Recording - September 2010 - 22

FXpansion DCAM: Synth Squad

bands—examples include the ARP Omni and the Solina. These devices were designed to provide what FXpansion calls “paraphonic” operation (the term was coined by Roland for its RS-505 string machine); that means you could have one note for every key at once (like an electric organ), rather than the handful of notes a synthesizer could provide. Amber can provide up to 96 notes without voice stealing! It has separate sections for Synth and Ensemble tones, with blending of octaves like the drawbars on an organ, plus an LFO, Ramp, three envelopes, a built-in chorus effect, and two filters—a multimode filter on the Synth and a lovely Formant filter on the Ensemble. Formant filters allow sculpting of timbres by boosting or cutting particular frequencies, and gave instruments like the Moog Polymoog much of their character. Amber instantly transports you back to the glory days of symphonic rock with its lush and vibrant sound (the Chorus even has settings for “1975”, “1981”, and “1984”!), and is great fun to play with. It carries a greater CPU load than the others (to provide paraphonic operation, a single instance has to launch literally hundreds of envelopes and filters from the getgo), but provides a lot of great sonic possibilities in exchange. Fusor FXpansion wasn’t the first to create a performance “shell” that could load more than one synth and have them control and interact with one another, but Fusor is unique in its depth of features. It’s set up like a 3-input mixing console; you can load up to three synths into it, and each one can have up to three insert effects, plus three Aux send/return paths (selectable pre- and post-fader) and three Master Insert effects on the mixed sounds. Those effects are lovely, by the way; FXpansion elected to leave effects processing out of the synths themselves so they would have great timbre on their own (the exception being Amber’s indispensible chorus), but offers Fusor as a way to blend in everything from compression and distortion to time delays, bit crushing, and a high-quality
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RECORDING SEPTEMBER 2010

reverb algorithm from Overloud (we reviewed BREVERB in February 2008). There’s a FuseMod system that works like TransMod for controlling one synth from another, eight user-programmable Macro controls, four assignable LFOs and four envelope followers that generate control data from

you can pile everything but the kitchen sink into a Fusor patch doesn’t mean you have to. I got quite manageable CPU loads from relatively simple combinations of multiple Strobes with a couple of effects here and there, and those simpler patches were actually more musically useful than many of the monstrous amalgamations of noise I could theoretically come up with! Final notes While I was doing my tests, FXpansion released version 1.0.3.11 of DCAM: Synth Squad, which drastically lowered CPU consumption without sacrificing sound quality— the synths, which were originally limited to 16 total voices each, now can provide up to 32. I ran some polyphony tests on my 2 GHz MacBook inside Ableton Live Intro before and after the upgrade, and was very impressed with the numbers— just as one example, a very complex Cypher patch that would hit 47% CPU load playing 16 notes on the old version was down to 40% on the new version, and could play 32 notes at 73% load. Not a night-and-day difference, but enough to let you get away with building some Fusor patches that would previously have been impossible. If you’re a synthesizer nut and my first paragraph didn’t have you drooling for this set of instruments, you should be now, and you’ll excuse my not going into page after page of detail about all the amazing sounds DCAM: Synth Squad can produce, because you’re looking forward to discovering them on your own. If, however, you’re a more middle-of-theroad studio owner, let me cut to the chase: if you love the synthesizer strings of old Pink Floyd and Genesis albums, Amber is a killer app, and if you want a really good-sounding basic synth plug-in that is CPU-friendly and easy to set up, Strobe is worth its weight in gold. Add in the experimental quirkiness of Cypher and you have a product that represents a tremendous value, even before you consider Fusor’s potential for effects-enhanced performance heaven! DCAM: Synth Squad is easy to learn to use, very flexible, rock-stable in all my tests, inspiring, DAW-friendly, and sounds awesome. It’s going to be my go-to app for nonsample-based synth patches and sound design for quite some time to come. Price: $249 More from: FXpansion, www.fxpansion.com.

the audio outputs of the synths and their mix, a very flexible multichannel MIDI implementation, multifaceted keymapping features, and a huge arpeggiator/step sequencer/ parameter automation stepper called Animator. The end result is a completely glorious set of over-the-top patch possibilities, with all three synths’ power multiplied together to form something far greater than just a simple mix. The downside is that a really big Fusor patch will mangle any but the fastest DAWs; this is one plug-in that we’ll be coming back to more and more in future years, as the state of the art catches up to what it can do. On the other hand, just because
http://www.fxpansion.com
Recording - September 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - September 2010
