Product Reviews by KVR Members

Let me count the ways I love Symptohm:
(1) It takes a static picture of a sound and breathes life into it. You can twist and pull and wrench and turn that sound over and under, backwards and forwards. The results are full and rich *and* clear and penetrating, and, most of all, musical. It does bread and btter with the same ease as deep fried peyote muffins.
(2) It introduces both a new form of synthesis and the Melohman technology. So it's innovative, too, something that immediately differentiates it from 99% of the plug-ins out there. And these innovations aren't just of the madly experimental sort, but are highly useable. Melohman, particularly, is aimed at players, not just tweakers, although it's a tweaker's delight, too. There's no other synth out there that can do these things: reason enough to buy it.
(3) It has, in the funky skin, the nicest GUI I have ever seen. I love the fact that ohmforce covered it in strange drawings and weird victorian decoration. And more mad apes than you can shake a stick at.
(4)Artistic merits aside, it's a clear and logical design: the signal flow is mapped onto the GUI itself. Which is handy given all the routing configurations. And as already mentioned, those knobs just ooze quality.
(5) There's more modulations per square centimetre than any other synth I have ever used. Virtually every parameter can have it's own envelope and its own lfo. Adding modulations doesn't thin the sound out the way it does in so many plugins.
(6) The filters sound really, really good. The quadfromage concept fits perfectly here.
(7) Metapatches are also an excellent solution to a perennial problem: you create an excellent patch but you have to tweak it slightly for different tracks. So you end up saving the same named preset all over the place. Metapatches centralise this and allwo you to switch easily between variations.
(8) Ohmforce support is among the best in the business.

What don't I like, then? To be honest, not too much. The are elements on the GUI that could be easier to read (a few too many shades of grey in places) but once you know what they do it doesn't matter. The multiple levels of modulation and routing could be confusing for a newcomer, but then you don't have to use these features to their fullest: Symptohm functions very well as a rwo oscillator single filter synth. Mising features? I'd like to be able to modulate the modulators, and modulate the filters using the oscillators as well. The documentation is clear if a bit on the brief side. A tutorial would be helpful for the less experienced user, particularly regarding routing.

Reading over this review, it sounds more like a marketing release, but I am genuinely blown away. I don't work for ohmforce, nor do I have any affiliation with them. I just love their work. Symptohm has become my favourite synthesizer, hardware included, and the first thing I load when I start new projects.

I'd like to add my voice to the chorus of praise for Stylus. I've been a fan of Mr Persing for some time and was really looking forward to a breakbeat-styled product from Spectrasonics. I have long wanted to use loops as they really do add something to programmed drums but I never found a sample resource that had that magic that seems to come from lifting breaks from other peoples' records.

Within 5 minutes of loading Stylus I stopped writing down the names of loops I liked: there were just too damned many of them :) Most had that elusive magic and they really added something to the tracks I was working on. It's like collaborating with a good musician-they suggest new avenues that the piece might venture down while, at the same time, seriously getting on with the job.

And it's not like you're stuck with them either. With Groove Control it's ridiculously easy to tailor the loops to your track, retaining the sound but changing the feel. And since Stylus has got really good filters and very, very useful modulation options, you can go the other way too: radically changing the sound while completely retaining the feel. Everything can be automated, so you can continuously shift between the altered sounds/groove and their original form. And the interface is well designed, so doing all of this is a piece of highly chocolatey cake. Mmmmmm. Cake.

Support, as most of you know, is exemplary. As for VFM, Stylus is (relatively speaking) an expensive tool but you definitely get what you paid for: the material is incredibly diverse and of an exceptionally high sonic quality.

I did nip off a mark for documentation because I would have liked a list of the loops, hits, etc for reference purposes. Also, way too many of the single kick drum hits have hat/cymbal noises on them. I'd have preferred them clean.

Parting shot: if spectrum is listening, I'd like more percussion loops - I can see myself using them even more than the breaks in the future. Ta for the killer tool.

phatMatikPro is in many ways the ideal VSTi. It basically does one thing, but does it extremely well. Altho I always liked the idea of ReCycle I never used it because of the hassle of having to switch to an entirely separate app. Slicing up loops is a function that really should occur at the coal face. Enter phatty.

My primary use for phatty is the importation and time alignment of weird rhythmic sounds I've made with my modular. My old way of working was to cut up the samples & then spend ages lining them up in VST. Now it's dead easy: drop them into phatty, export the MIDI file and then tweak timing and sound. I love tweaking & phatty's not been out of the VSTi rack since I bought it.

I've never used drum loops before, but since I got phatty I use them all the time. The possibilities for changing them are endless so I don't feel bad about nicking someone else's musical ideas (strangely, I don't seem to mind stealing their production skills ;)). I particularly like the slice reverse and looping features @ the slice level. & the comb filter, distortion & delays @ the master level. Oh, drag 'n drop implementation is the dog's.

The manual's great-it includes a useful little tutorial. I think these are always a good idea. No presets, but I have no idea how you could have presets without including content and that's not what phatty's about.

Criticism? Ok-IMO the slopes on the filters are a bit harsh. I've had a few weird unreproducable crashes, but these might not be entirely due to phatty.

Prior to writing this review I had two issues with phatty so I emailed Art. He responsed in 5 hours. This is amazing & it highlights one of the nicest things about phatty: you are buying a product that someone cares deeply about. It's a pleasureable transaction all around. Anyway, his response was that the next release will show the path of the loop currently in phatty so my first problem will be solved shortly. The second? User error ;)