Martin Walker wrote:
I do like my Prophet 12 a lot, but it's been quite hard work creating my own sounds for it, but (in your hands anyway) the Hydrasynth sounds so immediately flexible and inspiring to play.
Cheers Martin, I think the Hydra is a sound designer's dream. There is a great deal of extremely cool functionality under the hood, much of it with regards to the oscillators, LFOs and envelopes, none of which are restricted to the usual feature set.
The waveshaping functions in particular are addictive. You can take a waveform, set a number of points within it and then move/separate those points and have the waveform stretch like rubber with them, for example. These stretch points can also be modulated. You can also implement up to two FM blocks in each of the first and second oscillators using Mutators, with feedback and the ability to introduce ring modulation which can take input from a variety of sources including other oscillators or external audio input.
The LFOs have delay and fade-in, arbitrary start points within the waveform, one-shot and, joy of joys, my favourite feature from the Yamaha Motif ES synths, in the form of a programmable 8-step custom LFO shape (which can be slewed for smoothness or left jagged).
The DAHDSR envelopes support variable log or exp curves as well as linear, and run freely or reset with each note. They also support looping (specific number of times or infinite) and the time between each envelope stage can be defined in milliseconds via a kind of tap-tempo feature (or BPM sync'd of course).
Just about everything you can imagine can be modulated and there is a generous mod matrix which is a doddle to use and plenty of mod sources, not least of which are the 5 LFOs, 5 envelopes and the poly-AT.
I could go on but think I'd better shut up now ...
I've got a whole bunch of thoughts on it that I want to write out in the user review forum when I get a little time, including some things I think it could do better or which would make it easier to use.
But overall, the straightforward and intuitive way with which all this stuff can be done via the front panel is absolute genius.
Folderol wrote:Lovely metallic sounds in that, and I've never heard a synth doing that 'record' slow down before
I deliberately picked something harsher to contrast with the warmth of the first soundtest. I've not done this yet but with a little filtering and mutating, those metallic tones (and of course there are a lot of other waveforms to morph through that are less harsh) can make for some beautiful evolving pads.
The slowdown effect is done using the ribbon, which runs the entire length of the keybed and in actual fact it's acting here as a long smooth pitchbend; the tempo remains exactly the same
As well as pitchbend it also supports a theramin mode, (where one voice of the current patch is reserved for mono playing on the ribbon) and a 'modulate only' mode which doesn't affect pitch by default.
The Elf wrote:Pretty soon you're going to be seeking out other synths that respond to poly AT. Let me nudge you toward your very own Summit, but also such as the Roland XV-5080 and Integra-7 - these become so much better synths when paired with a PAT keyboard.
I have the Summit adjacent and am going to be doing some poly-AT experimentation with it torwards the end of the month (I'm a bit pushed for time at the moment sadly). Thanks for the heads-up, and yes, I will very much be looking for more of this kind of experience
