Blood Bucket

This is a chaotic SynthEdit gem.

There is a likeness between the many SynthEdit noise makers but this one is my second favorite after it's sibling Mr Alias.

It is core to over 20 of my compositions and after over 15 years I still find it fills a particular noisy need brilliantly.

To give you some perspective, my work horse VSTi synths are Zebra 2, Pigments 3, Reaktor and IK Syntronik. I also have 23 hardware synths including an 80 module Eurorack, Jupiter 4, JD800, Juno 106, JPX3 Kiwi and Yamaha SY35.

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Bloodbucket is a strange little critter to deal with. It has some nice sounds but it looks more or less like a test project thrown together without any consequential design in mind.

User interface

When loading it into the host it appears like a semibad user interface with poor drawn features, knobs are basically a white square with a direction marker in it. The synth seam to be designed with alot of haste in it since there are no consequential labeling of the knobs, but rather the classic SynthEdit tooltip names. The controls looks like they've been drawn in Paint or Photoshop and they don't look too well.

Sound

The sounds are really experimental and has some nice electronica feeling to it, not likely the synth you'll go for when it comes to good strings or other instruments, but it is more for synthetic sounds á la Kraftwerk.

Features

The synth has the basic synthedit waveforms and a simple modulation matrix for modulating the two oscilators. You have 3 envelopes controling different aspects of the sound. The matrix modulation has 3 knobs named Dog, Cat and Rabbit that controls the 2 onboard LFO depths.
Automation wise this the synth is pure hell to work with since many parameters are named the same, you don't know what decay parameter you're about to tweak, so it's some gamble when working with it.

Documentation

None to talk about.

Patches

The synth has 16 mediocre patches named after the heads organs, yet another sign of how hasty this plugin was created.

Customer support

Email on its site.

Value for money

This is freeware, and the synth should remain so. I can't see a valid reason why someone would pay for it.

Stability

Same stability that is known from SynthEdit plugins.

Final conclusion

This synth is really booring and it should have had some more time put down into it. It is yet another experimental synthesizer that is granted a place in my allready overcrowded Test folder.

JoBro Media.Read Review