Product Reviews by KVR Members

GUI ... a bit awkward at first to be honest with the 3 page design (and its not the most compact interface youve ever seen either) - but each page is pretty logically laid out (if youre familliar with quad frohmage then the filter page is straightforward anyway) ... as ever the ohmforce virtual knobs are the best on any VSTi (with the way they lock the mouse cursor and their nice 'weighted' effect - as well as the intuitive fine control method too)

SOUND ... its quite possible that were you so inclined you could get pretty much any sound you wanted out of just this one synth - the sample based oscilators mean that you can use anything from single cycle simple waveforms (and use melohman like a 'normal' VA synth) to big complex sounds (that you can manipulate and mangle to do the 'one note track' type tricks) ... the quality of the sound is great too as you might expect from ohmforce - particularly when youve got the mighty quad frohmage filterbank as your synths filter stage ... as with all things ohmforce though you need to tread carefully with this beast - if youre not careful you might think its only capable of nasty noisy sounds which is DEFINITELY not the case

FEATURES ... on the surface it looks like a simple featureset (2 oscilators / noise generator / admittedly big filter section) but once you get into the modulation possibilities (per-parameter envelopes and LFOs and deep deep MIDI control) its obvious that melohman can play on the level of the more obviously complex monster synths (z3ta+ / rhino / albino / etc) ... the metapatch system is a unique feature and should be a BIG selling point for live players (and still quite fun for us tweakers actually)

DOCS ... comprehensive and fairly easy to understand (if youre into that RTFM stuff)

PRESETS ... again - on the surface you might think that the list of presets was a bit on the small side (although a lot more have been added to the latest version release) but once you remember that each preset contains 12 patches (thanks to the metapatch system) things start to look more healthy ... these range from eminently usable bread-and-butter sounds like basses and pianos (all with an ohmforce twist) through to more esoteric monstrous noises that possibly only the abstract among us will ever get serious use out of ... all this ignores the fact that melohman is (with the already mentioned modulation system) one of the best tweaking synths available - load up your own samples and start playing with stuff (not always conducive to making finished music but HUGE fun nonetheless)

SUPPORT ... never needed it for melohman but have heard nothing but good things about the ohmforce people in this respect - they have an active presence on the K-v-R forums and are always good-natured (if quirky) in their communications - they also issue the best newsletter of any VSTi developers i know

VFM ... for what it can do when you start to delve under the hood this thing gives VERY good bangs for the buck

STABILITY ... melohman has NEVER crashed or stuttered on any of the setups ive used it on (other than a wierd disappearing knob GUI issue when i installed it on my new laptop - but that stopped with closing and reloading the plugin) ... it can however (as mentioned above) be a little unpredictable (read as - potentially painful for ears) in terms of the sound it produces if you dont take the time to learn how it reacts to the tweaks you make