Twin 3

We're a fickle bunch, we synth users. We're seduced by acres of wood, and anything with a row of bakelite knobs and switches warrants more than a second glance, even if it has no musical relevance whatsoever. And so it goes that for a few decades, we've purchased oddities and esoterica; some excellent, some wanting. Nice but ordinary analog monosynths fetch eyewatering prices on the web..

So, what should we look for in a synth? Or more importantly, what should we look for in a virtual synth? Well, to coin the early synth pioneers, it all starts and ends with the filter. As owners of, say, a sherman filterbank will tell you, with a decent filter, you could run anything at the input and make magic. Fabfilter have a deserved reputation for one of the most characterful filters in the business. It didn't take much to realise that by sticking an oscillator onto the input, you'd have a recipe for a very good little synth. And so it goes, but of course, we're a fickle bunch - we wanted Ring Mod, we wanted FX, we wanted another oscillator...

Fabfilter listened. And, in the process, they came up with not only one of the best VST VA's around, they came up with one of the prettiest. So let's start with the GUI. It's a semi-modular synth - fully configurable, deep-as-you-like, easy on the eye. There are two rows to work with. The top half of the screen is the signal path. Three OSC's feed to two Filters, and the signal can then output dry, or via a twin set of delays [which can run Series or Parallel]. The knobs that you can see are large and move with a satisfying 'virtual inertia', and clicking on them opens up an animated 'submenu' whereby you can adjust the finer details of the knob. It's a clever way of ridding the screen of unwanted controls without having to cycle through pages. Plus, the whole display is geared to mousework - clicking any control and moving does something to the sound, so you don't have to dig through menus if you don't want to. The osc's include the standard waveforms, a couple of noise sources, and sound good even when the filter isn't doing much.

The lower half of the screen is the modular modulation magic. You can add pretty much anything, in any order, and assign it wherever you like. XY controls? Envelope generators? LFO's [random, configurable multistep, cycling, even a piano roll for pitch mod], master controllers - all here, infinite possibilities; all you do is select a modulator, drag to a destination, and you're done. Anything can be selected via a drop-down menu aswell. Inbetween the two screens is an 'overview bar' which you can use to run from left to right, should you have a huge number of modulators. Both top and bottom screens have a 'sweep mouse view' function, too, so that you can navigate to the left and right of both signal path and mods. It sounds comlpex, but in practise is actually very easy.

Anyway, to the meat of the synth - the filter. It's Fabfilter, so don't worry. Not only do you have the wonderful Fabfilter One filter, there are 10 others to choose from, with helpful character descriptions like 'smooth, 'raw', 'hard', 'hollow' etc. Two filters, and the filter section GUI can be dragged anywhere to go instantly from a dual lowpass to swept bandpass, and adjust the resonance of one or both together on the fly. This filter really sings! The resonance is as cutting as you'd like it to be - overall the character of the synth is 'mature', with a nice balanced feel to the sound.

It sounds great. Really great. Maybe up against the sample-input, granular-experimento-extravaganza monsters it appears too simple - but this synth is just designed to be VA, and do it very well. This, Omnisphere and Zebra are my three examples of how software now outsounds hardware beauties in almost every way. And the GUI is probably the simplest way to run a modular synth this side of a wall of cables. It doesn't have FX except its delays - so reverb and Phasers need to be added later in your signal chain. No matter - if you will, it approaches VA in the same way that Nord do; simple, uncluttered, and without compromises at what it does.

If you're in the market for VA, download the demo and try it. Once you 'see' the workflow, you'll throw out a load of older synths...Read Review