Hive 2

2024 EDIT:

A while ago I bought one of Ploki's skins for Hive, which not only looks amazing but has made Hive 2 much easier to work with, to the point that it's changed my mind about this synth. I'm actually amazed at how something as simple as a skin has had such a profound effect on my feelings about an instrument, so I'm re-writing my review to reflect my changed attitude/opinion.

The core sound of Hive is quite good. I find it particularly suited to basslines and arpeggiated rhythms and stuff like that. It comes with a gajillion presets, which are well handled by the best preset browser I have ever used. The browser is amazing. I spent a week or more going through everything and colour-coding any preset I heard that I thought we might be able to use. Then I started looking for opportunities to use it in some of our songs.

Where the stock interface/layout feels like two separate synths slammed together, so you are forever flicking from one side of it's gigantic interface to the other, trying to work out how the patch has been set up so you can tweak it. It wasn't too bad in v1.2 but the update to v2.0 somehow seemed to make it harder to work with (for me at least). Ploki's skin fixes that, placing everything in a more logical order, laid out to follow the signal path, which makes it far easier and more intuitive to work with. These days I actually like working with Hive, where previously I kind of dreaded it.

Hive comes loaded with a million features, most of which don't interest me in the slightest, and when you look at the list of features on the product page here at KVR, you'll notice that the most important things about any synth - it's oscillators and filter(s) - barely rate a mention. In fact, there is no mention at all of the filters. Normally I hate that but with Hive it's easy enough to ignore the stuff you're not interested in and focus on what you are. It's still a bit cluttered by the skin I'm using has improved that situation a lot for me, as the clutter is more out of the way. Nothing in the synth really stands out but, by the same token, there's no area where it isn't at least competent, so you know you can always get something usable from it. I suppose that's a good definition of a workhorse synth, which is exactly how I see Hive.

I now find myself reaching for Hive fairly regularly. It has a solid sound, it doesn't use too much CPU and, with the skin I'm using, it has become easy to work with. I don't think it will ever be part of the core list of synths I love using but it definitely has its place in my arsenal, in no small part because of its very flexible skinning system.