Adventus

NOTE: Adventus 1.5 has come out since my review, and an Arpeggiator was added to sweeten the deal. Again, this fortifies it as a top choice for an "open-it-and-go" Techno synth.

This was one of two synths this year that within minutes of playing them I knew that I had to have. Immediately I was struck by its professional, colourful interface - reminiscent of a Juno crossed with an ARP - and its warm, large sounds.

The UI is very easy to read, with pleasing 3-D art for knobs, LED's, etc. One of the more novel things about Adventus is that it splits up its effects, LFO's and Options into different "pages" of the main UI; click the "FX" button and you get large displays to tweak the FX, which are very high-quality and have lots of parameters. I like how the delay has HPF and LPF controls, for instance - not often seen on onboard synth FX.

The filters are really high quality as well. These are the kinds of filters you want when doing slow filtersweeps, without getting annoying spikes and distortion, very impressive for a synth at this price.

You can get some cool FX with its two LFO's that have complex, assignable source-destination mapping. There are lots of possibilities there that I look forward to exploring.

And ultimately, this all gives you sounds that feel like they've been plucked straight out of your favourite electronic records. The well-programmed Presets leap out at you and, while I'm sure some purists would object to that much effect on a patch, the patches also sound good dry. The overall tone reminds me of early 80's synths such as Roland Juno/Jupiter or PPG Wave, with full bottom and bright highs. I can load several of these and still make out the individual instruments - despite all the FX - and it held up well in mono.

I assume because the author recognized that this could be the one and only synth needed to make electronic music, he made a "lite" version, included with the normal version, that has no FX and fewer internal connections. This is perfect if you just need a simple bassline, or if you need lots of instances (which you will!) or if you need to squeeze in that one more synth in your tune.

The only downside (as of this writing) was that I found it took unusually long to load up several instances in Cubase, I had to open the GUI to get playback from a MIDI track upon re-opening a comp, I'm not crazy about the knob movement where it seems you have to use very exaggerated circular movements to maintain sweeps, and there is no documentation yet (but it is very easy to use).

This is the best low-cost synth I've come across PERIOD. I was shocked that firstly, this was made with Synthedit and, secondly, that this cost only $30. With a focus on ready-to-go presets, I advise anyone who needs an all-in-one techno/trance/electronica workhorse to look no further. For all you users constantly inquiring about "that fat sound", get the demo today and I guarantee you'll be composing with it in no time.