Fabfilter Twin 3 --Released Feb. 7th

[Ploki]

yeah filters impose a lot of character on Twins sound.

And people seem to either love or hate Fab's character filters (in the case of Volcano as well)

[PieBerger]

yeah filters impose a lot of character on Twins sound.

And people seem to either love or hate Fab's character filters (in the case of Volcano as well)

Volcano is my main filter FX plugin, I just don't know that good filters alone are enough to make me buy (and invest time to learn) Twin3. If FF ever jump on the CLAP bandwagon and unlock Volcano as a polyphonic FX, I'd be all over that. Any synth I didn't like the character/variety/whatever of, but has features and sonic character I do like, I could just slap a Volcano after it and modulate with Bitwig's modulators, boom!

[teilo]

yeah filters impose a lot of character on Twins sound.

And people seem to either love or hate Fab's character filters (in the case of Volcano as well)

Volcano is my main filter FX plugin, I just don't know that good filters alone are enough to make me buy (and invest time to learn) Twin3. If FF ever jump on the CLAP bandwagon and unlock Volcano as a polyphonic FX, I'd be all over that. Any synth I didn't like the character/variety/whatever of, but has features and sonic character I do like, I could just slap a Volcano after it and modulate with Bitwig's modulators, boom!

While it is theoretically possible, I have my doubts that CLAP will ever do poly FX in any practical usable way. Not even Bitwig has that option. The voice routing becomes very complex, and breaks the models of most synths, which sum voices before internal FX and the final amp output stage. Way too many issues with this idea.

[Cepheus]

Beautiful GUI and it sounds very good. One of the few synths where you can actually see where you place and how much you apply a filter. So it’s not Twin any more but quadruplets but that doesn’t have a nice ring especially now with ring modulation option. Wondering about the filter configuration: thus 4 filters parallel means the quadruplication of the signal, filtering it and then mixing it back together. Would have been nice if one could mix serial and parallel. For example 3 filters, the first 2 parallel followed by a shared serial filter or 2 serial filters in parallel.

I tried to drag’n drop the FX’s in different order but that didn’t work. That must be a bug…? Is it really a fixed order? What signal flow do we have here? First reverb followed by delay? That feels weird. I would like to end with a reverb.

[bmanic]

Thank you... (you sound excited which is always good )..

I know we worked very hard on getting the envelopes to behave in a normal way (which they did not in twin 2!). Now retriggering and playing on it is tight, just as it should be. It just feels way better to play.

Can you look at my last comment above about retriggering? Maybe you know a setting I have missed?

Hi,

Probably what you are asking for is mono triggering modes like low/high note priority and the possibility for different triggering modes for the envelope. It's something I did ask for during the alpha/beta stage but it never got implemented. There are unfortunately quite a few playing techniques that can not be realized (for live playing) without these modes, which is indeed a shame. I do hope FabFilter will improve/update Twin3 and include more of these advanced playing modes.

Twin3 only has two basic mono modes. When you select 'mono' as the mode, it means what most synths call "legato mono" mode. This then has previous note priority, meaning you can get low and high notes to trigger when you let go of the key but unfortunately the envelopes stay in legato mode. Then the other mode is setting polyphonic mode but with a single voice. This will force retriggering of all the envelopes but does NOT have last note priority. Hopefully they can implement an update so that it does.

Personally I most wish for really extensive trigger modes for everything. They should look at something like Arturia Pigments and take inspiration from all their extensive trigger options for both the LFO and Envelopes.

[bmanic]

Beautiful GUI and it sounds very good. One of the few synths where you can actually see where you place and how much you apply a filter. So it’s not Twin any more but quadruplets but that doesn’t have a nice ring especially now with ring modulation option. Wondering about the filter configuration: thus 4 filters parallel means the quadruplication of the signal, filtering it and then mixing it back together. Would have been nice if one could mix serial and parallel. For example 3 filters, the first 2 parallel followed by a shared serial filter or 2 serial filters in parallel.

This is something I was wishing for. Basically I asked them if they could implement the Volcano routings menu for us but alas.. it wasn't thought to be a good idea.

An even more powerful option would be a per oscillator routing knob that would let us precisely control the amount each oscillator is sending to each filter but that is probably way outside the scope of the project.

[pierb]

It sounds like Fabfilter should have listened to bmanic

[liquidsound]

It sounds like Fabfilter should have listened to bmanic

I think they did and my great-grandchildren will get the update with the appropriate suggestions by bmaniac

For now I’m using this thing to death.
Love the presets as well

[bmanic]

It sounds like Fabfilter should have listened to bmanic

They did implement a lot of fixes I suggested. The problem with somebody like me is that I could probably find more things to add forever. At some point you just have to call it quits and say "Nope. No more changes".

They also clearly had a very different idea for Twin 3 than I was hoping. I can now see that some people really like the way Twin 3 is quite simple and very reminiscent of the Twin 2 feature set. As a tweaker I'm very seldom phased by too many options. More is always more for me.. but that's not true for everybody. For many people less can be more.. but those people are nuts.


Still, I do wish it had a few more bells and whistles. Especially relatively obvious things like the possibility to reorder the FX, more triggering options for the various mod sources and some basic additional mod things like a flipflop mode for incoming midi messages.

[exmatproton]

It sounds like Fabfilter should have listened to bmanic

They did implement a lot of fixes I suggested. The problem with somebody like me is that I could probably find more things to add forever. At some point you just have to call it quits and say "Nope. No more changes".

They also clearly had a very different idea for Twin 3 than I was hoping. I can now see that some people really like the way Twin 3 is quite simple and very reminiscent of the Twin 2 feature set. As a tweaker I'm very seldom phased by too many options. More is always more for me.. but that's not true for everybody. For many people less can be more.. but those people are nuts.


Still, I do wish it had a few more bells and whistles. Especially relatively obvious things like the possibility to reorder the FX, more triggering options for the various mod sources and some basic additional mod things like a flipflop mode for incoming midi messages.

+1

For what it is (a good sounding, simple synth), it works quite good. Still, i am missing some features and q.o.l. additions

[sQeetz]

I like it being simple. for 45 bucks it's my new go-to for everything (for now)

[pierb]

They also clearly had a very different idea for Twin 3 than I was hoping. I can now see that some people really like the way Twin 3 is quite simple and very reminiscent of the Twin 2 feature set. As a tweaker I'm very seldom phased by too many options. More is always more for me.. but that's not true for everybody. For many people less can be more.. but those people are nuts.


Still, I do wish it had a few more bells and whistles. Especially relatively obvious things like the possibility to reorder the FX, more triggering options for the various mod sources and some basic additional mod things like a flipflop mode for incoming midi messages.

100% agree with you here.

I mean it sounds great but the effects have been brutally simplified.

Considering the simple synthesis I expected the effects to be the main dish but no, they are the side dish. I wanted Something more like what KiloHearts do or even the modular effects grid from Zebra.

Oh well. Hopefully one day FF will reconsider and make a modular environment If not a synth at least something like an effects rack.

[bmanic]

Keep in mind that you can modulate the effects. For instance, if you look closely at some of my presets you'll notice I'm very often modulating the Reverb pre-delay time. This causes it to have some old school pitch wobble. Same goes for the phaser/flanger and chorus. You can modulate the knobs and stuff there to really change their behavior. Especially the chorus can be completely changed the way it sounds simply by modulating it.

Also, you can make both the Chorus and the Phaser/Flanger 'static' if you turn rate all the way down to zero. Then you can use the depth knob to place it's static position. Combine this with modulation and you'll have a lot of control over it's character.

This is why I feel Twin 3 is actually a ridiculously powerful mono synth. You can fully modulate all the FX stuff with that one mono voice, so experiment with using envelopes on the FX parameters. Of course you can do this with polyphonic presets too but there it wont behave the same way as naturally the FX are monophonic.

[original flipper]

Hi

Bmanic Wrote: The problem with somebody like me is that I could probably find more things to add forever.

I think 90% of software synth users veer towards either using pre sets or lite 'dabbling' - with heavyweight synth programmers in the minority - to the point where they are considered superfluous to the design goals... might be totally wrong of course...

[sQeetz]

I think 90% of software synth users veer towards either using pre sets or lite 'dabbling' - with heavyweight synth programmers in the minority - to the point where they are considered superfluous to the design goals... might be totally wrong of course...

I admit being a preset juggler on a lot of plugins (Aparillo, Synclavier, whatnot...)
If the synth is as easy and simple to program as FFT3 is, though...
It's a fun synth. It's fun to tweak it. At least to me....