Gforce MAP

[seafire]

https://www.gforcesoftware.com/products/map/

[seafire]

[Voxon]

West Coast Expreimental/Buchla based sounds promising. The sounds in the video are a bit underwhelming, it’s dominated by the people telling us how great it is. Will give demo a try.

[mountainmaster]

[Igro]

She was playing some filtered saw chords? Also, from the video I see that she was far from being a keyboard player.

[foosnark]

Heh.

This is literally a bog-standard, fixed architecture, 3-osc wavetable synth with not very many wavetables, two filters, 3 ADSRs, 3 shapeable LFOs. They just called the third oscillator "MOD OSC" and have knobs to use it to modulate the other two oscillators. It's far less flexible than Serum. The "inspiration" from Serge or Buchla is tenuous at best; it might as well claim inspiration from Minimoog and PPG. And there's nothing at all modular about it.

The interface is frankly horrible -- to choose a wavetable you have to click through the options, you can't even pop up a list. And sometimes when you click once it steps through two shapes. I assume this is broken rather than intentional...

"MAP isn't about presets, it's about exploration" but it comes with 300 presets and the default one is a fancy pad heavy with FX. Even the Init patch isn't a sine, it's a two-oscillator sawtooth.

I guess if I had to find something positive to say, it's that I do like that style of wavetable where it's literally just a coherent timbral sweep between two points, rather than lots of random shapes that don't sound good when you modulate the table index more than a tiny bit.

[aMUSEd]

Heh.

This is literally a bog-standard, fixed architecture, 3-osc wavetable synth with not very many wavetables, two filters, 3 ADSRs, 3 shapeable LFOs. They just called the third oscillator "MOD OSC" and have knobs to use it to modulate the other two oscillators. It's far less flexible than Serum. The "inspiration" from Serge or Buchla is tenuous at best; it might as well claim inspiration from Minimoog and PPG. And there's nothing at all modular about it.

The interface is frankly horrible -- to choose a wavetable you have to click through the options, you can't even pop up a list. And sometimes when you click once it steps through two shapes. I assume this is broken rather than intentional...

"MAP isn't about presets, it's about exploration" but it comes with 300 presets and the default one is a fancy pad heavy with FX. Even the Init patch isn't a sine, it's a two-oscillator sawtooth.

I guess if I had to find something positive to say, it's that I do like that style of wavetable where it's literally just a coherent timbral sweep between two points, rather than lots of random shapes that don't sound good when you modulate the table index more than a tiny bit.

No LPG?

[foosnark]

No LPG?

No LPG.

I didn't even try the filters, I was too annoyed by the marketing not at all matching the synth, the interface either being badly designed or buggy, and it basically being like a stripped-down Serum clone.

[tumface]

Doesn't seem much like Serum to me at all?

I'm glad to see GForce supporting MPE. I hope they bring it to their other plugins, in time.

I don't know if this synth specifically is my cup of tea. I have years of experience with Bazille and I feel like I can make it do anything I want within this sonic range. That's just me, though.

[Danilo Villanova]

Honestly, I hate that type of marketing. I won't elaborate or I will be banned and possibly police will show up at my door lol

[foosnark]

Doesn't seem much like Serum to me at all?

Nah, it's really not that much like Serum, that was just the first thing that came to mind. It *is* closer to Serum (or a dozen other wavetable-based softsynths, as a broad category) than it is to any Serge or Buchla stuff.

[Teksonik]

Trying the demo....I can't remember the last time I found a synth this uninspiring. Thin, weak, and weedy sounding. Seems to lack any "weight" at all. No poly unison mode is pretty much strike three for me.

The interface seems very laggy here but that might just have something to do with my test machine. Make sure you test that out on your systems and it's a 7 day demo so take care to do your testing in that time frame.

To be fair I am comparing it to the other synths in my collection, some of which cost much more than the $66+tax this would set me back.

But each synth must stand on its own merits in order to justify a purchase and this one falls flat on its face for me. Others will no doubt disagree.

Moving on.......

[phreaque]

Pass

[Digivolt]

This is literally a bog-standard, fixed architecture, 3-osc wavetable synth with not very many wavetables, two filters, 3 ADSRs, 3 shapeable LFOs. They just called the third oscillator "MOD OSC" and have knobs to use it to modulate the other two oscillators. It's far less flexible than Serum. The "inspiration" from Serge or Buchla is tenuous at best; it might as well claim inspiration from Minimoog and PPG. And there's nothing at all modular about it.

It makes me think of Pigments especially the modulation section

[foosnark]

It makes me think of Pigments especially the modulation section

Yeah, that's probably a closer comparison. I tried the V1 version of Pigments (maybe also V2?) and felt like I didn't need it.

I would put Serum, Vital, Pigments, Massive, Hive, and maybe Thorn (and probably others!) into one broad category, at least based on my memory of trying them all briefly. Serum 2 is by far on top for me, with the wavetable editing and being able to modulate nearly everything at audio rate. I also think Vital is pretty amazing for a free synth (I never felt compelled to pay for more features, but if I hadn't had Serum I probably would have just to support development) and Massive was great in its time (I wasn't a fan of Massive X). Anyway, I'd put MAP into this category but I think it's the weakest of them.