Recording - June 2013 - 59

Use and sound
As with any complex software instrument, there is a bit of a
learning curve with Spark Vintage, but all in all it can be as complex or deep as you want it to be. I have been using it for a few
months to add textural rhythms alongside my acoustic drumming
on my church’s worship team, as well as in the studio to add vintage-flavored drum sequences to electronic and indie rock
tracks... and even with all that experience behind me, I still feel
like I am just getting my feet wet.
Soundwise, I feel it’s pointless to argue about how close it is or
is not to the real boxes it emulates. To me it does a superb job of
implying the original flavor of said boxes, but the true joy of this
plug-in lies in the mix and match of sound creation. The effects are

Tone2 Saurus

a nice added touch; they’re fairly rudimentary from a controllability standpoint but by and large they sound quite good.
My favorite drums of the bunch? My hands-down winners are
the CR-78 (a Holy Grail piece of mine) and the similarly minimal Micromatix which is based on some vintage Soviet boxes.
Being the apparently vintage-aged geek that I am, I also found
it cool to return to a drum machine I used a lot in the ’90s, the
sample-based Roland R8.
The best way to wrap up this review is... Hey, you get all this for a
hundred bucks! It doesn’t matter if you’re starting from scratch as I did
or if you already have a Spark controller in your studio. If you want
to feed your vintage-drumbox jones all in one fell swoop, then Spark
Vintage Drum Machines is a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned.

By Mike Metlay
You can play Saurus in mono (with or without legato/glide),
16-voice poly, or “OldPoly8”, where retriggering a note uses
the same voice with a “soft” envelope reset. This is very similar
to how old hardware analog polysynths retriggered and has a
distinctive articulation that us Old Guys love. You can double or
quadruple the number of voices per keypress with the 2x/4x
Unison control. Another interesting tweak is Boost, a psychoacoustic “louder-sounding without actually being louder” control—lifted, I suspect, from the AkustiX plug-in.

Tone2 has been busy since our last review (AkustiX, April
2012)—there are two new virtual instruments in the arsenal that
have been garnering a lot of attention. We’ll be coming back to
the newest arrival, RayBlaster, in a detailed review in a future
issue, but for now we’d like to quickly draw your attention to
another gem in the Tone2 crown: a modeled analog synth called
Saurus. “Saurus” implies “dinosaur”, which I guess is a good
thing when discussing analog synths, but the implementation and
sound of this synth are very modern when they want to be.
The basics
Saurus follows a basic analog synth design framework: two
oscillators, each with its own sub-oscillator, through a multimode
filter, then an effects chain. The two main oscillators offer 8
waveforms, which can be morphed into different waveshapes
using the PWM control (which acts like “real” Pulse Width
Modulation for the Square wave, and as a “morph” control for
the others). Waveforms can be dirtied up and made more realistic with FM or AM noise modulation, oscillator sync, ring modulation, and an Oscillator Drift control.
The filter includes six modes (including Notch and Formant filtering) with overdrive, feedback, FM, and its own envelope.
Built-in effects include chorus, reverb, delay, and tube warmerupper; the amplitude section has a loudness envelope and master pan/volume controls.
On the control/modulation side of things, there are two synchable LFOs with phase control and freerun capability, an assignable Aux envelope, a stepped gate and flexible arpeggiator, and
a 15-routing modulation matrix with a fair number of options—
you can’t assign any MIDI CC number you want, but there are
lots to choose from already. One cool thing about the modulation
matrix is that there are optional modifiers that can be added to
routings—you can filter, square, square-root, or limit a source
value before sending it to a destination, to create a different control response. This effect is often subtle but very musical.

In use
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with virtual analog synths
ever since the first hardware versions came out in the 1990s;
they offer more control and reproducibility than traditional analog designs, but they often sound harsh or tweezy. Saurus, therefore, came as a pleasant surprise, with a rich clear timbre that
didn’t get tiring to my ears.
I should also mention that Tone2 sells an optional soundset for
Saurus as well. Simply called “Analog”, it has a lovely collection of rich and evocative leads, pads, string sounds, arpeggiation patterns, effects, and more. If you’re more interested in finding well-crafted sounds in a hurry than in rolling your own, or if
you love being inspired by other programmers’ work, it’s a
good investment to expand on Saurus’s palette.
One thing Saurus has going for it with respect to other currentgeneration analog modeling synths is CPU efficiency. On an
older Core 2 Duo MacBook running Mac OS X 10.6.8 and
Ableton Live 9, I could get a 12-note chord in a patch with 4x
Unison mode set (48 voices) with the CPU load meter hovering
at about 68%. You’ll want to freeze any tracks that have a lot of
polyphony when using an older computer, but this is still very
usable, and modern quad-core (or bigger) machines shouldn’t
have any issues at all.
There’s not a lot else to say, other than “go get the demo and
hear it for yourself”. Saurus is a worthy contender in the virtualanalog world, and its straightfoward design and luscious sound
had me returning to it again and again. Viva la dinosaur!
Delivery: Web download only
Formats: Windows Me/XP/Vista/7/8 32/64-bit stand
alone or VSTi; Mac OS X 10.5+ (PPC or Intel)
32/64-bit AU or VSTi
Copy Protection: watermarked keyfile
Licensing: single user/multiple installs
Documentation: PDF user manual
Prices: Saurus, $119; Analog soundset, $49
More from: Tone2, www.tone2.com
RECORDING June 2013

http://www.tone2.com

Recording - June 2013

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