Recording - April 2011 - 59

RECORDING'S
ConcreteFX Kubik
By Mike Metlay

SHOWCASE OF SOUNDS

ConcreteFX is a soundware developer that is perhaps best known for the products it’s developed in conjunction with Rob Papen, such as Predator (reviewed September 2008); we’ll be reviewing some of those in our forthcoming review of Papen’s new eXplorer bundle. But ConcreteFX has some well-liked products of its own as well, the most popular being a synthesizer called Kubik, which was recently updated and rereleased for PC and Mac. Kubik is called a “wavetable sequencer synthesizer”, which is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s difficult to sum up what it does any other way. The true heart of Kubik is its unusual oscillators, and we’ll spend most of this review explaining what you can do with them, leaving the rest of the synth’s architecture (which is impressive but Kubik has a very solid synth architecture to fill them out. much more traditional) to the end. The synth’s oscillators feed a multimode resonant filter and Each of Kubik’s two oscillators plays back a waveform that is creat- an output effects chain with two multieffects plus standed by additive synthesis, where a number of sine waves are added alone eq, compressor, tremolo, vibrato, and stereo widentogether to make a more complex waveform. The user can set the rel- er. You can use ring modulation, FM, phase distortion, ative levels and phase relationships of up to 64 sine waves (partials). and other techniques to further alter the oscillators’ tone. Additive synthesizers have been around for decades; the most famous There are a lot of modulation sources for the synth were the Kawai K5 and the high-end Synergy. architecture: eight multistage loopable envelopes and But that’s not all Kubik’s oscillators can do. Each oscillator can have eight LFOs with very complex waveform operations, plus a Wave-Set, which is an ordered list of these waveforms, up to 64 of a powerful modulation routing system, two 16-step modthem. The waveforms in a Wave-Set can be anything the user likes; ulation sequencers with a graphical interface, and an XY small variations of one another, or radically different sounds. If desired, pad whose motions can be recorded and played back to you can scan through the Wave-Set, causing the output to smoothly control parameters in real time. morph from waveform to waveform, creating sounds that evolve in time Kubik is relatively CPU-light; I was hitting 25% load with dramatically changing harmonics. This is precisely the technique under Ableton Live on my test MacBook (2 GHz Core 2 made famous by the PPG Wave synths of the early 1980s. Duo) with two-fisted chords of fairly complex patches, so You can imagine that individually drawing 64 waveforms and pop- you should be able to run several instances before you’ll ulating a Wave-Set by hand could drive you bonkers, but Kubik has need to freeze or render your audio. Installation is very some fantastic shortcuts. Like the original PPG, it can start with a small simple. Just remember to have your serial number handy, number of waves in a Set and “fill in the gaps” between them by mor- as Kubik will ask you to paste it in when you first launch phing from, say, a wave in slot 1 to a different wave in slot 32 to a your DAW after installation. third different wave in slot 64. Kubik even offers a fun resynthesis Additive synthesis isn’t for everyone; if you get into option where you can have it analyze a sampled audio file and try to the nitty-gritty details, it can be very time-consuming create a Wave-Set that mimics the audio file’s sound over time. I had and occasionally frustrating. Kubik goes a long way a blast with this; it did an okay job accurately imitating simple sounds toward easing this pain with user-friendly shortcuts, an like solo string notes or flutes but created truly bizarre textures when easy-to-navigate and beautiful interface, and perhaps fed things like voice samples. most importantly for the newcomer, hundreds of useful And that’s not all! Once you have a Wave-Set in place, you can presets from thick evolving pads to bell sounds, electric scan through the set forwards and backwards using envelopes, or pianos, and much more. Check out the audio examples have the waves play back in an arbitrary order using the Wave and demo versions at the ConcreteFX website and see Sequencer. It lets you plot out, step by step, which wave will play, for if this unusual approach to sound creation clicks with how long, and set each step’s pitch, volume, pan, and filter frequen- your creative muse. cy, and how smoothly one step will blend into the next. Parts of the sequence can be Delivery: Web download looped, you can insert pitch glides Format:VST for Windows XP/Vista/7 (32 or 64 bit);VST/AU for Mac OS X 10.4+ between steps, and decide if the sequence Copy protection: Serial number will sync across all notes played or be Licensing: single user/multiple non-simultaneous computer installs; uniquely timed for each note. The Wave no royalties on music created with the plug-in Sequencer is reminiscent of the Korg Documentation: PDF manual available from website Wavestation’s, although its steps play back Price: $75 single waves rather than samples. More from: ConcreteFX, www.concretefx.com. Starting with the fantastically complex evolving sounds these oscillators create,
RECORDING APRIL 2011

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Recording - April 2011

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