Current Launch v2 - A new instrument platform by Minimal Audio

[_leras]

So I'm demoing Current, so far I'm hearing a lot of fx on most of the sounds, they all seem to have some weird dimensional effect going on, and can be quite weak when these are taken off.

The UI seems a bit on the small side and to me could have more information, perhaps more obvious routing, perhaps? The browser also seems a bit odd to work with.

I couldn't seem to find just straight up synth leads at all. It does seem to have a some pretty nice sounds, but at least under leads, I couldn't really find and plain punchy and powerful leads... I was comparing against Massive X, and that seems more more present and punchy.

Not really getting a great impression... what am I missing?

[Ou_Tis]

So I'm demoing Current, so far I'm hearing a lot of fx on most of the sounds, they all seem to have some weird dimensional effect going on, and can be quite weak when these are taken off.

Maybe it's the reverb? I think I really don't like the reverb. Going by the Youtube demos it has a character I dislike, lacks depth, sounds too harsh, seems excessively thin, and isn't lush enough. I could probably still get a sound I'm ok with by bringing down the damping (depending on how that's implemented) or adding a low pass afterwards.



I wonder whether some of these dubstep folk have lost the ability to hear high frequencies from listening to so much loud music (of course, age can also do it... though 2012 wasn't so long ago, and I did go to a few dubstep shows myself and get totally wasted dancing right next to one of the giant speakers, with my ears ringing the next afternoon and my pants torn apart---IDK, maybe people who went to a lot of dubstep shows were wearing earplugs?).

[Trancit]

Maybe it's the reverb? I think I really don't like the reverb. ...

The reverb indeed is a bit weird... I like it really much for effect sounds as to either side of the "Size" parameter it goes easily into some weird tonal teretory which can sound cool when being filtered...

But it wouldn´t be my first choice for a "normal" reverb sound and I find it hard to dial something in which doesn´t color the sound too much...
Imho not the best choice for a general purpose reverb to put into a synth...

[Razzia]

Question - why is rift not included in the Current bundle? The distortion in the synth is essentially rift, no?

I see on their site it says if you are an existing customer you can check your account for what are essentially loyalty discounts, a la Fabfilter's pricing scheme I assume. If you were to, for instance, buy the Current bundle, would there be a discount to crossgrade to the effects bundle since it seems all it's missing is Rift? Or would you be stuck paying the full price of the one plugin you don't have?

[swilow11]

Maybe it's the reverb? I think I really don't like the reverb. ...

The reverb indeed is a bit weird... I like it really much for effect sounds as to either side of the "Size" parameter it goes easily into some weird tonal teretory which can sound cool when being filtered...

But it wouldn´t be my first choice for a "normal" reverb sound and I find it hard to dial something in which doesn´t color the sound too much...
Imho not the best choice for a general purpose reverb to put into a synth...

I've got similar complaints with the Cluster Delay. Which sounds great and is easy to do creative stuff with...but I often just want a basic ping pong dotted 8th.

As a synth to play with and make wild presets on, Current is wonderful but it isn't exactly practical. Still good fun though.

I've yet to truly figure out the preset browser and how I know what is factory content and what isn't. Probably shouldn't be so confusing and it makes using Current much less enjoyable trying to constantly navigate confusing non musical things. Maybe it's just me.

[Trancit]

I've got similar complaints with the Cluster Delay. Which sounds great and is easy to do creative stuff with...but I often just want a basic ping pong dotted 8th.

...

But that´s easy to do:

- set it to 2 taps
- time knob to 1/8d
- Scatter to +/- 100% (for full ping pong)

Cluster.jpg

.
Preset:

PingPong.zip

[swilow11]

I've got similar complaints with the Cluster Delay. Which sounds great and is easy to do creative stuff with...but I often just want a basic ping pong dotted 8th.

...

But that´s easy to do:

- set it to 2 taps
- time knob to 1/8d
- Scatter to +/- 100% (for full ping pong)
Cluster.jpg
.
Preset:
PingPong.zip

I know how to do it, but it's not the most immediately intuitive way compared to say Replika and countless other delays where you just press "ping pong". I feel like a lot of Current employs non standard language and complicates things, when in truth it is one of the easiest synths to use. Some of the preset labels are just arcane to me. What's a haze pad compared to a normal pad? Particularly confusing is the fact that the haze pads sound like either normal pads or leads. Look at the browser and tagging system in Hive2, this is brilliant and keeps things relatively objective.

[MADMANJ]

Question - why is rift not included in the Current bundle? The distortion in the synth is essentially rift, no?

I see on their site it says if you are an existing customer you can check your account for what are essentially loyalty discounts, a la Fabfilter's pricing scheme I assume. If you were to, for instance, buy the Current bundle, would there be a discount to crossgrade to the effects bundle since it seems all it's missing is Rift? Or would you be stuck paying the full price of the one plugin you don't have?

I also raised this question but I found it somewhere in this topic that Minimal Audio will keep 2 main plugins and that is Current and Rift, so Rift is separated from the Current RTO. That is why they named the distortion effect Polar Distortion and not Rift, Rift has many additional features. From what I learned is that there will be a separated Polar Distortion plugin that is attached to the RTO, also the other remaining FX will be added soon as separated effect.
I hope for a descent sale price then for Rift 2.0 soon.

[_leras]

Maybe it's the reverb? I think I really don't like the reverb. ...

The reverb indeed is a bit weird... I like it really much for effect sounds as to either side of the "Size" parameter it goes easily into some weird tonal teretory which can sound cool when being filtered...

But it wouldn´t be my first choice for a "normal" reverb sound and I find it hard to dial something in which doesn´t color the sound too much...
Imho not the best choice for a general purpose reverb to put into a synth...

When i take the FX off, everything has sounded pretty weak...

Perhaps that's a plus point for the FX, the fuse compressor seems to bring out details.

I'll have to demo further. The lack of a simple fat lead left me scratching my head...

[Trancit]

When i take the FX off, everything has sounded pretty weak...

Perhaps that's a plus point for the FX, the fuse compressor seems to bring out details.

I'll have to demo further. The lack of a simple fat lead left me scratching my head...

But this happens to me in every synth for many many sounds...
If you turn off all effects in Omnisphere patches you cannot refuse thinking "Wtf... this I am listening to??"
I remember very well my first Hardware Synths (Korg 05W and Roland JV 1080) which had very very impressive factory patches...
Unless you wanted to use them in Multimode were the FX were lacking... the sounds were only a shadow of their former selves...
So this I am not seeing as something unusual...

[Ou_Tis]

Asked here before but didn't receive an answer---if we buy Rift and then do the annual subscription for Current, will owning Rift give us a discount on buying the perpetual license for Current one year later, and if so of how much?

Generally there are discounts for owning Minimal's other products.

I bought Rift 2.0, the 30 day return window passed several days ago, and I'm still not getting offered any discount on Current. So the answer is no. There's a discount on upgrading to the full effects bundle, and I could then get a discount on Current, but I'm not going to do that.

I think I'm not even going to bother demoing Current until they add a better reverb or (at least) better presets.

[Greenstorm33]

Maybe it's the reverb? I think I really don't like the reverb. ...

The reverb indeed is a bit weird... I like it really much for effect sounds as to either side of the "Size" parameter it goes easily into some weird tonal teretory which can sound cool when being filtered...

But it wouldn´t be my first choice for a "normal" reverb sound and I find it hard to dial something in which doesn´t color the sound too much...
Imho not the best choice for a general purpose reverb to put into a synth...

When i take the FX off, everything has sounded pretty weak...

Perhaps that's a plus point for the FX, the fuse compressor seems to bring out details.

I'll have to demo further. The lack of a simple fat lead left me scratching my head...

It's an interesting synth. Cool oscillators, unique filters, many other things to like. But the presets so far are pretty rubbish. They're too busy to even serve as the centerpiece of a track. Every synth has some "look what it can do!" presets, but Current has hundreds of them with almost nothing that you could realistically actually use. Also in my opinion there are too many of them with unnecessary distortion, probably due to Rift being their flagship effect.

[Razzia]

Asked here before but didn't receive an answer---if we buy Rift and then do the annual subscription for Current, will owning Rift give us a discount on buying the perpetual license for Current one year later, and if so of how much?

Generally there are discounts for owning Minimal's other products.

I bought Rift 2.0, the 30 day return window passed several days ago, and I'm still not getting offered any discount on Current. So the answer is no.

Yeah. The dynamic discounts described on the plugin pages are not quite what I was expecting. It's only for upgrading to bundles, which is fine, but I was hoping for a bit more of a discount considering the upgrade available to me is from Current Bundle to Effects Bundle, which is a difference of only 1 plugin. I guess I understand why it's done this way - because if they had a tiered Fabfilter type loyalty discount system, the math to make bundles are a better value than buying plugins piecemeal could get complicated quickly. I'd rather they just had an all plugins bundle with a slightly better discount since I wanted rift too, but I guess I'll just hope a sale comes along eventually.

That said, I'm very impressed with these plugins so far. They sound good and the UI clicks with how my brain works which is just as important.

[Ou_Tis]

For most of the presets would it be easy to turn off the reverb and use a reverb plugin without otherwise changing the preset significantly or is reverb frequently part of an FX chain with other things coming after it (like multiband compressor etc.) or modulated within Current in ways that would be hard to replicate with a separate plugin in Ableton?

[_leras]

When i take the FX off, everything has sounded pretty weak...

Perhaps that's a plus point for the FX, the fuse compressor seems to bring out details.

I'll have to demo further. The lack of a simple fat lead left me scratching my head...

But this happens to me in every synth for many many sounds...
If you turn off all effects in Omnisphere patches you cannot refuse thinking "Wtf... this I am listening to??"
I remember very well my first Hardware Synths (Korg 05W and Roland JV 1080) which had very very impressive factory patches...
Unless you wanted to use them in Multimode were the FX were lacking... the sounds were only a shadow of their former selves...
So this I am not seeing as something unusual...

It's true that many synth presets have FX and removing them makes the sound thinner.

For the sounds I was hearing, I kept wanting to take the FX and try and find what was causing the odd spacial effect I was hearing...

Having the FX as standalone is a pretty decent thing that I think all synths should do (i.e. FX version)