Product Reviews by KVR Members

Ever since going open-source, Surge has been quietly accumulating more and more features. With the Surge XT release, it's blossomed into a real "Swiss Army Synth", covering nearly every category. OK, it doesn't have multisampled instruments - but it does, in fact, have a fair few samples buried in its numerous oscillators, which now include the content of the well-regarded Eurorack macro-oscillator "Plaits". Besides oscillators, more filters and effects are also present, giving it a huge timbral range. The architecture lets you layer, ring-mod and FM, waveshape, filter, and feedback, and modulation capability is effectively infinite because it now lets you execute Lua code as a modulator, on top of many standard LFO and envelope options. If you can't make the synth sound you want with this, you probably just don't know what you need to tweak to get there. (Hint: most synths get their distinctive character from oscillator EQ.).

While at a glance, the big panel it opens up with is intimidating, it's not deeply nested and presents just about everything in a few pages. It is intuitive enough to program if you've been working with synths for a while and grasp working with a modulation matrix, and in many cases it has a "more than one way to do it" quality that makes it simple for bread-and-butter sounds but also possible to switch your approach to something deeper. For example, you can start using FM by using the 2op and 3op oscillators which do FM synthesis directly; or you can use multiple oscillators and the FM signal path to create more complex uses of FM, incorporating other oscillator types. You can start with a simple waveform and add post-filter waveshaping to give it complexity; or you can switch to using wavetable synthesis. And so on.

All that and it's now free and open-source, no strings attached. So even if you don't have a need for a sound design tool, the presets available for it are plentiful.

Renoise has been one my two go-to trackers since the late 2000's(the other one being OpenMPT).

Renoise is a tracker, which means it is good at intricate sequencing and lends itself to a percussive workflow. In a piano roll you are inclined to view parts as interlocking pitches with an appendage of modulation on top; in trackers it's almost the opposite, as the note data is squashed down into parity with everything else. The "clean tracker sound" comes from it being easy to make every note fine-tuned - it's informationally dense and you can see every velocity and pan for every track at every moment, which means that your first pass at mixing can be done without adding anything to the FX chain, just by tweaking some velocities or panning to make everything sit a little better - and then you can add in some processing to finish it up, but less than what you might have done otherwise. A side effect is that you are likely to rely on hearing your parts, not reading them, because it's harder to read a cluster of A-4, D#5, etc. than it is to see a triad in the piano roll.

On the subject of note entry, Renoise also offers a snap-to-scale feature which helps greatly in using the computer keyboard for part-writing. As well, there is a "phrase" feature which lets you write a detailed sequence and then trigger it from a single note-on event. Phrases are great for simplifying loops, chord vamps, and articulations, and they're a great antidote to the intimidating aspects of seeing hundreds of notes scrolling down a grid - turn some of those parts into phrases and your main sequence gets less dense, easier to manipulate.

Renoise is primarily a sampler. The VST support is good - not perfect, I have seen bugs - but good enough that I can and often do rely on it. But it's second-class and a bit "bolted on" in that it's not totally seamless to automate VSTs. In contrast, the sampler and built-in effects are clearly the star of the show and they are very powerful, letting you write multisampled and sliced instruments with of all the effects used as modulations. If you're after minimalism, it can easily be made into your sole instrument and mixing tool. There isn't a huge amount of built-in content, but what does exist is usable and does a good job of demonstrating the power on offer.

There is a lot of programmability in Renoise. Just about everything, including UI state changes like "select track", can be assigned to a hotkey or MIDI event, so it's easy to set up some knobs and buttons for live performance. There is a lot of "more than one way to do it" as well - many functions are duplicated across the various sequencing and sampling features. You can automate on the grid with FX commands, but you can also automate in a graphical interface. You can arrange in the classic tracker mode, one pattern at a time, or you can use the pattern view to toggle track muting for something more like an Ableton session. And if that's not enough, you can write Lua scripts and extend the UI further. It can be overwhelming, but it helps to get familiar with a classic tracker first and then gradually upgrade your process to add the extra stuff. A laptop with Renoise plus a cheap knob controller is more than enough to achieve some expressive parts and speedy mixes.

In summary, I suggest seeing Renoise as a complementary tool to a clip-based multitrack DAW, with potential to be the sole tool if you're primarily a solo producer. While you can arrange and remix all sorts of things in it - sliced jungle loops, multisampled orchestral instruments, session backing parts, etc. - one thing it doesn't really accommodate is "record a band in the studio". That said, even in that scenario, you can definitely make use of it to generate backing material.

I just upgraded from Synthmaster One + Synthmaster Player to the Everything bundle and have had the prior two for some years and often bring them out.

Synthmaster is a true "jack of all trades, oftentimes better than master of one". It's established and stable, and its utility as a preset box is enormous, even before getting the expansions. I readily admit to rarely deep-diving the UI, because, while I've been toying with filters and envelopes for 20 years at this point, the presets basically always have something I want. The licensing is, relative to the scale of the product, very hassle-free, unlike most of the big players in plugins. Not only does it have presets, but it also has macro knobs for each preset, so no extra configuration step is needed to get some expressive playing. These are all qualities that are boring yet important when one's attention moves away from noodling and towards quickly producing tracks. Synthmaster plus your multisample rompler library of choice is a fine instrument palette, and anything on top is getting into extra-credit territory and is relatively less important than the studio recording work and effects plugins in making a well-rounded production.

The sound quality is something I've sometimes dinged Synthmaster for and it did keep me away in the past - in a head-to-head demo it's just a little more polite and thin than competitors, on average - but it has only gotten better with time and it's always had a lot of tweakability, and it successfully avoids the trap of glossy over-effected presets that you have to immediately strip down to their bare bones to actually use. For the most part, you can bring quality up to par by cranking the engine quality and doing a little more mixing work to give it some distortion, EQ, transient punch or a touch of reverb. It's just not quite on the level of the high-end analog modellers when doing exposed, filter-intensive patches(yet), and that's the kind of thing that, if it really does concern you that much, you may just want to get real analog gear instead.