Moog Mariana

Moog’s new bass soft synth goes deep. Really deep...

Available for macOS and Windows in VST3, AAX and Audio Units formats, the new Mariana soft synth has been described as “the Moog that never was”. It is dubbed a ‘bass synthesizer’, hence it being named after the deepest place on Earth.

Back To Bass‑ics

Mariana has more than a few tricks up its sleeve, but it is at its core a fairly simple subtractive monophonic synthesizer. The SYNTH 1 page presents two oscillators offering sine, triangle, triangle‑saw (or ‘sharktooth’), sawtooth and square waves — with the chosen shape only applicable to both oscillators together. The oscillators’ mutual waveshape can have its shape edited by a Duty Cycle knob, which is essentially a pulse‑width control, but for all the wave shapes, not just the square wave.

Familiar territory so far, but there are a few particularly well‑suited controls for bass here as well. One such is a Key Reset button, which helps maintain a consistent phase relationship between the two oscillators by having them reset with each new key, hopefully ensuring that different notes and pitches sound as similar as possible. There’s also a knob to adjust oscillator 2’s phase relationship with oscillator 1. There’s a sub‑oscillator with variable octaves and three simple waveforms to choose from (sine, sawtooth and square), as well as a control to adjust its own phase relationship with the primary oscillators. There’s also a variable noise generator, with an accompanying knob to cycle through red, pink, white, blue and purple noise variations. The sub has its own multimode filter, while the other oscillators have the useful pairing of both a high‑pass and low‑pass filter, which can be routed in series or parallel. The noise can also be high‑passed by itself to float above the rest of the synth voice: a nice touch for adding a percussive edge to otherwise murky low‑frequency information.

Next along is the CNTRL 1 page, for all things movement and modulation. It contains three fairly simple LFOs and three envelopes, including an assignable MOD envelope that has additional Delay and Hold stages compared with the other two’s ADSR stages. Finally, there are two random generators for rate‑variable or sync’able stepped or smooth random values; the latter uses a Perlin noise generator, so named for its inventor Ken Perlin, and is comparatively natural in feel. The random sections also have optional slew, which is a handy addition. The modulation routing itself takes the form of a drop‑down menu: click a knob, click the modulation source and adjust the movement range with useful, colour‑coded visual cues.

Each synth has a CNTRL page featuring LFOs and envelopes.

Doubling Up

Here’s a question: what’s better than a synth with all the features above? That’s right: two synths with all of the features above! Yes, Mariana has two identical layers of architecture — SYNTH 1 and CNTRL 1, and SYNTH 2 and CNTRL 2 — and this really does expand its functionality by more than just a factor of two. One one level, it being a soft synth, you might argue that you could just instantiate multiple instances of Mariana, but beyond the CPU question (Mariana does take its toll), there’s another benefit to this: you can modulate parameters on either layer from either CNTRL panel, mix and match sub‑oscillator responses, blend waveforms together, and legions more. It’s also possible to arrange the two layers into a duophonic synth.

“Hold on,” I hear you say. “It can only go up to duophonic?” That’s right. “But it’s a digital synth. What’s to stop it from being fully polyphonic?” You may have been thinking similar thoughts about several of the functions I’ve mentioned. The fact that there are only three wave shapes for the sub oscillator, for example, or that both oscillators on each layer can only have their shapes adjusted together. “We’re in software now, where the boundaries of hardware that infuriated musicians in years gone by need not apply! Why all the limitations?”

Endless features in software might sound good on paper, but they do tend to create option paralysis. In my humble opinion, the more developers can work against this, the better. I do not, for example, think it’s helpful that Arturia’s software emulation of the Minimoog Model D (to name but one) makes it fully polyphonic, because its monophony is precisely one of the things that means players have used it in a particular way, with more emphasis on sound design and the significance of singular musical gestures. In this respect, Mariana does a brilliant job, and it’s one of the reasons I think the observation of it being the “Moog that never was” is a good one. Its workflow really does make it feel like an emulation of a hard synth — just one that doesn’t exist. It’s a software synth for those, like me, who approach software with a degree of trepidation. It incorporates actual design decisions to guide the user, which is much more interesting than simply throwing everything at the wall and making every single value adjustable down to the last, undetectably insignificant increment.

Sum Of Its Parts

It’s on the final page, OUTPUT, that Mariana’s two synth layers deviate, but only in their effects. SYNTH 1 is given a delay line, while SYNTH 2 is endowed with decent enough chorus. One area in which Mariana performs very well is its imaging: here there’s a lot of room to play with the stereo field, with effects tangibly widening their respective voices and both voices independently pan‑able, on top of their per‑voice oscillator Spread settings.

The OUTPUT page brings the two synths together, but with different effects.

Beyond this, the OUTPUT page has a host of functions that perform surprisingly well. With software instruments, developers are invariably faced with the question of what to include natively and what to leave up to other plug‑ins. Mariana has gone for goal with on‑board delay, chorus, saturation for both layers and even a compressor. With the delay and chorus working across their two voices independently, and the option for the saturation to also work as such, these ultimately come to feel more like contributions to the synth voice itself than effects — particularly since they’re modulatable from within Mariana’s matrix and can therefore participate in the movement of other aspects of a patch. Thankfully, these effects genuinely sound good, so I wasn’t left wanting much in this department. The compressor, meanwhile, won’t wipe the floor with your Fabfilter Pro‑C, but it’s not trying to. In practice it’s just a quick and useful stereo bus compressor, for melding what can amount to a lot of movement and disparate information into a more coherent singularity. This certainly makes Mariana easier to work into a mix, and it means that any other dynamics processing you choose to put on its channel strip can both focus on more creative gestures and keep your plug‑in list that little bit more manageable.

If you are after additional effects, Moog have made it very easy to integrate Mariana with none other than their own range of Moogerfooger plug‑ins, courtesy of a virtual CV system that plumbs right into Mariana’s modulation matrix. While the workflow here isn’t the most intuitive, it is capable of some great results — and the more outré the Moogerfooger the better. Rack up enough of them and you can create something of a virtual modular setup right there in your DAW.

Mariana manages to retain as much Moogness as you could ever hope for from an original soft synth.

One wonders if Moog are turning their attention to the development of a more fleshed‑out digital ecosystem; it’s no secret that changes have been made since the company joined the InMusic conglomerate, so I would hazard a guess that we can expect more software goods from the company in the near future. In fairness, if they’re anything like this then there’ll be very little to complain about. Mariana manages to retain as much Moogness as you could ever hope for from an original soft synth, and with such a nicely balanced set of options and limitations, not to mention a formidable sound, will be welcomed with open arms by any lover of Moog hardware.