Renegade

Interesting instrument this one... I like G-sonique's sound. They're doing something right. I like their Twisthead ampsim for adding colouration, and if you've tried Alien303 you'll know they do a convincing warm analogue-style saturation.

This is a nice, cheap synth. The quality/price ratio is high. The oscillators can run several algos, some of which are digital and gritty (aliasville), others try to be more smooth (analogue) and do an OK job at it. There's a nice pick of waveforms, including some unusual types like rectified sine, but your variable pulse is the only "moving" waveform, and with no ring, sync, or symmetry powers over the waves, we're basically stacking, mixing and detuning here.

My biggest gripe with the oscillators is a lack of semitone tuning. We can set the octave, and we can detune. We can even set the starting phase (or initial PW for everybody's favourite, the pulse) but can we make fifth or fourth interval stack pads? No. That's a shame.

There are filters, two in number. One is multimode, the other is a less flexible lowpass. The filters and following saturation stage are where this instrument shines. They're just warm and pleasant. I appreciate the differences between the different algorhytms you can choose, beyond simply selecting low/band/high-pass, and I particularly like the "G" filters, I suppose it's... a "G" thing... *shrug*... The envelopes are reasonably snappy too, so there's lots of potential for moogey sounds which will no doubt cause much funking out at the keyboard.

Beyond the filter envelope, the other modulation option is a rather wimpy LFO, which doesn't go very fast (it's so slow they should call it a VLFO), but has a row of knobs for assigning modulation off to different parts of the synth. Sadly these only run positive, so we can't have, for example, one osc detuning up while the other detunes down. Modulating the filters can only be done as a pair on the whole, so while the two filters are flexible, getting the more wacky mods out of them is tricky. Mild is the word of the day for the modulation on this synth.

Finally there's the effects. The saturation is *lovely* and works with the filter resonance like a dream. This is the reason you use this synth. The chorus does a very good job also, and the delay sounds good to me. Once again, amp envelope is snappy like the filter one.

So there we have it. I'm a lover of abstract sounds, but there are none to be had here. However, not every sound in a mix can afford to be a stack of freaking out serial pulse/sine waves being phase modulated by eachother under control of a variable shape LFO who'se speed depends on the velocity. Sometimes you just want nice and convincing bread and butter sounds, and not only is Renegade cheap and capable of these with aplomb, but it's also VERY good with polyphony, and fares very well on my aging computer with pad parts and long amp envelopes.

Good job, G-sonique!Read Review