Bazille

I started with electronic music in the early 70's with modular synths, Arp 2600, Steiner-Parker and a few others.

I was using just hardware synths until recently and only started replacing the hardware with plugins when I discovered that they are far easier to deal with and in many ways more musical.

I was happily using many excellent plugins and only recently found out about Bazille. The fact that it is very modular and can run on Linux, which is my preferred OS, meant I had to try it.

It sounded like a dream come true to me.

I tried the demo and started patching it like I would a hardware modular synth and fell in love. I eventually purchased a license and have been using it as my preferred synth for a while now.

It very much feels like the older modular subtractive synths, but includes digital methods of making sound as well.

The sound can be very much like the 70's modulars, but goes way beyond that very easily.

Like the classics, it is very easy to get have bad results. Unlike most current synth plugins, you can step outside of the safety zone very easily and not understand what is going on. You can push the filters into oscillation, overload circuits, max out the cpu, get brittle digital artifacts, ....

But take the time to learn how to tame the beast and you have an extremely flexible synthesizer.

I have read other reviews and wanted to add my opinions.

1) People complain about it being too CPU intensive, .

Bazille has a lot going on and if you go crazy and try to pile everything on, you will max the cpu. Most synth plugins are far more limited and so your not so likely to go overboard as is possible with Bazille.

The more I use Bazille, the less CPU my patches require. I find many ways to optimize. I rarely need to pile everything on and don't need a ton of polyphony. It becomes too much anyway when things get that busy.

2) It sounds digital, .

It can sound digital, but it does a very good job of sounding analog if you limit yourself to sounding analog.

There is tendency to bring in some of the digital tools and then you end up with a digital sound. I have had very good luck creating patches that sound like the 70's, when I stick to subtractive synthesis rules. The delay can sound very much like classic Echoplex or Space Echo, the reverb sounds like a classic spring reverb and the distortion, which I almost always use at least a little, adds to the classic character by adding the traditional dynamic control the way the classic synths did.

3) It is limited to sounding like a classic modular synth, .

I suspect some people limit it to that, but it goes way beyond that. It can sound very contemporary and includes modern synthesis methods.

The flexible patching means it can produce sounds that you won't find with other plugins.

Anyway, I still use my other plugins from time to time, but Bazille gets used the most.

Why does the review box limit the OS selection to Windows and MacOS?

My system: Debian Linux, Bitwig, Zebra2, DicoveryPro and many others.