mean, “plug-in-like”?
The plugs are proprietary, not standard
formats like VST or AU. You get
onscreen graphics for editing, but a
DSP chip in the Plugiator does the
work, so there’s no latency or CPU
drain.
What plug-ins do I get? The base
Plugiator ships with Minimax, B4000,
and Lightwave synths pre-installed,
plus Vocodizer as a free download
when you register. Plugiator Loaded
adds Prodyssey, Pro-12, FMagia, and
Drums ’n’ Bass.
How’s the polyphony? Different
depending on the plug-in. Minimax,
Prodyssey, and FMagia do ten voices.
Pro-12 and Lightwave do 12.
Vocodizer does 6. B4000 models 91
virtual tonewheels for forearm-acrossthe-
keys polyphony.
Can I play it without a computer?
Absolutely.
Can I control it in my host as
though it were a plug-in? Not yet,
though it fully responds to MIDI control
messages coming from your host.
At press time, Windows VST editors —
to allow insert and automation — were
in beta.
Keyboardists want the benefits of soft
synths but not the problems, and we have
every right. The benefits include emulating
classic hardware synths we might not be
able to find or afford, more polyphony and
preset memory, and velocity and aftertouch
response the originals didn’t have. Flexibility
is another plus, as a diverse stable of
plug-ins will let you create more types of
sounds, more authentically, than you could
with the average keyboard workstation.
The biggest problem is still the latency vs.
CPU drain equation: Getting less of one
means putting up with more of the other. The
better your plug-ins, and the more of them
you run, the more of an issue this is. Even
with today’s fast computers, workarounds
that make sense in the studio (like freezing
tracks, increasing buffer size and thus
latency, or just pushing the computer hard
and doing another take if it chokes) are nonstarters
in live performance.
Use Audio’s solution is Plugiator, a compact
tabletop synth that runs a finite but
great-sounding set of dedicated plug-ins.
Most were originally developed for
Creamware’s Pulsar and Scope: PCI cards
that had audio I/O, software synthesis, and
DSP chips to do the audio processing while
your computer just ran the graphics. Plugiator
is the latest spinoff of this technology.
Can it feed your vintage-clone Jones while
avoiding the soft synth Murphys?
SYNTHS
Plugiator can run up to eight synths, one at a
time, which you select on the box itself or in
the included Plug-In Manager software, a
full-featured editor/librarian. The hardware
knobs edit five obvious tweak-me settings
per synth; in the Manager you get full control
panels that dock below the preset list (see
Figure 1 on page 61) or pop out to their
own window. We know — you want to split
and layer multiple synths, but two things
more than make up for not being able to:
The low price (multi-synth capability
would’ve meant more DSP, so more money),
and the fact that they all sound so good.
Minimax. When it debuted for Creamware,
nothing could touch this Minimoog emulation,
and my ears say it’s still a notch above
today’s best host-based Mini-mimics. Listen
to one oscillator without filtering or
effects, and it sounds like a raw analog
oscillator should. Stack ’em up, and you’re
in fat city, with subtle analog-like irregularity
that adds warmth but not exaggerated dirt
or drift. How a tuned and maintained Minimoog
behaves, in other words.
Since it’s not a proper instrument
mag review until someone brings up
aliasing, I didn’t hear any in Plugiator’s
virtual analog synths. That is, not unless I
pushed the oscillators to heights of treble
not even a canine John Cage would find
musically useful.
B4000. Plugiator’s also a clonewheel
organ? Yes, and a darned good one — finetunable
rotary simulation, authentic
vibrato/chorus, tonewheel leakage and condition
to dial your desired vintage vibe, and
nicely tubey overdrive. Overall, the sound is
thick and ballsy enough to do the job in any
live or recorded mix, though I will float a
comment I’ve made about nearly every digital
Leslie sim I’ve tried: The fast speed
sounds more like the real thing in conjunction
with chorus (setting C3, please) than it
does on its own. The harmonic percussion
does sound a bit synthetic, not unlike those
organ hits you hear in house music.
Having separate upper, lower, and
pedal parts is cool, but undermined by Plugiator
not implementing those parts to listen
to different MIDI channels. That makes
B4000 better for single-manual rock playing
than for two-manual organ jazz with
bass pedals. Most factory patches are
splits, so to make your whole keyboard play
just the upper drawbars, you’ll need to
drop the split points to where they’re out of
range of your bottom key.
Lightwave. Daring to be digital, Lightwave
evokes the crystalline timbres of the PPG
Wave and Prophet-VS. A Grunge knob for
each oscillator adds some intentional aliasing
to really cop that PPG sound. Though
each oscillator lets you choose from a table
of 128 waveforms, there’s no internal
means to step through waves rhythmically
as you play — that capability is what gave
the PPG its famously animated sounds.
Still, many Lightwave patches have captivating
harmonic changes, accomplished by
clever LFO modulation of the filters. Downstream
of the oscillators, those filters
smooth things out so nicely that what we
have here is a very flexible hybrid of digital
and virtual analog.
Vocodizer. This vocoder features 22
bands and a detection mode that judges
whether the input is a human voice; engaging
it increased the intelligibility of words I
sang into an attached mic. Vocoders normally
work by imprinting the characteristics
of your voice onto a sound from another
synth, but since Plugiator runs one synth at
a time, Vocodizer has an internal waveform
source to give you plenty of robot-voice
variations, from Styx to the Fixx to Daft
Punk. Just as we went to press, Use Audio
was finishing up an improved vocoder
called Voctor — read this review at
keyboardmag.com to see what we think.
Prodyssey. This one nails the distinctly
different character of the ARP Odyssey,
the main solo synth alternative to the Minimoog
back in the day. That sometimesairier,
sometimes-sharper signature is
here in all its glory. Notable on the Additional
settings screen are sliders for the
response of the filter and/or oscillator pitch
to aftertouch.
Pro-12. Here’s another spot-on homage,
this time to the Sequential Circuits
Prophet-5. As Minimax and Prodyssey get
their analog inspirations right, so does Pro-
12 faithfully duplicate the singular squawk
and sheen of Dave Smith’s original gigfriendly
polysynth. It also adds very expressive
modulation, the aftertouch options in
particular going quite a bit deeper than
Prodyssey (see Figure 2).
FMagia. This synth and Drums ’n’ Bass
(described next) are new for Plugiator, not
encore performances. FMagia makes
Yamaha DX-style FM synthesis easier to
get your head around, and includes an
Expert Mode page for deep-divers. How
does it sound? The factory presets deliver
all the percussive, bell-like, and sometimes
piercing qualities for which I loved my original
DX7, plus a great many warmer sounds
I could never quite coax out of that beast,
no matter how many FM programming
books I’d cracked.
Drums ’n’ Bass. Squirty, rubbery synth
bass and analog drum kits are what this
endearing little plug-in does. Drums are
mapped to roughly the middle octave of
your keyboard, with the same range of
bass notes duplicated on either side. Click
the name of any kit piece down the left
side, and up comes a simple but useful
bunch of editing controls. You can even
change the waveform of each piece individually.
D ’n’ B proved so chunky and funky
that I found myself regularly going to it in
place of the more storied synths I usually
use for similar sounds. They should have
named it “Booty Machine.”
IN USE
The most significant thing Plugiator doesn’t
do (yet) is sync its effects and synth LFOs
to host tempo. As a quick glance at most of
the effects pages in the graphical editors
show, the potential is there: Delays include
pull-down menus of beat divisions: half,
quarter, eighth, etc. — with triplet options,
no less. Currently, though, what these sync
to is a field called “MIDI clock” in which
you simply type a bpm number; no external
sync is involved.
Is there a workaround? Using the Pro-
12 synth, I recorded a MIDI track of pingpong
delayed chords inspired by the
Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me?”
After making sure the first note-ons fell
exactly on beat 1, I typed the same tempo
into Plugiator and Logic and let the eightbar
sequence loop. It took about 50 repeats
for me to hear the delay taps begin to drift
from Logic’s metronome. Verdict: You can
“free-sync” it and get decent results. Use
Audio tells us external MIDI sync is slated
for a future update. This’ll be especially welcome
given how many factory patches feature
pulsing modulations that just beg to be
locked up to your song or DJ set.
What if you want a keyboard or knob
box to control even more synth settings
than Plugiator’s hardware knobs allow?
The Plug-In Manager software doesn’t
have a “click this then wiggle that” MIDI
learn function at this time, but it does have
a MIDI monitor that shows note and controller
messages, and every parameter in
every synth receives MIDI. So you can do it
old-school: Using your mouse, move an
onscreen knob or switch and take note of
what control number comes up. Then, program
a gizmo on your MIDI controller to
send on that same number. Repeat until all
desired assignments are made, and save
all this as a preset on your controller. By
the way, remember how I said Lightwave
couldn’t change waveforms on its own? By
drawing automation in my host for the
waveform selectors (CC48 for oscillator 1
and CC22 for oscillator 2), I got shimmering,
rhythmic wave changes for days!
Some hardware synths let you insert
their editors in your host to automate them
like any other plug-in. Use Audio is working
on this, and I tested the first betas, which
currently work only in Windows VST format
in Cubase or Nuendo. But they do work,
even to the point of the Automap function
of my Novation keyboard (reviewed on
page 54) recognizing each Plugiator synth.
VST (not AU) editors for Mac are planned.
CONCLUSIONS
I love, love, love this box, and raise the
issues I’ve raised only because I want you
to know how to get the most out of your
Plugiator if you buy one. Should you? Consider
what you get from even the base
model for a paltry $500: a stellar Minimoog
clone you can play polyphonically, a modeled
tonewheel organ with full drawbar
control and a solid Leslie imitation, the
Lightwave digital synth, and a vocoder. I
also can’t emphasize the sound quality
enough. If this thing were just a keyboard
with presets and knobs and you couldn’t
even hook it up to a computer, it’d still be a
steal, and I’d still want to take it to every
gig. As it stands, it’s the most affordable,
instantly gratifying, and downright fun way
there is to get the best of both the hardware
and soft synth worlds.