Why can't more synths be so well designed?

[ajay_m]

Yesterday I was noodling around on my Hydrasynth Deluxe and I got to preset A022 and thought, hmm, I quite like that bass sound and the upper register is nice in a different way, but I'd like to turn off the ribbon and portamento for the bass and add some effects on the upper register to make more of a lead sound. It's a bit thin right now, though the bass is perfect.

So I just pressed Multi to go out of single mode, scrolled to a free patch slot, selected A022 for upper and lower patch - which on the HS means any changes you now make are NOT to the original single mode patch but a copy - an incredible piece of design which means the original single patch won't be affected at all. (looking at you Roland, and you, Yamaha, with that wretched design where 'voices' or what have you use 'parts' and then you change one 'voice' - or so you think - and every other one using that 'part' now changes).

Then I just set a split point by pressing the Multi button, then pressed Lower, pressed the Ribbon button and set it to 'mod only' then went back to Upper - there are dedicated buttons for all these obvious functions - added some effects, (they all have their own dedicated button), went into the mod matrix with a one button press, and added poly aftertouch and key velocity release (not a lot of synths have this) to modulate the delay feedback so that if I pressed down with aftertouch or played staccato there would be more feedback then if I played legato.

I thought, yeah, I want a latching arpeggiator on the lower part; there's - of course - a button for that too. And, hmm, I'd like a bit more of the upper register, it's a bit quiet compared to the bass. Of course, there's a dedicated "balance" rotary encoder with a proper LED collar to let you set that and save it with the patch. Just tweak it the way you want.

It's just so intuitive to do stuff on this synth. Even the buttons all light up a different colour when you're in multi, upper or lower mode so you always know what you're doing. I simply have never worked with a piece of gear so intuitive. The original Moog Model D is what springs to mind, if somehow a design genius could turn that into a 16 voice synth with wavetables, FM and all the other powerful features and yet - somehow - keep everything intuitive. And yet Glen and the team did just that. It's a model of design clarity, not to mention no-compromise design - the backlit buttons whose legends will never wear off because they're printed underneath the plastic button face, the generous, crisp, bright OLED displays, the encoders, the beautiful keybed, where even the black note velocity response has been carefully tweaked to match the white notes (after initial feedback from users).

It's not absolutely perfect of course - the main thing I miss is that although there is keyboard scaling it doesn't allow the wonderful Yamaha functionality of setting a break point and right and left scale, curve and depth, it's just a linear function splitting at middle C. This does make it a bit challenging to create some patches where you want timbral changes across the keyboard to be quite the way you want. But no piece of gear is perfect; this comes as close to perfection otherwise as anything I've ever owned, a real tribute to the team at ASM.

[Hugh Robjohns]

I agree! I've never met a synth that does so much so quickly, easily, and obviously. Tiz wonderful.

[alexis]

... looking at you Roland... with that wretched design where 'voices' or what have you use 'parts' and then you change one 'voice' - or so you think - and every other one using that 'part' now changes...

OMG, I had no idea (Relatively new Juno DS 88 user here) - thank you for posting that.

Your synth - does it come in an 88 key version, with a keybed that feels piano like, and does it have a library of voices for the guy who says something like, "I'll put some saxes, no it'll be trombones, at this part of the song ..."

[ajay_m]

To be fair to Yamaha and Roland, I believe they are slowly moving away from the voice/patch thing or part/patch or 'performance/patch' or however you want to name them, but to the best of my knowledge the Hydrasynth is unique in that the moment you layer a patch in multi mode the base patch is copied - you never inadvertantly change the underlying single mode patch at all, that you used as your base for the new dual layer patch.

And of course it's unashamedly a synth. It has no samples, just wavetables. It *can* imitate a range of instruments surprisingly well but really that's not its purpose. It's a machine for sound design and to give you an example I came up with a patch that sounds like a room full of people talking. You can't quite make out the words, but it sounds like a whole bunch of people in a reverberant environment talking. Another contributor created a patch where you can hear crickets chirping and a coyote howling and yipping at the moon. Many classic patches like the sequence in Pink Floyd's "On the Run" have been accurately emulated, too. Someone's also done a pretty damn good version of the famous
"Arr1" patch from the Fairlight that was used by Tears for Fears amongst others (Shout), which at the time was a unique sampled sound that couldn't have been synthesised by the limited synths of the era.

Although most people leave the two filters in series, their real strength comes when you put them in parallel. You can then reproduce the wonderful 'sparkle' of the Odyssey, which had some high frequency leakthrough in the filters that gives it a unique sound. Of course you have about a dozen different filters to choose from to, and they are pretty decent as well. Add a touch of filter drive and those wistful synth lines from 'Shine on' are easily obtained. And so on...

You have 76 notes and not 88, and they aren't weighted, but then polyphonic aftertouch wouldn't be as controllable on a weighted keyboard. Nor would it be easy to do those 'back of the hand' glissandos that are part of classic B3 technique, on a weighted keyboard you'd peel the nails off your fingers trying that!.

[Hugh Robjohns]

You have 76 notes and not 88, and they aren't weighted, but then polyphonic aftertouch wouldn't be as controllable on a weighted keyboard.

As a previous owner of a CS-80, with a decent weighted keyboard, I found poly aftertouch was perfectly controllable...

Nor would it be easy to do those 'back of the hand' glissandos that are part of classic B3 technique, on a weighted keyboard you'd peel the nails off your fingers trying that!.

That much is certainly true... confirmed as the owner of a Nord Stage Classic 88!

[The Elf]

The Hydrasynth is certainly well designed, and sounds fabulous. I'll admit that the Deluxe does still have me scratching my head over the duals/singles - so much so that I almost never have it in dual mode.

But the fact that you can edit half of a dual and not scupper other patches is exemplary. My experiences of the Korg Wavestation still have me waking up in a sweat from time to time - that thing was an absolute nightmare of cross-shared wave-sequences and patches, such that you could be editing something and breaking material on cartridges you didn't even have plugged in!

My only gripe with the HS design remains the amount of knobbery and real estate dedicated to the arpeggiator - it seems inordinately over-exposed. I'd take some more assignable knobs and buttons over arpeggiator controls.

On the (counts on one hand) number of times I've used the arpeggiator I've found the controls useful, but to take up over a third of the control knob allocation? Silly IMO.

[OneWorld]

Everything I read about the Hydrasynth seems to be salutory, I keep looking at the website, advert etc it's getting closer to Xmas,,,hmmmmmmm

[ajay_m]

Well, I had the original 49 key version after reading some of the very positive reviews. This was during the pandemic so it was the only piece of gear I've purchased that I couldn't evaluate ahead of time.

I was not disappointed though. It more than lived up to my expectations and ASM released a number of firmware updates that added even more capabilities over time, and they were responsive to feedback from their user community - for example the black note velocity response was a bit more sensitive than the white notes - to be honest I'd never really noticed it, but one particularly demanding player brought it up, and in due course it was fixed with a firmware update. This was pretty impressive since in my experience most gear seldom gets significant updates after release (honourable exception, the Akai Force/MPC line).

It's nice that you have several choices, three with the same synth engine, and of course the Deluxe with two entire separate synth engines.

If you are not a keyboard player, the desktop is a good choice, or possibly the Explorer I think. If you do play keyboards (and have the space for it) though I really do think the Deluxe is worth the money. First of all you have a full six octave keyboard with a great unweighted keybed, and of course poly aftertouch, and in my experience this is perfect for almost any style of music, where five octaves in my experience can be a little cramped for classical or jazz. Secondly of course you have the raw power of six oscillators, ten envelope generators, ten modulators and eight mutants, which is a heck of a lot of power under your fingertips.

It is a synth of course, not a sampler, so it's not a workstation keyboard and it doesn't have a sequencer, although the 64 stage modulators do allow you to program some pretty complex 'mini sequences'. Nor do a lot of the presets really do it justice, though subsequently ASM did provide some free patch libraries from some talented people that are pretty good, and there are a lot of user contributions. I do wish they didn't use Facebook as their support forum though - this is unfortunate though common these days.

Of course though you don't have to get far through the presets to find a couple of very good homages to Vangelis and BladeRunner and you're sitting in front of a CS80 at that stage, assuming you're playing one of the two larger keyboard models - the Explorer lacks the ribbon unfortunately.

But you have to think of this as a performance machine attached to a pretty capable modular synth that's been made accessible without patch cables - though, there are of course analogue ins and outs like mod, cv and gate, a nice touch, though I've never used them to be honest.

As a synth, I'd venture to say it can replicate the sound of any of the classical synths, for example, although I don't have the original, my Akai Force has a pretty good Odyssey synth and I could come vanishingly close to replicating its timbres with the HS. Things like Moog basslines are dead simple; I mean, turn it on, press INIT and you're basically in front of a polyphonic model D, with a sawtooth oscillator. Reach for the filter, dial in some cutoff, set a bit of envelope filter modulation (like the model D, this is 'wired in' as a default, though of course you can change this), and you're immediately right there in classic synth territory with only a few button presses.

Another very nice feature is that it supports an expression pedal and the control is extremely smooth with no 'zipper' effects as you move the pedal. This lets you add another dimension of control so that you have the ribbon, the wheels, poly aftertouch and then a foot-controlled pedal (they're cheap), as another performance source.

Of course, there's some very worthy competition, the Summit, for example. Some have said that the Summit reverb is 'lusher' than the Hydrasynth, which may be true; I think it's fair to say that the HS effects work very well, but they are there to support the sound more than anything else, and you don't have anything fancy like grain shaping or some of the truly off the wall processing you get with something like Razor (admittedly, an in the box solution). On the other hand my original DX7 had no effects at all.

Another thing to be aware of is that unlike some Roland (and I think Yamaha) synths, there's no support for audio over USB; it's only there for MIDI control and patch management. You can't therefore route audio directly over USB back to your DAW, only as analogue signals.

But when it comes down to it, late at night, with the lights down in the studio and a pair of headphones, this is an inspirational piece of kit, a genuine musical instrument with the power and expressiveness of a CS80 but with far more timbral range than that synth was capable of.

Finally there is no getting round that, yes, this is a digital synth. However I defy anyone to tell this from the sound. The HS has incredible control to add imperfection, from 'analogue feel' as a dial in param, to modulators that can add noise and jitter, and even entire 'voice level' settings which let you mimic how a single voice board in an analogue synth might be slightly detuned or respond differently to envelopes. You also have 'filter drive' which allows you to mimic the very real non-linearity of analogue filters. And of course you have about a dozen different filter models, including a formant (vowel) filter, and these are very well modelled, they self-oscillate as they should (where applicable) and each has a distinct character.

[t-sun]

Everything I read about the Hydrasynth seems to be salutory, I keep looking at the website, advert etc it's getting closer to Xmas,,,hmmmmmmm

If you want to dip your toes, the Explorer has the Polytouch (albeit mini keys. nice ones, but mini nonetheless) and the full engine of the big boys. However there is more menu diving and no ribbon, so you're not getting the full experience described here, so the Desktop is probably a better way to go if you want the full ergonomic experience and aren't as interested in the Poly-AT.

I will say that if you haven't tried one, once you use a polyphonic aftertouch keyboard you will wonder why every keyboard doesn't have that feature.

[Hugh Robjohns]

Finally there is no getting round that, yes, this is a digital synth. However I defy anyone to tell this from the sound. The HS has incredible control to add imperfection, from 'analogue feel' as a dial in param, to modulators that can add noise and jitter, and even entire 'voice level' settings which let you mimic how a single voice board in an analogue synth might be slightly detuned or respond differently to envelopes. You also have 'filter drive' which allows you to mimic the very real non-linearity of analogue filters. And of course you have about a dozen different filter models, including a formant (vowel) filter, and these are very well modelled, they self-oscillate as they should (where applicable) and each has a distinct character.

I heartily recommend the Vintage Voice Modelling template which does all the things you mention in a very impressive and controllable way for some phenomenally good vintage analogue synth richness.

https://www.voicecomponentmodeling.com/

https://www.presetpatch.com/article/hyd ... late-patch

[ajay_m]

Yeah I must download that. Good call. I've been manually adding randomness but that template looks really well thought out. I recall recommending the HS to someone in another forum who said "I couldn't possibly contemplate purchasing a digital synth" which is, to be frank, baseless analogue snobbery in my opinion. And completely misses the capability this synth has to brilliantly add analogue colour if you want, or be precise if you don't.

[Arpangel]

If I was starting out and didn’t have "anything" the Hydrasynth would definitely be a consideration, although I don’t know if it would have the microscopic flexibility of a modular, be interesting to treat it as such, and see how far I got, and like Alexis, I'd need some acoustic/orchestral stuff in there too.

[ajay_m]

You could probably find something a well-equipped modular might do that would be challenging on the HS (apart of course from some kind of effect it simply doesn't have, which wouldn't be entirely fair). However its scope for weirdness is pretty broad, especially since mod matrix slots can modulate not just the normal destinations but also other mod matrix slots, including the slot you're using, (and you can also modulate macros, which themselves fan out to a fairly arbitrary set of simultaneously controlled things) - and you can also feed audio frequency signals into either of its two analogue mod inputs, and/or manually patch back its outputs into those inputs if you were feeling so inclined.

I know that at one point a couple of us on the forum managed to create quite a few 'Dr Who' sound effects including a reasonably good Tardis taking off, although the scraped string isn't quite perfect (yet) - you can though do some Karplus-Strong-like things with the HS because the delay goes down to a millisecond or so and is a modulation destination, allowing some interesting effects.

The big advantage of course is that you just press 'save' and your off the wall serendipitously discovered sound is yours forever. Since the HS has an amazing 'controlled randomness' generator, you can spend many an enjoyable hour either throwing the dice for the entire patch by pressing the randomise button, or just randomising a piece of the machine like the EGs etc. This was how I discovered the nucleus of the weird 'people talking' patch I created - I thought, wow, that sounds weird, like people in an ambient room, then I modified the patch to zoom in on the accidentally-created sound I'd found to improve it. I imagine Brian Eno would love this synth.

[Arpangel]

I imagine Brian Eno would love this synth.

Why didn’t you say that when it came out? it would be here now.