Recording - September 2010 - 21

getting big sounds out of a single oscillator chip per voice, using various modulations and sub-octave generation to fatten up the sound. Strobe’s layout is appealingly simple: one oscillator with mixable waveforms, a sub oscillator with mixable waveforms, pulse width control, a multimode filter with overdrive, two looping envelopes, an LFO, and a ramp generator. Beginners will find it easy and fun to learn the basics of synthesis with this layout, and advanced programmers will get a kick out of pushing the available modules to the limit to create cool sounds without falling back on multiple oscillators. My favorite trick here is the Stack control, which provides a faux detuning/thickening effect that can turn a single oscillator into a huge sound all by itself. Strobe is easy to use and sounds great, and best of all it’s by far the lightest of the three synths with respect to computer load, making it easy to use multiple instances in your DAW. It’s worth the price of admission just on its own. Cypher When people hear that Cypher’s emphasis is on FM (frequency modulation), the initial instinct is to think, “Oh, like a Yamaha DX7.” After all, the DX7 put FM on the map as the world’s first popular and affordable digital synthesizer. But FM was around long before the DX synths—it was a standby of many analog synthesizers, and modulating one oscillator with another can produce a huge variety of clangorous and complex timbres that are utterly unlike the warm sound we normally associate with analog synthesis. Programmable polysynths like the Oberheim Xpander brought modulation like this into a modern controllable form, and Cypher takes that architecture and runs with it. FXpansion warns you up front that if you’re after a simple and straightforward sound, you should start with Strobe—it’s easier to program and has way less CPU load. But when you’re ready to experiment, Cypher offers a serious tool set. Its three oscillators can be tuned to one another in harmonic ratios, and each one has a continously variable waveshape (Triangle to Sawtooth to Square to Pulse). There are a variety of modulation functions

built into the architecture so that oscillators can control one another’s waveshapes, frequencies, waveform sync, and more. There are two LFOs (in addition to any of the three main Oscillators being turned down to LFO frequencies), three envelopes, two waveshapers, two filters with common and filterspecific controls, and more... and that’s before you even add TransMod to the mix. I could write an entire article just about how to use the many modulation paths in Cypher, but I don’t have room, so trust me when I say there’s enough here to keep the experimenter occupied for a long time. Amber Amber is a modeled divide-down string synthesizer, a type of keyboard popular in the 1970s with keyboard-heavy rock

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Recording - September 2010

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