On the Job with Synth Squad
I’ve taken some time over the last few days to explore the new FXpansion bundle of soft synths DCAM Synth Squad. The bundle comprises three synths—Strobe, Cypher and Amber—and a multitimbral layering and control plug-in called Fusor that holds up to three synths in any combination and adds effects processing, keyboard management, step and control sequencing and global modulation routing. All devices come in Mac/Win standalone and plug-in (AU, VST and RTAS) formats.
DCAM stands for Discrete Component Analogue Modelling, and FXpansion has modeled each of its synths’ modules at the circuit-and-components level. Their goal is to have the synths respond the way hardware devices would to normal as well as abusive parameter settings.
The simplest of the synth trio, Strobe, is a one-oscillator synth, but that one oscillator features waveform mixing and octave dividers, and you can stack up to five detuned copies of the oscillator. Its versatile filter has 22 modes and overdrive. For modulation you get two ADSR envelope generators and a waveform-mixing LFO. At the other end of the complexity spectrum, Cypher features three oscillators with audio-rate cross modulation, dual multimode filters with flexible routing and an extra LFO and envelope generator. Both synths have a basic arpeggiator and neither has any effects (that’s left to Fusor).
The third synth, Amber, is a string-machine emulation using divide-down-oscillator architecture. It has no arpeggiator (you can arpeggiate it in Fusor) but adds chorus (a must for a string machine) and a formant filter. The three synths come as both virtual-instrument and effects plug-ins. The effects versions replace the noise generator with audio input, which makes for some unusual, MIDI-controlled synth and effects combinations.
Each of the synths features a powerful modulation scheme called TransMod for which I’ve posted a short screencast. Fusor offers a similar scheme, called FuseMod, that provides cross-modulation between synths, as well as from Fusor’s LFOs, envelope followers and sequencer.
All these synths sound great, and to my ear, the analog inspiration comes through. None of them are especially light on your CPU, however, and when you stack them up in Fusor you’ll probably find yourself doing some track freezing. No demo versions of the synths are availble, but you’ll find both audio and video demos on the FXpansion Website, fxpansion.com.
