Purple People Eater - Radiophonic synthesiser ensemble for Reaktor.

It's not polyphonic, it's not velocity sensitive and it can't respond to aftertouch, but it's a Monster of a Synth.

The PPe is inspired from the early days of sound synthesis and dedicated to the pioneers of the sound effects departments that terrorised the audiences of the science fiction silver screen.

The PPe has FreeRunning oscillators (FRO's) that deliver a diverse sonic arsenal from 9 waveform generators including sine, triangle, saw and pulse, the waveforms can also be shaped and detuned plus sync and instability can be added.

Each of the 3 oscillators has soft clip gain reduction, so pushing the output level will brick wall the waveform without inducing distortion.

What sets the PPe's oscillators apart is that they are capable of generating multiple waveforms at the same time, mixing a sine-wave with a small amount of pulse-wave is no problem.

Oscillator 1 has a sine-wave generator and a choice of triangle, saw or pulse, the waveforms can be shaped, you can also add a small amount of instability to the mix.

Oscillator 2 has two waveforms, one pulse and one triangle you can shape the waveforms and add instability, you can also detune the pulse against the sine, hard sync is also switchable here.

Oscillator 3 is a slightly different beast with selectable triangle or sine waveforms plus a tunable Pulse waveform, it has a wider frequency range than 1 and 2, you can use it as a low frequency modulator or to add sub frequencies or both, again instability and shape are included.

The Noise Generator is sweepable from pink to white and can be used as both a sound source and modulator.

You can feed the output from any oscillator back into any oscillator, including itself, giving you very diverse waveform modulation.

The Matrix Patcher is how everything is wired together and determines the signal flow, the modulation and the synth effects, but it takes all this a few stages further.

The PPe's pitch is not fixed you need to tune the oscillators and set the key-scale, this gives the PPe some very strange capabilities, it is possible to have one oscillator going up in pitch via MIDI and another in reverse, also they don't have to follow any scale plus they can modulate each other.

All this is then triggered via the PPE's Envelope Generator, the EG works a bit different than the standard ADSR used on most synths, there is no release, the decay plays that part instead, it can be triggered via MIDI but as you turn the Self Gen control anti clockwise it will start to self trigger at regular intervals and will go through a cycle that is set by the Attack Hold and Decay.

The synth section of the PPe also has a Ring Modulator, a Reverb Generator and a choice of 9 Filter Types, all patchable via the Matrix Patcher.

The post synth section of the PPe allows further sound shaping possibilities from the Filter Bank LFO, the eight faders are kill bandpass filters, turn them all down and you get no output, the Shift crossfader moves the bands relative to each other, all controlled via the LFO.

After the Filter Bank LFO the signal is passed to the effects, these are pre wired in series in the following order.

Compressor > Flanger Phaser > Dual Delay > Reverb Space > Auto Gain Reduction > Output.

The effects are simple and easy to use, you can bypass any of them with the on/off switches, the Auto Gain Reduction is hard wired and always active, see the PFx for more details.

Add all of these features together and you have one gigantic out of this world monster synth, and it sounds like one.