Product Reviews by KVR Members

This review comes as personal and as a request from Bulent creator of synthmaster.

sound..

To begin i must say i enjoyed working with this synth cos of the multiple osc/filter choices.

the raw waveforms sound good and clean but i still find that they need the occasional beefing up to make them sound huge and fat.. but all in all the big selection of osc's and waveforms makes up for this.

i can easily make fat sounding basses and organic chords.

i found my self spending more time on the additive oscillators than the rest cos of the simplicity of the implementation.

but still the huge amount of sampled waveforms on the "basic" oscillators give the opportunity of some amazing diverse sound pallet.

modulation..

this thing can do almost anything.... you can practically send anything anywhere and its also very simple to work with the modulation matrix. sometimes simplicity is the key of producing the best sounds.. but also having a huge amount of modulation slots and destinations gives room for creating some incredible sounds.

filters..

The filter section is excellent.. it doesn't have 100 different filters types to choose from but the one that are there are very good, clean, and sound very close to analog like.

i love the dedicated slope in the filters.

the ability to envelope control the drive/gain with choices of pre/after/within the filter is just some smart coding.

all in all good and workable filters that produce clean and alias free filtering.

gui..

gui when first looked is clean and easy on the eyes.. but this is the only part i kinda felt lost in.

it does have lots of menu and selections.. the are thousands of options to mangle sounds but it gets kinda confusing some times.. i tend to prefer single window synths but this is not applicable in synthmaster since it incorporates a huge amount of options.

the guy is not for the beginner.. but when used to it its fast and easy to navigate through the different pages.

fx section..

the effects are good..

i specially find the distortion very good and gives in some rather weak waveforms that extra punch and fatness without sacrificing sound quality.

ensemble is also a good one.

i find the use of compressors in the main fx section to be useless it doesn't really offer anything special.. but its good to have.

the reverb although has lots of tweaking options over the space and overall sound and also add some modulation options.. it just doesn't sound very good compared to some other free/payed alternatives.

but with conjunction of the delay and ensemble its usable.

overall..

I liked it.. ALLOT.. its definitely going to be used heavily in my minimal techno and prog house tracks.

the semi modular approach on that synth is well executed and gives lots of room for experimentation.

i think this synth is really for the enthusiast patch maker not only cos of its huge amount of sound sculpting abilities but also cos it can produce some truly great and fat sounds.

i would not recommend it to the physical sound makers but mostly on the dance/ambient/drum and bass producer.

in the beginning it does look intimidating and its easy to get lost but after some time its very easy and simple to work with.

i give it a 9 just cos its huge amount of menu and options makes its cumbersome to work out of the box.. it has a learning curve although not a long one but its not for the noob user that will find him self just browsing the presets. but if you give it some time to learn it.. it will deliver and deliver some awesome results.

special thanx to Bulent and the kv331 team.

well for a free plug you cant go wrong with this one..

sound..

this thing sounds nice and organic, it fits electronic music in the trance/psytrance/techno very very nice.

the oscillators are sharp and clean with a fat and playful character. although there is a small aliasing in the very high registers but nothing that will hold you back.

it fits easy in the mix and this is very important.

envelopes could be a tad better for fast attack short release trance basslines, dont get me wrong they are tight but could be a bit tighter/faster specially when used in 16th sequences with fast attack short decay/release.

modulation..

well it has some weird modulation slots specially in the lfo domain.. its not the usual stuff but very creative.

could do with some more straightforward approach but it works nonetheless.

filters..

i could do with more filter options but the ones provided work very good, sound nice and there isnt any noticeable stepping for that smooth filtering action.

resonance could be better for some self oscillating pads and atmos.

gui..

its nice and easy on the eyes but the unconventional approach could scare some since it doesn't have the usual analog style.

personally i like it since it makes me to get out of my comfort zone and produce some excellent sounds.

overall..

i wish this thing was polyphonic.. i can imagine that those nice and fat oscillators would produce some great and super fat polyphonic sounds.

its fairly light on the CPU overall but i have seen some odd performance in studio one v2 (but this maybe is a host issue cos it works very smooth in flstudio 10)

all in all this is excellent i dont give it a 10 just cos i feel this thing needs a polyphonic version.. and i would pay for it.

its a lead workhorse for me.. for the standart lead sounds but mainly for the organic psychedelic sounds and fx.