Soundspot Union Wavetable Synth out today

[commodore]

I'm going to pass - After collecting vsts for many years, sometimes less (vsts) is more. Just use top 10 best vsts you like. I've learned that mediocre synths are just not worth the money, time, or management.

[layzer]

maybe this a new strategy in a saturated market where everything has already been done - make a modest bread and butter synth, and sell more units at rock bottom price (I say that before having tried it but it does seem to be a trend lately)

[layzer]

I'm going to pass - After collecting vsts for many years, sometimes less (vsts) is more. Just use top 10 best vsts you like. I've learned that mediocre synths are just not worth the money, time, or management.

yup, stick to old tried and true favorites, thats what i've always done.

[layzer]

Yeah it's cheap alright...

This thing is too basic. It might be good for people just starting out or for those who want to add just one more synth to their arsenal, but for me it's lacking too many things and the sound is just okay.

i still love surge for WT sounds. it still has me exploring.

[BONES]

Unless they're desperate to recreate the feel of an oldskool PPG, most experienced users are just going to pick a synth that has velocity response (and the PPGs at least responded to aftertouch) unless the sound quality is way better than existing alternatives - which doesn't seem to be the case here.

You are being specific but there are plenty of examples of great basslines and synth riffs that don't rely on velocity at all and Russell was being entirely general in his comment.

I had a look at this for six quid but came to the conclusion that there are other options already installed that would do the job.

This thing sounds great, though, like really nice. I think it is definitely worth downloading the demo. The real downside I have with it is that it's a bit of a CPU hog.

Typical Soundspot plugin, snazzy GUI but comes with bizarre omissions and odd/annoying workflow choices.

Yes, I want to be a fan of Soundspot but they make it hard to do. For every great plugin they make you get half-a-dozen that are more annoying than they are worth.

CPU hog.

Yes, easily its biggest problem. Although it only got as bad as 20% on my machine, that's 10 times more CPU than DUNE 3 uses.

Basic sound is ok. Overall it feels cheap and not worth buying at any price.

I think it sounds pretty good, actually. It's got a very high quality sheen to the sound that I quite like. I haven't tested the filter yet but just playing through the presets impressed me.

Sound wise it's light years ahead of Air synths, I can say that!

Woah! That's a big call. I really love the way Vacuum Pro sounds. It's one of my absolute favourite plugins.

Hybrid is as far from bland as you can get in my opinion. Crisp and unapologetically digital sounding in a world that is pathologically obsessed with Analog.

This is a bit OT but its interesting lately to see digital making a bit of a resurgence, with synths like Arturia MicroFreak and Modal doing good things with Skulpt, Craft Synth 2.0 and soon Argon8. And Korg adding a digital oscillator to Minilogue XD is a step in the right direction. Good sound is good sound, it shouldn't matter how it's made. People obsess over the wrong things all the time.

I bought this synth (since it's so cheap). From my first experience, what I have to say is that is douns interesting, but the good presets make a lot of use of Unison, and that brings the CPU comsumption to levels above what's tolerable.

I didn't find that when I was playing with it last night. On a couple of patches I ramped up the unison on all oscillators from 1 to 5 or 7 and the CPU only increased slightly. I don't know what is making it use so much CPU but I don't think it's unison.

[yellowmix]

I want to like this synth but every interesting or innovative thing is double-edged. No mod matrices, no click and drag, super-fast click-the-circle until the color matches one of two mod sources. This works because there are ONLY two possible mod sources. Add velocity and the workflow increases 50%, nevermind aftertouch or modwheel.

Amp ADSR, Mod ADSR, LFO, and filter per oscillator is great, but no easy way to copy them to the other two oscillators.

LFOs are really MSEGs and super-simple to edit, double-click to add or remove points. Click the dots to the left of the label and it becomes the dotted version of the next longer period, click again and it becomes to dotted version of the current value. But I can't find a way to make it not sync'd (e.g., for vibrato).

Speaking of vibrato, it took me a while to figure out, but click on Fine or Coarse to modulate it. The flip-side is there is no numerical value, it's purely graphical and by ear, and trying to add small amounts of vibrato is difficult since there is such a large range. Logarithmic increases would help.

ADSRs are similarly graphical, but again, no numerical values or snap which makes precision difficult. The envelopes can be as long as 10 seconds, but there is no way to tempo-sync it.

The wavetable oscillator is an interesting concept, but it honestly sounds like the two other oscillators merged together. I mean, that is what it is, but it becomes redundant. You can modulate it and do other things to differentiate it, but it's inherently limited. Also, there is no way to save it or go back to a previous state. To call it a wavetable synth is a little too generous.

The FX are generally decent to good and being able to reorder them is great. The reverb is trash but it's good for glueing and ambience if you filter and dampen it. The distortion is pretty nice, you can get some nice lofi sounds that way. The delay uses the same click-to-dot method as the LFOs. You can modulate them with 4 shared LFOs, so now it's up to 4 clicks to choose the modulator you want.

32 unison voices is cool but after 12 or so it's diminishing returns. The detune is rather limited to a sweet spot. You can't make the uglier reese bass sounds (there's a "Gentle Reese Bass" preset in the factory bank). But you can make some really wide sounds.

The GUI takes a significant amount of time to load. Close the window, reopen it. It's going to eat away at your workflow over time.

This is only going to add clutter to my arsenal so I am passing. I know I'm never going to touch it again. If you're starting out and/or don't have many softsynths already and you can give up a pint of craft beer then maybe. But it's a not complete synth to me, there's always some half missing or flawed and it's frustrating. Better to save up for something like Synthmaster One ($36 on sale) or put it toward Serum on Splice.

[layzer]

yeah, cpu hog.

3 osc at 32 voice unison? come on...
thats when you use a sampled 3 osc 32 voice unison sound
instead of an actual synthesized 3 osc 32 voice unison sound

[Sinisterbr]

I want to like this synth but every interesting or innovative thing is double-edged. No mod matrices, no click and drag, super-fast click-the-circle until the color matches one of two mod sources. This works because there are ONLY two possible mod sources. Add velocity and the workflow increases 50%, nevermind aftertouch or modwheel.

Amp ADSR, Mod ADSR, LFO, and filter per oscillator is great, but no easy way to copy them to the other two oscillators.

LFOs are really MSEGs and super-simple to edit, double-click to add or remove points. Click the dots to the left of the label and it becomes the dotted version of the next longer period, click again and it becomes to dotted version of the current value. But I can't find a way to make it not sync'd (e.g., for vibrato).

Speaking of vibrato, it took me a while to figure out, but click on Fine or Coarse to modulate it. The flip-side is there is no numerical value, it's purely graphical and by ear, and trying to add small amounts of vibrato is difficult since there is such a large range. Logarithmic increases would help.

ADSRs are similarly graphical, but again, no numerical values or snap which makes precision difficult. The envelopes can be as long as 10 seconds, but there is no way to tempo-sync it.

The wavetable oscillator is an interesting concept, but it honestly sounds like the two other oscillators merged together. I mean, that is what it is, but it becomes redundant. You can modulate it and do other things to differentiate it, but it's inherently limited. Also, there is no way to save it or go back to a previous state. To call it a wavetable synth is a little too generous.

The FX are generally decent to good and being able to reorder them is great. The reverb is trash but it's good for glueing and ambience if you filter and dampen it. The distortion is pretty nice, you can get some nice lofi sounds that way. The delay uses the same click-to-dot method as the LFOs. You can modulate them with 4 shared LFOs, so now it's up to 4 clicks to choose the modulator you want.

32 unison voices is cool but after 12 or so it's diminishing returns. The detune is rather limited to a sweet spot. You can't make the uglier reese bass sounds (there's a "Gentle Reese Bass" preset in the factory bank). But you can make some really wide sounds.

The GUI takes a significant amount of time to load. Close the window, reopen it. It's going to eat away at your workflow over time.

This is only going to add clutter to my arsenal so I am passing. I know I'm never going to touch it again. If you're starting out and/or don't have many softsynths already and you can give up a pint of craft beer then maybe. But it's a not complete synth to me, there's always some half missing or flawed and it's frustrating. Better to save up for something like Synthmaster One ($36 on sale) or put it toward Serum on Splice.

Well put.
That's why I asked if SoundSpot use to release updates/ upgrades to its products or not. As it is I wouldn't say Union is worth it, but if they surely will improve upon it, I'd think otherwise.

[Russell Grand]

Yeah it's cheap alright...

This thing is too basic. It might be good for people just starting out or for those who want to add just one more synth to their arsenal, but for me it's lacking too many things and the sound is just okay.

i still love surge for WT sounds. it still has me exploring.

Yes! Agreed, Lazer, Surge is awesome!

[BONES]

3 osc at 32 voice unison? come on...
thats when you use a sampled 3 osc 32 voice unison sound
instead of an actual synthesized 3 osc 32 voice unison sound

How do you detune and spread those sampled oscillators to your liking?

Where the hell did the term "reese bass" come from? A week ago I had never consciously heard it but since then it has come up 3 or 4 times. To me it's just a standard sound you'd make with any 2 osc synth so I don't get why it needs a special name.

[mgw38]

I think Reese was the name of the artist who first used the technique in the 80s.

[Russell Grand]

https://www.dogsonacid.com/threads/how- ... 433/page-2

[elassi]

The wavetable oscillator is an interesting concept, but it honestly sounds like the two other oscillators merged together. I mean, that is what it is, but it becomes redundant. You can modulate it and do other things to differentiate it, but it's inherently limited.

At least it saves you a lot of CPU when transforming OSC1 and OSC2 with tons of unison into a wavetable.

Other than that I sign your findings.

[BONES]

The thing is, there is nothing stopping you from generating your wavetable and then changing the waveforms of Oscillators 1 & 2, so it doesn't have to sound anything like the other oscillators. That's the cleverness of it.

Anyway, back onto "Reese" bass, it's actually in Wikipedia (because of course it is) - "The bassline of Saunderson's 1988 track "Just Want Another Chance" (released under his "Reese" pseudonym on Incognito Records) became very influential in the jungle and drum and bass music genres." Link -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Saunderson

Listening to the three examples they give on that page, all I'm hearing is a bog-standard synth sound, nothing that deserves its own name. Very strange.

[elassi]

The thing is, there is nothing stopping you from generating your wavetable and then changing the waveforms of Oscillators 1 & 2, so it doesn't have to sound anything like the other oscillators. That's the cleverness of it.

Yep, good remark/addition.