What are some soft synths with preset morphing?

[zerocrossing]

reading this topic, i'm sure it's about preset to preset morphing in a controllable way realtime. So not that kind when the plugin -not realtime- generates an inner state,
and not that kind when it's about the inner states of one preset,
so good bye Absynth and Crystal and Alchemy!
Very few plugin can transform its sound between two chosen presets. sure it's easier to be implemented in a fixed architecture synth.

to pilotredsun:
thanks for mentioning the morf wrapper, i will check that thing!

Yeah, how would a preset that had a user configurable modulation matrix morph between presets unless the two presets had the exact same mod matrix sources and destinations?

But I don’t understand why you’d dismiss a synth that has an Alchemy style ability to take a patch and create “snapshots” of that patch and morph between them. I mean, in the end the result would be identical to what you’d get if you had two presets in a fixed architecture synth and morphed between them. In practice, it’s great.

[Cinebient]

reading this topic, i'm sure it's about preset to preset morphing in a controllable way realtime. So not that kind when the plugin -not realtime- generates an inner state,
and not that kind when it's about the inner states of one preset,
so good bye Absynth and Crystal and Alchemy!
Very few plugin can transform its sound between two chosen presets. sure it's easier to be implemented in a fixed architecture synth.

to pilotredsun:
thanks for mentioning the morf wrapper, i will check that thing!

Yeah, how would a preset that had a user configurable modulation matrix morph between presets unless the two presets had the exact same mod matrix sources and destinations?

But I don’t understand why you’d dismiss a synth that has an Alchemy style ability to take a patch and create “snapshots” of that patch and morph between them. I mean, in the end the result would be identical to what you’d get if you had two presets in a fixed architecture synth and morphed between them. In practice, it’s great.

Exact my thinking as well.
Morphing to different presets without changing the sound sources and/or osc types is quite the same.
Otherwise its more blending than morphing.
Alchemy is by far the king here still and the most user friendly for me. Also 8 slots to morph are really great as well.
Beside that it can morph really smooth even trough different arps and stuff.
Alchemy presets are in general still the most variable from all synth i ever used.
Now i just wish it had morphable parameter locks on top. That would make it close to perfect for me.

[vurt]

That's what Orion allows you to do with any generator and, I think, VSTi as well.

patch genetics it was called wasnt it?
not realtime though, but could get some interesting starting points for designing new sounds

[empphryio]

Manuals are available only to paid customers, but there are videos on both the GForce and OhmForce websites. You can try a demo too. Well worth spending some time with IMO.

Thanks. I'm getting the hang of it now. It's sounds really good.

[AnX]

Minimonsta

Seconded. You can set up to twelve patches on the leftmost octave of keys, then press one to morph to that patch.

Velocity-sensitive, too — low velocity gives a slow morph, high velocity, fast morph. I think (not certain, and can't test it now) you can release the key before morphing is complete to stop at an intermediate stage.

pretty sure the 12 are variations of the original (user definable?) not complety diff presets (never used the function myself, may be incorrect)

[shonky]

Pretty sure you could do this by loading your own VSTs into Obscurium too - 32 step sequencer that you can modulate 16 parameters so you can have different sounds per step and can then morph between two different sets of those modulations.

[empphryio]

pretty sure the 12 are variations of the original (user definable?) not complety diff presets (never used the function myself, may be incorrect)

Definitely completely different patches though without the manual it's not obvious how to assign them.

[Meffy]

Minimonsta

Seconded. You can set up to twelve patches on the leftmost octave of keys, then press one to morph to that patch.

Velocity-sensitive, too — low velocity gives a slow morph, high velocity, fast morph. I think (not certain, and can't test it now) you can release the key before morphing is complete to stop at an intermediate stage.

pretty sure the 12 are variations of the original (user definable?) not complety diff presets (never used the function myself, may be incorrect)

Could be. I'll give it a try with a few scratch-made patches and report back. Can't do it now, yet another 16-hour workday.

[eta] Just noticed empphyrio's post — hope you enjoy the synth as much as I do.

[empphryio]

Actually maybe I'm wrong. There's 11 additional presets specific to whatever the main preset is. Though it sounds great. Not happy with that. No idea if that can be modified. Really wish I could look at the damn manual to help figure out if I want to buy this. I'll shut up now.

[cron]

Loom and, by extension, Loom 2 immediately spring to mind. You can't really morph presets as such, but you can morph states. There's even a vector-synthesis-like XY pad where you can drag around or predraw a trajectory then control the speed of traversal letting you morph across 4 states at once.

Sugarbytes Factory has a morphing function but I have no idea how well it works.

Pretty damn well! It's really easy to set up too. Just 'arm' the slot and go to town. Massively underrated synth.

Is there a reason it's not more common (not in the big-name synths I think of)? Does it tend to sound bad? In the ones you have all tried, how was the sound transition sounding?

Could be my memory playing tricks on me, but I seem to remember preset morphing was all the rage for a while in VSTi's difficult teenage phase. 2005ish maybe? The main stumbling block was that changes in 'architecture' weren't really taken into account. Clicks and sudden timbral lurches when filter or oscillator types set up like 'hard switches' change, or worse, multiple abrupt changes if the knob has to move through various states to get to its destination (e.g., you want to morph from sawtooth to square, but they're at opposite ends of the dial so you get clicks and jumps through triangle, sine, and whatever else on the journey). Possible mitigations like excluding a knob from the morph or ensuring there's only one abrupt change instead of several wouldn't be there. It was a totally different era in terms of design elegance though. Today's approach focusing more on morphing states within one preset seems a much more sensible, albeit more limited on paper, way of going about things.

Most synths with a mod matrix or drag and drop assignment allow you to map whatever parameters to modwheel or macro knobs, so tweak these and you'll be getting essentially that

Never understimate this either. If your modulation matrix has enough slots, anything is a morphing synth. You can even blend one modulation with an equal but inverted modulation elsewhere to morph between things that were never meant to be morphed in the first place (e.g., sacrificing one LFO in Serum to build a more capable LFO that seamlessly morphs between two shapes - a function the synth doesn't have out of the box).

[ztrauq]

Not quite the same thing, but you could also use two "non-morphing" synths and feed it into something like MMorph (https://www.meldaproduction.com/MMorph). Results definitely do vary, but using its spectral morphing, you can get some really different combinations. I tend to use it to combine synths with totally different synthesis methods and see what kind of unusual "hybrids" I can produce...

[recursive one]

The main stumbling block was that changes in 'architecture' weren't really taken into account. Clicks and sudden timbral lurches when filter or oscillator types set up like 'hard switches' change, or worse, multiple abrupt changes if the knob has to move through various states to get to its destination (e.g., you want to morph from sawtooth to square, but they're at opposite ends of the dial so you get clicks and jumps through triangle, sine, and whatever else on the journey). Possible mitigations like excluding a knob from the morph or ensuring there's only one abrupt change instead of several wouldn't be there.

That's indeed the issue. When I think how a true morph between two randomly chosen presets could be implemented, e.g., in Serum or Spire or the likes, the first thing that comes to my mind - what about the oscillator or filter state changes? waveform/wavetable changes? And basically any other parameter that has discrete values, abruptly switching from one to another at arbitrary point has high chances to sound quite ugly I think.

I think a truly "morphable" synth must have fixed architecture and all parameters must have continous values.

I don't remember MorphoX in detail but when I look at the screenshots it seems that it was mostly like that, but still there were some discrete parameters, e.g., the osc and LFO waveforms, LFO sync rate, etc. How did the morph work between these?

[Scoox]

Yeah, how would a preset that had a user configurable modulation matrix morph between presets unless the two presets had the exact same mod matrix sources and destinations?

As long as a parameter is automateable, it can be morphed. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it will sound good. Discrete parameters such as 'filter type', modulation source/destination, etc, will probably sound like ass if morphed because they are not continuous. It is the sound designer's job to be aware of this fact and ensure the only parameters that change between the patches being morphed are continuous ones.

[noiseboyuk]

NI's Skanner XT (a Reaktor synth of course). Morphing presets on that is a helluva ride.

[pdxindy]

FM8 has the X/Y pad that can load a preset (via drag-n-drop) to each corner and them morph between them