Recording - January 2012 - 63

XY pad and tilt, and have their own effects processor (phaser/flanger/chorus/delay/cross delay). The 17 drum kits have a wide variety of sampled drum and drum machine sounds, giving you plenty of latitude. The sequencer is a bit of a revelation in an iOS app; it’s a full piano-roll setup with tap tempo, metronome, and count-in, offering loop record, reorderable patterns, and automation lanes for external MIDI expression data, velocity, and XY pad movements. You can cut, copy, paste, and move events easily, and build up full arrangements with ease, turning these powerful instruments into a self-contained music creation environment. The opening splash screen states that iSyn Poly is “brought to you by audioMIDI.com”; I’m not sure what the well-established music-gear distributor/retailer had to do with getting this fantastic app to its audience, but I’m grateful! VirSyn has been wowing people with synth plug-ins for years now, and this app carries the company’s reputation for quality and ease of use into a whole new realm.

Way Out Ware SynthX
$9.99; www.wayoutware.com

Way Out Ware is well known to synth-software enthusiasts as the maker of TimewARP 2600, the astonishingly accurate emulation of the ARP 2600 semimodular synthesizer. SynthX combines a quirky user interface with a sound that is frankly stunning, well beyond what one might expect from an iOS app. While there is a fun retro feel to the 8-bit-video-game appearance of SynthX, there’s a practical aspect to it as well; with the program’s simple, colorful graphics, very little CPU power is directed toward making things look pretty, leaving more oomph for the synth’s sounds. The emphasis here is on playability... the keyboard interface for SynthX offers three different ways to play: a conventional keyboard, a grid of notes in semitone rows split by fifths (so you can grab huge chords and play scales in patterns that don’t change from key to key), and an XY “keyboard” with lines showing pitch centers and the ability to bend from note to note. Whenever you hit a key, the waveform you’re playing appears under your finger, and the keyboard and XY allow you to add modulation by sliding upward (or by MIDI velocity and pressure if you’re using an external controller). The overall sound of SynthX can best be described as “fun”. The single-oscillator synths of the early 1980s had a charm of their own, and it’s lovingly recreated in SynthX. You’ll find yourself spinning out leads and doing cool retro sound effects in no time, and delighting to presets like “Hu-Puff Snooker” and “Kass-C-Oh-Tone”. You’ll be tickled and inspired at the same time, and what more could you ask of a musical instrument? One other thing worth mentioning: several users who have rated SynthX on the App Store have mentioned how they had problems (related to SynthX running under certain older versions of iOS), reported them, and were contacted quickly and directly by Way Out Ware to work out solutions. You don’t see that every day, and it’s refreshing to hear about a company whose support policies have the same gleam of genuine quality as its software’s sounds. Thumbs way up.

The synth voice itself is very straightforward: one oscillator with mixable sawtooth and pulse waves, with sine and square wave LFO modulation of pitch and/or pulse width; a noise source, LFO with sine and sample/hold, resonant filter, and ADSR envelope. You can open the VCA so the synth drones without being played, something many iPad synths lack. There’s also a built-in effects chain with distortion, flanger, and delay with XY control pads for realtime tweaking, and a limiter to keep things clamped down if they get out of hand. There’s even a built-in audio recorder for capturing performances as samples.
RECORDING JANUARY 2012

http://www.audioMIDI.com http://www.wayoutware.com

Recording - January 2012

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