Sawer

Image-Line had a yard sale recently so I demoed all of their synths. Sawer blew me away from the get go and I just had to have it. It is a very basic/simple synth with a very powerful sound. To me it sounds as good as some of the better known "newer generation" synths.

It has 1 Oscillator (SAW) and 1 Sub Oscillator (Saw or Square). It has a great Unison section with 1,2,4 or 8 Unison voices. You can control the amount of detuning as well as the panning of the Unison. The filter is wonderful. One of the best I have heard in a soft synth. With the Filter envelope and the LFO, one can really have fun tweaking the filter cutoff to achieve some true yummy goodness. I can easily spend a half hour just playing with the filter, just for fun, with no specific goal in mind.

The features of Sawer are limited.. but the sound.....

There's only one LFO. You get 4 LFO shapes, a choice of 7 destinations for the LFO. There are 4 filter types available (LP24, LP12, BP, HP). There are only 4 destinations for the filter envelope.

Sawer can be a CPU hog. On average the patches I use/make range between 15% and 25% CPU and I am using an i7 920. I tend to only have one Sawer play at a time, and it's usually being used as a lead synth. It is more CPU hungry than other synths that I use but the sound makes it worth it.

The effects are very nice. I usually tend to turn off effects in synthesizers and use dedicated effects, but Sawer's Chorus, Phaser, Delay and Reverb all sound very nice and I use them a lot in my patches. Sawer also has a decent arpeggiator with Up, Down, Up/Down, Random and 7 sync speeds, for 1, 2, 3, or 4 octaves.

I really don't like the Preset browser at all but have had to learn to live with it, and I believe Image-Line is working on coming up with a better solution to browse presets.

SAWER is fun, easy to use and I highly recommend it. It's actually kind of nice that it's limited in it's features. It helps me move on with the music. Sometimes I can spend too much time playing around with a lot of parameters because they're there. With Sawer I don't have that much freedom but I really love the sounds that I get out of it. I'm always surpised at the wide range of sounds I have been able to get out of it. Love it. Read more