Recording - September 2010 - 20

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

FXpansion DCAM: Synth Squad
Three fascinating synthesizers, one powerful sound creation environment
run audio through their virtual architecture and process it with filters, envelopes, and so on. Installation of the program is pretty straightforward; it makes use of FXpansion’s License Manager program to keep track of your installations and serial numbers. You don’t have to be connected to the Internet to install the software, but it does speed things up quite a bit. If you look at the pictures of the three synths, you’ll quickly see that they share common features. Above each synth’s front panel there’s a Preset Picker that lets you scroll through, audition, compare, and save presets, as well as open a searchable browser window that’s sorted by patch type (e.g. bass, lead, pad, texture, etc.). Next to that is a series of eight TransMod buttons, each of which provides a set of graphically-displayed modulations activated by a single source (like an LFO, velocity, or the pitch or mod wheels—see the Strobe screenshot at left for examples). Any number of controls can be affected by one TransMod source; there’s also a MIDI Learn function for direct mapping and DAW automation of particular parameters. Below the synth front panels are controls for the Arpeggiator (on Strobe and Cypher), Performance Mode (Amber), keyboard behavior, glide (portamento), pitch bend range, and polyphony—you set the maximum number of voices to prevent CPU glitching, and then you can set up Unison mode to stack those voices on a single note. For example, if you set 8 Voices and a Unison of 2, you use two Voices per note you play up to a maximum of eight Voices, so you can play up to four notes at a time. A special set of modulation sources are designed to affect each voice inside a Unison note slightly differently, to produce effects like huge animated stereo soundfields. All synths have the Visualizer Scope, a large oscilloscope display that shows the waveform currently being generated by whatever part of the synth you’re working with, be it an oscillator, LFO, or envelope. This is great visual feedback and a cool teaching tool as well. You can switch each part of the audio path of each synth on or off to isolate what a patch is doing where, or just to simplify your workspace. All synths’ audio paths end with controls for level and panning, and an Analogue knob to simulate analog drift and add uncertainty and character to sounds. Strobe We’ll start with Strobe, the simplest of the three. It’s an analog synth of a type that was very popular in the early 1980s, such as the Korg Polysix and Roland Juno-60. At the time, analog circuitry was expensive, and the only way to build a truly affordable analog polysynth was to limit how many chips it used, so builders got clever with

If you’re reading this review and you haven’t found out yet about FXpansion’s new software synthesizer suite DCAM: Synth Squad, and you’re a vintage keyboard enthusiast, I can sum things up very neatly: imagine being able to build a gigantic synthesizer that’s part ARP Solina, part Oberheim Xpander, and part Korg Polysix. Okay. Now, while those folks are busy running for FXpansion’s website and hauling out their credit cards, I can take a moment to explain to everyone else out there why this synthesizer plug-in is so freakin’ cool. DCAM: Synth Squad is a collection of three different synthesizers, each with a unique sound and feature set but with common control functions and design elements that shorten the learning curve considerably. There’s also a special environment that allows you to combine multiple synthesizers into larger ensembles that can control one another and create complex and fascinating timbres you can’t create any other way. Ideally, this suite gives you not only three well-liked sound generation types from the glory days of synth building, but entirely new hybrid sounds as well. It promises to be an amazing resource for the computerbased music studio—let’s see how it delivers. Starting with the Squad DCAM Stands for Discrete Component Analogue Modelling. It’s FXpansion’s emulation technology for re-creating vintage circuitry and it forms the basis for all of the synths in the suite. DCAM: Synth Squad (“DSS”) has four components: three synthesizers called Strobe, Cypher, and Amber, and a modular environment for combining them that’s called Fusor. DSS is available as a download from FXpansion’s website or as a boxed version on DVD with a printed Quick Start Guide—the Operation Manual comes on PDF for both versions, but a printed manual can be ordered separately for for $20. It can be installed as a VST, AU, and/or RTAS plug-in in any Mac OS X 10.5+ or Windows XP/Vista/7 DAW environment; you also get standalone versions of all four modules. The plug-in versions of Strobe, Cypher, and Amber are made available not only as instruments but also as effects processors, so you can
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RECORDING SEPTEMBER 2010

Recording - September 2010

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