WNAdditive

2003 has been a good year for additive synthesizers. Include WhiteNoiseAdditive to the list. Taking a page out of programs like the Mac only Metasynth and PC only Coagula which enable sound to be structured through the use of drawing and reading of bitmaps WhiteNoise come through with a new and interesting interface for sound creation with a real-time graphic to sound interpreter. Unlike many programs that attempt this, Additive does a fine job of implementing the interface.
What it basically means is drawing with a toolkit and import of bitmaps that generate sound, formant filter and spectrum information. Ok, so it's a fancy program with a lot of graphical input, but how does it sound?
We're not supposed to say but it rocks. The methods used to paint your timbre allow for organic voices, organs, analog style synths and noise/industrial squelches that will find you playing with Additive for the fun of squeezing out sounds that are at once familiar yet a bit on the weird and wild side.
There are two oscillators that work this way, an x/y pad that does a good job of vector emulation, a sensible spread of effects, mostly modulation based and time based. There are also compression and distortion available as well. Also included, two LFOs, a nice little modulation matrix. And beyond the visual controls for each oscillator a general section including frequency modulation, ring modulation, pan and volume. Also cool are the adjustments you can make within each picture to sweep or change timbre in real time.

WMAdditive may sound difficult but it's easy as there are a large number of visual sections useable for the oscillator/formant/spectrum/noise generators. A large number of changes can be made using just these controls, yet like any other great synth, there is more and most important, there is variety. Although not sample based as several other additives are WNAdditive delivers sonically for PWM, microWave, and evolving timbres and does so with a minimum of screen space to boot.

This is one side of additive, more are available and they have their own charms, but in terms of overall fun and useful sounds WNAdditive is a bargain and fairly light on CPU. Customer service is excellent and responsive to requests.

One area I'd like to see change are in the numeric controls. If you are at 24 steps (2 octaves) above the base frequency there is no way other than to click 24 times. A better way to do it would have been scrolling on the control and/or clicking on the readout and entering data.

These are minor functional quibbles. Additive is the big story for new technology synths and looks to have a brighter future in 2004.

Highly recommended.Read Review

After the first few notes played on this VSTi I knew I had to take my hadphones off and hear in through speakers. The sounds are simply unbeatable, some great presets included. If you don't like to tweak too much, presets are a good way to derive new things from, but if you know your synthesis basics, you can get pretty much any sound you want out of it. The sound can have a lot of punch and be subtle at the same time.

The graphics are good, the fact that you can edit graphically formant and spectrum made me work a little differently and look for more detail in sound. That actually made me wish for a separate extension that would let me draw faster - but that's because I'm performance oriented and I thought having a projection of what I'm drawing, changing the sound at the same time would be interesting. I know there are other things that do that, but the sound is nowhere near to Additive's. First analogy was with Wavestation, although they're different types of synthesis.

It's a great synth, one of the best out.
I've used it in pretty much everything I've worked on since I got it. If you read the technical specs you'll notice the few other additive synths out so far do not come close to it. Definitely not sound-wise. Just try the demo...Read Review

White Noise Additive (WNA) is very interesting, it's approach is straight and you can get really good moving, evolving pads sounds with it, from all the range of additive synths today I found this one the best and easier to use, and you get lots of fun making the presets. It features formant morphing so you can use the same principles of vocoding to make your pads.

CPU usage is high, just as any other FFT synth, My CPU goes real high when playing 4 notes on my 1.6Ghz and that depends if I use Formant or not. But, still a great synth in my opinion.Read Review

First review here. I've lurked...I've read, but I've never spoken out. I'm not very conversant in the language of synths so I don't know if I can add to the technical stuff already ably supplied by ew and Spe3D. Whatever they said, I agree with!

As a musician, I'm in love. I have a number of different synths and they are each excellent in their own way. Let's put it like this, I'm just beginning to learn to program many of these wonderful synths but with the White Noise Additive, I'm able to stumble around in an intuitive way and make usable sounds really quickly. And these sounds are not hackneyed cliched thangs, either. While all synthesizers make music, this is somehow for me a very musical synthesizer...we just sort of bonded and hit the deck running. Alright, I admit to really enjoy playing in the sandbox of sound and with the Whitenoise Additive it feels like a vast expanse. The sounds cover the gamut from usable bells and pads to the lullabye sung somewhere down the wormhole that's to the right of alpha centurae. The .bmp files also help to make it incredibly flexible.

Because it's additive, I think it has a unique sound and while I don't know additive well enough to know all the differences between White Noise, Cameleon, Vertigo and Adder, I do know that they all seem to have their own je ne sais qua...the Additive though is something that I have been going to alot because it seems so intuitive to work something up from scratch. I'm not too particularly taken by the manual. It's a flash help file. It's an interesting approach and not unhelpful but I'm still 20th century enough to want to hold text in my hand. It has been relatively stable. So far so good.

And besides, I really like the pretty spectrums. Yeah!Read Review

Hi! White Noise Additive synth is just the ticket to make some really far out and groovy pads and for adding strange evolving texture to your (mine) musical experience.

I personally enjoy this synth because it's an additive that is focusing on the use of image import for both of its OSC and filters. Each OSC (there are two) can import a 128x128 pixle 8-bit greyscale image or (in my case I prefer) a colour uncompressed 128x128 pixle 24-bit image. Now once the image is in the OSC window there is a heap of interesting things that can be done with it (for one the user can use the paint tools in Additive to fine tune a picture by painting directly on the image in the OSC window), time line can be run from left to right (and back) at any speed the user wants = the facitlity to make very smooth long evolving pads or as choppy as hell speedy hits.

The very lower part of the image is the lowest of the tone so having images in the OSC windows there make for a nice base to work with if you are looking for rich deep sounds, the higher up the image you go the more high the sound will become. It's easy to merge the two OSC windows together via the mod matrix or by using the mix slider plus detuning the OSC is a breeze.

There are a ton of features on this synth all of which play an important part for programming if you wish to obtain the best this synth can offer – you are going to need to learn about their features and experiment to see what each section does either by importing one of the many many images that are available already for it or by dissecting one of the many patches (and they just keep getting more) at the time of writing there are 250 presets available to registered users demonstrating well what this synth can do and close to a 1000 images in bmp format that I know of. Also it can import .raw files and these come with the synth following various shapes and sounds. Currently the banks only hold 16 presets at a time (it’s easy to load patch banks though) – this is something that will be addressed for the next update.

It has a unison mode – fm – rm and its additive – something to keep in mind with ‘unison mode enabled (above one)’ is the cpu will go up if you put too many (2+ depending on the other effects and polyphony) - but the overall cpu use with one unison enabled is surprisingly good, this is a 128 partial additive (per OSC) I am using FL Studio with 2.6gig AMD – 512 MB ram and Windows 2000 SP4 and I can easily add more than one instance of Additive to my projects and still have CPU resources left for other stuff.

Actually I could write about this for hours so all I can say is try the demo and experiment – if you are looking to make some new and evolving different sounds this is just the ticket for you – its fun – stable – well supported by its developer both here on the forums and by email – evolving in development – cost effective for what it offers and I recommend you try it.

Have fun, Spe3d :O)

Edit reason: SpellingRead Review

White Noise is a fairly straight forward additive synth with the capability of producing some very cool and unusual timbres.The engine itself consists of two oscillators,each with 128 partials.There's also two formant filters,two envelopes,two LFOs,an xy pad,ring modulation,reverb,a delay unit...you get the picture.
The concept is sort of a tribute to the Kawai K5000.While I've never owned a K5000,I STILL own an original K5,and I haven't turned it on since first loading up WNA.
My favorite feature is the ability to load bitmaps into the oscillators and formant filters to use as spectra.You can also use .wav or .raw files as spectra.For vocoder sounds this instrument's hard to beat-just load a voice sample into the formant filter and use that as the spectra.Slick,slick,slick:)
CPU usage (as with all additive synths) can be on the high side,but the limit control controls how many partials are in the spectrum.You have even/odd editing of partials;something adapted from the K series,and very handy for nailing down a sound.Being able to adjust the initial phase is a godsend as well.
I was on the beta team for this,and from the first beta released,it has NEVER crashed.Fairly amazing in this day and age.David's quick to fix any bugs that show up as well.
For $99,it's hard to beat.Grab the demo and give it a spin-I think you'll like itRead Review