I did a review of TERA 2 for musicFAQ last year. Now that TERA 3's out, I thought I'd chime in here. The newest in the TERA series, TERA 3 brings some welcome improvements to an already fantastic synth.
There's sample oscillators which can either use multisamples or one sample (the resynthesis algorithm is good enough to allow using one sample across the keyboard). Furthermore, you can have two multisamples in the same oscillator and morph between them. And, while you can't use them as FM carriers, you CAN use them as modulators- think SY77/99 here. How cool is that?
There's a simple arpeggiator for each part now. While the sequencer could be used as an arpeggiator, setting it up could be a pain. For more complex arpeggios, the sequencer is still the way to go.
Speaking of the sequencer (or sequencers- there's 16 of them; one per part), they can send MIDI as a plugin now- both note and CC info. Use it with your favorite loopback device or EnergyXT to drive other synths.
There's a terrain filter- a morphable filter with two 16 pole filters in parallel. Great for forcing vocal formants on a sound, and kind of a poor man's vocoder.
There's a pair of stereo inserts right before the amplifier. Run your filters in stereo for example, or use the spectrum oscillator in stereo mode...
Yes- you heard right. The spectrum oscillator can now be used as a stereo oscillator, with separate spectrum controls. There's also new synthesis methods with it- along with the additive of past TERAs, you have Walsh, wavelet and operator synthesis.
The multienvelopes can be decoupled from each other (they were always in sync before), and you can save multienvelope presets.
There's an AM module, which is like the ring modulator except that you also have the input signal as well as the sum and difference signals.
You can right click on a knob and assign two modulators to it (you used to only be able to assign modulators through the mod matrix on profiTERA and through the dropdowns on the other synths. Speaking of the mod matrix, you can copy and paste settings between patches now, and there's two new mod sources- key alternate and key random.
The 8D settings are available on all the synths now, and not just profiTERA.
These and other such improvements make TERA even more of a monster than it was already. It was one of the best sounding, most flexible synths out there before, and now it's even better. If I were to have three synths on my desert island, TERA would be one of them (the other two being Reaktor and Absynth).
Try the demo and prepare to be amazed :)Read Review
