Available now: Tone2 Gladiator4 - Harmonic Content Morphing synthesizer

[Robmobius]

Still such a good synth I'm definitely going to upgrade.

[dlandis]

Still such a good synth I'm definitely going to upgrade.

Yes, I agree. I'm just trying to budget well.

[Korg Supporter]

I just tried exporting wavetables from Gladiator 4. In Icarus, they sound very nice and translate well from how they sound in Gladiator, even with the transformations applied!

[AdvancedFollower]

I think I found a small bug.
In Cubase 12 on PC, when you load a new preset by using the Browser, the "Filter type" display doesn't update. The filter type still changes and the visualization in the "Response" window updates, but the actual text description doesn't. If you use the arrows or dropdown in the top left to change presets, everything updates correctly. Happens with both the VST2 and VST3 versions.

[Markus Krause]

I checked it out. Sorry to say this, but I can not confirm that this is a bug in Gladiator.

I examined what you reported and did run many tests. It does not happen in FL Studio, Reaper, Orion, Studio One, Energy XT, Ableton or any other DAW.
Only my old Cubase 11 version with VST2 did sometimes show a small gui glitch when the up/down arrows were used in the top bar. It did not happen when I used the menu selector or the plugins own selectors.

I assume that another Window or menu that is owned by Cubase overlaps with the plugin window and the underlying window does not get redrawn as expected because the performance optimization is handled a bit too aggressively.
From the technical side this is a purely cosmetical problem of Cubase. It has no effect on the functionality, sound or stability of the plugin or DAW. Most likely it affects also some plugins from other companies.

You can
A) Safely ignore it
or
B) Open and close the window in Cubase once to force an update
or
B) update Cubase and/or refer to Steinberg for a fix
or
C) use the plugin's own patch browser (which is always the best choice for any plugin)

I will check out for a future update if the wrong pixels can be worked-around from the plugin-side as It is likely that Steinberg will ignore this (low priority) issue of Cubase.

If you got further questions feel free to send me an email to markus[a t]tone[do t] com. I will take care of you.

[bmanic]

Bought the upgrade today, mainly to support Tone2 for all the awesome work.

EDIT: I can also confirm that from 'very high' upwards it does indeed seem to sound better than the previous version. Hard to put a finger on it but the "better" seems to be similar to how ElectraX got better. It's just deeper, clearer sound. Less veiled.. but doesn't sound like EQ being applied or boosted.

[bmanic]

I've found quite a few bugs though. The easiest to spot is the lack of refresh of the GUI on knobs and other elements. For instance, if you move any knob and then return it to default value using CMD + Click, the value moves to default but the knob doesn't update it's graphics.

I've also ran into issues where matrix routings don't do what they are supposed to. For instance modwheel going to a target, then modulating this matrix position with something else. It seems to be a bit random and seems to work for some things but not for others. Especially problematic seems all kinds of serial routing several layers deep, meaning modulating one matrix position with another which in turn gets yet again modulated by something else. This very often breaks and doesn't work.

This is on Mac OS X Big Sur, running latest version of Reaper (6.82 as of this writing).

[EnGee]

I've found quite a few bugs though. The easiest to spot is the lack of refresh of the GUI on knobs and other elements. For instance, if you move any knob and then return it to default value using CMD + Click, the value moves to default but the knob doesn't update it's graphics.

I've also ran into issues where matrix routings don't do what they are supposed to. For instance modwheel going to a target, then modulating this matrix position with something else. It seems to be a bit random and seems to work for some things but not for others. Especially problematic seems all kinds of serial routing several layers deep, meaning modulating one matrix position with another which in turn gets yet again modulated by something else. This very often breaks and doesn't work.

This is on Mac OS X Big Sur, running latest version of Reaper (6.82 as of this writing).

Yes I can confirm that. When pressing command + click to reset the knobs, some of them don't reset (Cut off for example). This is with both AU and VST3 tested with Ableton Live 11 and Bitwig 5 (both latest). It is on Mac Ventura.

On Windows 11, however, there is no such problem.

[Markus Krause]

1) I can confrim that the knob's graphics do not aways update as expected when you use cmd+click on Mac to reset it to the default value. I will fix this in a free update.

2) It is not supported by our products to modulate matrix targets that are modulated by matrix targets that are modulated by matrix sources.
I do not see how this should make sense in sound design and noone has asked for somthing like this in the last 20 years. I've also never come across a patch in a synth that uses such a setup.
Apart from this support for such a setups would waste quite a lot of CPU for the modulation as the computation complexity for the matrix would raise fom N(x) to N²(x).

Here is an example how you use the matrix modulation. It controls vibrato depth with the modwheel:

Matrix slot1:
Source: Modwheel
Target: Matrix2
Send level: +20%

Matrix slot2:
Source: Lfo1
Traget: Pitch12
Send level: 0

[Aloysius]

The moral of the story? Mac is a wonky system. All the pros use Windows 10.

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

Sounds quite good! Love the preset browser.

In my budget for purchase next month. We'll see how well it works in darkambient music...

[nusound mind]

If anyone has updated all 3 of Gladiator, Nemesis & Electra how would you compare the updates sonically?

These are prob. my top 3 Tone 2's and they've all had updates recently. Gladiator I've always liked for it's "darker" character, if you will, compared to the other Tone2 synths which tend to sound more on the brighter side at times.

[AdvancedFollower]

I do hope most of the UI issues can be ironed out. They aren't dealbreakers by any means, but it's a bit disconcerting when you can't trust what the UI is showing you.

I think clicking the A-B button twice in Cubase is the fastest way to manually make sure everything is updated.

[Markus Krause]

I already have taken care of you and answered to you in a long and detailed post above. Please read this and follow my advices.

The tiny GUI glitches that affect only few users under very special conditions will be fixed in a free update.

Apart from this want to point out that Gladiator4 is very stable. We did not get a single crash during 5 months of testing. There are no really serious problems known.

[zerocrossing]

2) It is not supported by our products to modulate matrix targets that are modulated by matrix targets that are modulated by matrix sources.
I do not see how this should make sense in sound design and noone has asked for somthing like this in the last 20 years. I've also never come across a patch in a synth that uses such a setup.
Apart from this support for such a setups would waste quite a lot of CPU for the modulation as the computation complexity for the matrix would raise fom N(x) to N²(x).

Here is an example how you use the matrix modulation. It controls vibrato depth with the modwheel:

Matrix slot1:
Source: Modwheel
Target: Matrix2
Send level: +20%

Matrix slot2:
Source: Lfo1
Traget: Pitch12
Send level: 0

This is how I expect a mod matrix to work, but I do appreciate when a developer adds a modifier slot, as it can make for a cleaner preset. Meaning:

Matrix slot1:
Source LFO 1
Send Level: 0
Mult Source: Source: Modwheel
Send level: +20