McDSP Synthesizer One

Virtual Analogue Synth For Pro Tools TDM & HD

Published in SOS January 2003
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Synthesizer One's editing window, with the Quick edit page on the left above the routing diagram. The main area of the plug-in window shows the Oscillator page: each 'VCO' can blend up to three waveforms, with powerful FM and ring-mod possibilities.

McDSP's Synthesizer One plug-in for Pro Tools goes beyond basic analogue synth emulation, providing some sophisticated wavetable synthesis features and an impressive degree of MIDI controllability.

It seems that TDM-format soft synths are like buses: you wait ages for one, and then two come along at once. And so, hot on the heels of DUY's SynthSpider modular synth comes Synthesizer One from McDSP (who sound as though they ought to be Scottish, but are in fact from California).

Synthesizer One is perhaps best described as a semi-modular synth. Unlike SynthSpider and other fully configurable modulars, it provides a fixed array of oscillators, filters, envelope generators and other subtractive synthesis devices, and their signal routing is largely preset. Within these limitations, however, it's much more flexible than a typical analogue synth.

For example, where SynthSpider and other modulars provide an array of different oscillator types which you can mix and match to your own ends, Synthesizer One always gives you the same two VCO-style oscillators — but they're far more sophisticated than your everyday 'sine, square or sawtooth' models. Each is actually capable of blending three different waveforms chosen from a long list, or based on sampled waveforms, and there are PWM, FM, phase offset and saturation options galore. In total, Synthesizer One provides the synth programmer with over 400 parameters.

Happily, even the designers of TDM plug-ins are now starting to realise that floppy disk copy protection is past its sell-by date, and when the two-week demo period is up, Synthesizer One can be authorised either by challenge and response or using the iLok USB dongle. The response I got approached the length of a nineteenth-century novel, but once I'd typed it all in it worked fine.

McDSP Synthesizer One £633 pros A versatile synth with some unusual features and a well-designed interface. Excellent modulation options and MIDI spec. The pad sounds are a definite highlight. cons Most parameters are calibrated arbitrarily. Some of the presets are a little uninspired. More DSP-intensive than Virus TDM. summary Synthesizer One is a very competent virtual analogue synth which offers a good deal of programming depth.

Installation is straightforward, and Synthesizer One can be used as an insert in audio, aux and Master tracks within Pro Tools. The PDF-only manual warns that you may need to increase DAE's memory assignment in order to use Synthesizer One alongside a lot of other plug-ins, and it takes longer than most to load into a TDM slot. Each instance of Synthesizer One can deliver up to seven voices from one Mix card DSP chip, or eight from an HD card DSP. Rather than using a control within the plug-in to adjust the polyphony, however, McDSP provide additional versions of the plug-in that are restricted to two, four and six voices. There doesn't seem to be any way to link two instances of S1 together to create one synth with greater polyphony, so big keyboard parts may fall victim to note-stealing.

Once you've inserted it and routed a MIDI signal to it, you can begin to try out the presets, of which there are hundreds. Many of these are clearly designed to mimic patches from classic synths, both analogue and digital: as well as presets called things like 'Moog bass', there are also folders of Wavestation and PPG impersonations which make use of Synthesizer One's wavetable synthesis features.

The presets provide a reasonably thorough overview of Synthesizer One's capabilities, but quite a few fall into the 'nothing special' category. Browsing through them demonstrates that Synthesizer One excels at pad sounds, that it turns in a decent bass or lead monosynth, and that if you want Hammond organ sounds, you really need NI's B4. There are no percussion sounds to speak of.

One of the problems confronting any plug-in developer is how to fit a complex editing interface into a plug-in window, and some compromise over usability is inevitable. DUY's SynthSpider makes the entire synth patch visible at once, at the expense of using tiny graphics. Synthesizer One's interface, by contrast, is distributed over a number of pages. This has the benefit that all the controls are large enough to be easily visible, but does make it harder to visualise the overall signal flow and the way all the synth components interact. Deep-level programming involves some switching between pages, but I didn't find this annoying in practice.

Programming is aided by Synthesizer One's Quick edit mode. Sometimes you don't want to wade through 400-plus parameters in order to darken a preset's filter response or lop half a second off its release time, and so McDSP have helpfully made a few key parameters available for instant tweaking. These include filter type, cutoff and resonance, VCA envelope parameters, oscillator detune and portamento, and they appear in four pages under the Quick Page heading at the left.

The three LFOs are well-specified: each can combine up to two waveforms, with extensive options for phase and pulse width. Synthesizer One's two filters offer a good range of modulation options. The envelopes are rather more limited, although they do go beyond the standard ADSR template in offering a second attack phase, and are unhelpfully calibrated in arbitrary numbers. As well as providing a good range of standard waveforms, Synthesizer One offers the option to capture additional waves from incoming audio or draw your own with the mouse. The results can be used both by VCOs and LFOs. Two of Synthesizer One's eight editing pages are devoted to MIDI control. Over 300 S1 parameters can be controlled, using all 128 possible MIDI Controllers if need be. To go with a virtual analogue synth, what else but an analogue-style step sequencer?

The bulk of Synthesizer One's window, though, is devoted to in-depth editing. A total of eight editing pages is available through a drop-down menu under the heading Synth Page, but only four are directly concerned with the sound-generating aspects. Two of the other four provide a comprehensive MIDI Controller setup window, allowing you to assign up to 128 separate Controllers to different parameters within Synthesizer One; another offers access to system-wide and performance parameters such as pitch-bend range and the assignment of MIDI Controller numbers to physical controls such as the mod wheel, while the final Perform page provides a 16-voice step sequencer/arpeggiator.

Synthesizer One's actual synthesis parameters are divided across four pages: VCO, LFO, VCF/VCA and Wave Edit. I've already mentioned the luxurious specification of the oscillators, and most of the other elements are similarly well endowed with parameters and options. Three LFOs each offer a blend of two waveforms chosen from the same palette as the VCOs', with pulse width, phase offset, key follow, one-shot/loop and ASR envelope controls. Two multi-mode resonant filters offer all the options you'd expect (with the odd exception that they are fixed 12dB/octave devices), including modulation of cutoff frequency and resonance, key follow, a choice of routings, and the capacity to link cutoff and resonance controls.

Three envelopes, one hard-wired to the VCA but all available as modulation sources, boast the usual attack, decay and sustain settings, but with an additional second attack prior to the release stage. Given how flexible the other modulation options are, however, I was a little surprised that the envelopes weren't more freely configurable, and there's no option to draw in your own shapes. Like most of Synthesizer One's parameters, moreover, both the LFO rate and envelope controls are arbitrarily calibrated (from 0.1 to 10.0 and from 0 to 100, respectively), rather than displaying a useful value in milliseconds.

Synthesizer One's wave editing page allows you to draw your own oscillator waveforms, with a number of tools available to help you sculpt them; you can also work with waves 'captured' from an existing segment of audio. Up to eight user-defined waveforms can be stored as part of a patch, and they can be used by the LFOs as well as the VCOs. A healthy selection of conventional wave shapes is also available, and the standard sine and square waves come in several versions which respond differently to PWM. One version of the square wave is designed in such a way that PWM acts as a form of oscillator sync; to my ears, this sounded rather more extreme than conventional oscillator sync (which is not available), and it generated some distinctly digital-sounding noise.

For a long time, the only soft synth available for TDM platforms was Access's Virus TDM, and Synthesizer One seems to be pitched directly against the latest Virus Indigo. The architecture of both synths is very similar; both have multi-page editing interfaces, both are guilty of calibrating their parameters in arbitrary values, and both have a distinctly dodgy line in organ patches.

Where they differ, Virus has the advantage in some areas, two of which are particularly significant. Firstly, the presets supplied with Virus are much more consistent in quality than Synthesizer One's, and include a decent range of percussion sounds. Secondly, Virus also scores in having a much lower DSP load: up to eight instances can be run from a single Mix card DSP chip.

In terms of synthesis features, Virus's filter saturation and 'analogue boost' options give bass and lead sounds a punch that's harder to achieve with Synthesizer One. Virus also boasts built-in delay, chorus and a dedicated vocoder. In Synthesizer One's favour, it has much more sophisticated wavetable and waveform drawing functions, there's the built-in step sequencer, and its freedom to be set up for MIDI control is hard to beat.

Sonically, there's a good deal of overlap between Virus TDM and Synthesizer One, and if you're looking to fit your Pro Tools system up with a virtual analogue synth, either will do the job nicely. They have slightly different strengths — I feel that Virus definitely has the edge for basses and punchy, dance-style sounds, while I'd turn to Synthesizer One first for pads and sci-fi madness — but both are perfectly capable of covering all the standard subtractive synthesis bases and more. If you already own the Virus plug-in, there are probably better ways to spend your money than on Synthesizer One. If you don't, you should definitely demo both before you decide!

Test Spec     McDSP Synthesizer One v1.0. Beige 300MHz G3 Apple Mac with 256MB Ram, running Mac OS 9.1. Digidesign Mix system running Pro Tools v5.1.3.

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£633 including VAT. Unity Audio +44 (0)1440 785843. +44 (0)1440 785845. Click here to email www.unityaudio.co.uk www.mcdsp.com