Widely admired for their hardware synths, Novation have now taken the bold step of releasing a software plug-in synth. But is it the wave of the future, or a software pirate's delight?
Native Instruments' flagship modular software synth has now reached version 4, dispensing with the dongle copy-protection that bothered v3 owners, adding many user-friendly features and allowing even greater scope for personalising your patches.
Despite the synth-spangled history of the company, it's been many years since a Roland product ruled the high-end keyboard roost, and 2001's Fantom workstation failed to change this. However, there's much more to the new Fantom S than one extra letter...
Times change. When announced in 2001, the Chameleon, a reprogrammable DSP unit, looked out of date compared with the software studio concept. But with piracy rife, and software companies being bought out everywhere, the idea of reprogrammable, unhackable hardware now seems quite timely...
As we saw last month, there's much to synthesizing a convincing flute sound — and yet basic analogue monosynths have offered reasonable flute patches for 30 years. Surely the process can be simplified?