Mother Ship Astrobelt

GUI: The User Interface is compact and clear in its layout and slick looking; clicking on the "screws" on the side allows choosing four different colour patterns.

SOUND: While Mothership is structurally an substractive synth, the term "analog" doesn't really fit; its basic sound is brilliant and warm but with a certain special colour which is hard to put in words and has no comparisons to other synths i know.
2 Oscillators with three waveforms and variable symmetry, a suboscillator and a noise generator with varying bandwith, three filtermodels, a very flexible LFO section with various modulation targets, three envelopes for Volume, Pitch and Filter, switchable aliasing and a very good chorus and a unique filtered delay section allow for a very broad range of sounds, from convincing analogish bass and leads to Percussion to unique effect sounds.
For me, the main strenghths of Mothership are, however, in moving, spacy pads, unique and beautiful, harpish or epiano-like percussive sounds or not-too aggressive leads. All these sounds work very well in a mix and layering some instances allows very big soundscapes without muddying; since the CPU and RAM usage is extremly low due to optimized coding (i suppose), using several Motherships can be done without worrying looks on the CPU usage pointer in the host.

FEATURES: As described, Mothership is quite a complex beast. Apart from a small wish for an attack curve on the LFO, there is nothing left to wish.

DOCUMENTATION. Very good, an HTML manual with many graphical explanations.

PRESETS. I think there are around 280 presets now, two complete Banks provided and another very good one created by Criminal. Additionally, Mothership has a clever built-in preset generator which generates whole banks of sounds which are always usable and sometimes amazingly good, so there is nothing to complain.

SUPPORT. Extremly good.

VFM. I got this together with some other Nusofting synths at an amazingly good bundle price, but even if you buy this alone it is very reasonable priced.
For a very small sidegrade fee, you can additional order its "nasty brother", Fat Machine, which shares the basic architecture, but features a different filter, a distortion unit and legato options which make it predestined for more abrasive sounds and bass and leads.

STABILITY. This is clearly the product of much expertise on synth design and this also shows in the stability - it never crashed me or made any problems.

EPILOGUE. I had the demo of Mothership for quite a while on my harddisk and while i liked it at the first try, i never got around to actually buy it, but came back to play with it often. Now that i purchased it and integrate it in my music, i wonder why i didn't buy it on the first sounds i heard - and concluded: it has to be used in a song for really appreciating what an beautiful and original instrument this is. If you do any sort of beautiful and/or athmospheric music, do yourself a favour and try this out !