Kilohearts Updates the Entire Kilohearts Ecosystem to v2 - Including Phase Plant

[aMUSEd]

Which bank is this Blue Messiah patch in? Want to check it out now

[Per Salbark]

It's in the factory content, in the "Pads" folder.

[aMUSEd]

Thanks not been though them all but will check

[SamDi]

Do you think the main focus or strength of pp is sound design and creating own presets? Was it promoted that way by the dev when it was released? I am just curious and think pp is a pretty good synth. Do most people use pp for sound design?
The first thing I noticed when I demoed pp in addition to high cpu of quite a lot of presets was something else, I mean there are easy ways to replace it, but when I compare it to Avenger (the synth I use the most at the moment) it's pretty obvious.
I didn't like the quality of reverb, but that's not a big downside and it's a matter of personal taste, you can add any reverb you want, of course, otherwise I see the great potential of pp as a sound design tool.

At least they write that on their website: "Phase Plant is a multi-award-winning, semi-modular softsynth developed for music producers and sound designers...."

I would fully sign that. On the one side Phase Plant doesn't set you many limits. If you have an idea, you can implement that and pretty important - you can do it precise, fast and it makes fun. On the other side the GUI is also inviting to noodle around and discover new ideas. It's just plain fun.

Sound-wise I regard PP in the same class as Serum or Vital. It's proudly digital. It's good on the impressive, agrressive also precise side, also may be good for drones (not my territory).
But for all kind of sounds, which rely on components adding some kind of "magic" to the sound, may it be filters or effects, PP is not the best option. I am not sure, if you could bring PP to sound similar like Dune, Pigments, Viper or whatever is considered to sound well. But for sure it won't do it out of the box and you had some work.

Furthermore in my opinion, there are some of the additional snapins you "need in every case". So I would highly recommend Multipass, Slice EQ and Convolver to unlock the full potential.

Take your first example: the Blue Messiah Pad uses like 38(!) instances of oscillators, if I counted correctly. I am not sure, if I would regard that a good sound design in terms of "what do you do to achieve a certain sound" and I assume one could reach similar results with much less waste of CPU time.
What is also pretty CPU consuming for many patches is the fact that they use some polyphonic effects, but this is clear that you will need much CPU power, if you want to use this.

Yes! It is a big preset! There are some like this one especially in the Pad and similar categories. Of course it is better to make our own presets. Personally, I don't use that much oscillators and effects! Two oscillators with some unison and little bit of effects. Anyway, I believe some presets are for demonstrating more than to be used.

I guess you are right. Unfortunately the expansions also do not add any value to me ATM.

I still like Massive X presets more! (Yes, I have a strange taste maybe!), but there is no exact rule which synth I should use or which preset. The only rule is to use what fits better and support the overall song or track better. Sometimes, not a favourite preset (even my own) and it sits the best, so just browsing presets and listen to them only by themselves, is not useful for me as I need to hear them in context with the other elements of the song. So, when I browse preset, I try to imagine how this preset sound with other sounds (and usually it is a start of a new track if it sounds so good in my head ).

Overall, PhasePlant is a great synth. I like how it is developed and the company behind it

I try to love Massive X, but I am far from managing it. My attempts to handle it lead to underwhelming or harsh or both sounds. But for the presets I made a similar observation. Some do really well in a mix, although a little underwhelming, played alone.

Yes definitely. PP is one of my go to synths.

Like some of you have noted, Phase Plant is comparable to the main competitors in terms of performance. But only if you make a patch that is similar to what fixed architecture synths do. If you start going beyond that with unison, multiple generators, many polyphonic effects, or global unison; it can get crazy pretty fast. It's not hard to make a 1000+ voices patch.

I can absolutely support that. As I mentionoed before, I could run like 500 instances with a simple preset on a mid-class CPU, Serum was just like 400 and that's a synth from last decade. Thus the overhead of PP is very lean.

Just because it's not hard to make a 1000+ voices patch, this shouldn't be an invitation for your sound designers to do so

[shonky]

I didn't like the quality of reverb, but that's not a big downside and it's a matter of personal taste, you can add any reverb you want, of course, otherwise I see the great potential of pp as a sound design tool.

If you have Snapheap, or if you want to use one of the lanes as a (pseudo) send channel, you can use delays to add pre-delay, additional reverbs to add early reflections, make hybrid delays by using the convolver for the reflections, chorus, eq, etc. to alter the overall quality of the reverb.

Agree it's not the greatest reverb but there are quite a few options which can improve that situation.

[PieBerger]

I didn't like the quality of reverb, but that's not a big downside and it's a matter of personal taste, you can add any reverb you want, of course, otherwise I see the great potential of pp as a sound design tool.

If you have Snapheap, or if you want to use one of the lanes as a (pseudo) send channel, you can use delays to add pre-delay, additional reverbs to add early reflections, make hybrid delays by using the convolver for the reflections, chorus, eq, etc. to alter the overall quality of the reverb.

Agree it's not the greatest reverb but there are quite a few options which can improve that situation.

Indeed, the overall philosophy of the Snapins as I see them, isn't instant gratification but rather simplicity and flexibility in their implementation, such that larger more complex results, which are ultimately more satisfying, can be created more easily and to the exact specifications of the creator's needs at the time.

[zerocrossing]

I wish the Snapins were not just confined to the effect slots and you could use them in Generator groups.

[zzz00m]

I wish the Snapins were not just confined to the effect slots and you could use them in Generator groups.

Especially the filter snapins...

[zerocrossing]

I wish the Snapins were not just confined to the effect slots and you could use them in Generator groups.

Especially the filter snapins...

I know, right? Seems do dumb that I don’t have things like the ladder filter available to me in the generator section.

[Greenstorm33]

I'd guess not everything they have works in a feedback path. At least you can run them all per-voice. I'd definitely like more generator section filters though. Maybe a nice waveshaper too.

[SLiC]

From the newsletter that dropped today-

Prepare for another game-changing update...
Our dev team have been excitedly beavering away on the next big update and we're excited to say that it's not far off done now. We don't like to set hard dates for these kinds of things, as we wouldn't want to rush something out that we weren't at least 98% happy with.
But we will say this...
Soon.

[martiu]

Bring the grains