I was given this synth to betatest and to be honest it was good 'ol fun testing this one.
Firebird is a synth with a very rich sonic palette, good featureset, high quality oscillators and low on cpu use. On top of that you have the possibility to switch to low, medium, high or ultra quality oscillators.
It offers beginners an easy way to get fast results as well as tweakers the features to go beyond the standard patching. It does however take a bit of looking beyond the everyday VA controls to see where some of the more advanced features of Firebird can actually take you, a quick glance at the interface reveals perhaps an ordinary VA with some extra flavours thrown into it, but it is much more then just that.
The Harmonic Content Morphing gives you wavetable like features, but takes it all a bit further and gives it's user many more ways to manipulate selected waves. Wavemodifiers like sync, flange, hyper, spread and the other twenty modifiers give good results when used in combination with any of the included waves, often instantly giving something exciting and useable. Combined with the loopmodes, lfo's and good sound quality it's easy to come up with presets that would have been hard to program with other synths.
On top of that a nice bunch of filters are included, Resample, M-shape, Vocal and several FM types for example make it easy to come up with somewhat more extreme presets, or when used moderately with the loopmodes good ambient drones and pads.
Firebird already comes with a good selection of presets but additional soundbanks have been announced, next to that I can see more waveforms expanding it even more.
It's a good synth if you're looking for something that delivers the basic stuff but also packs that bit of extra, especially if you're into more experimental sounds it's easy to get outstanding patching done on this one, but if you simply want a good bass or lead it's just as easy. The only con for me would be that I would like to see more mod possibilities, seeing however how much already can be done with version 1, I can imagine features like more mod destinations make it into a next version. I'm looking forward to see what the future will bring for Firebird and Tone2.Read Review
