Recording - December 2014 - 49

sound categories and a customizable mapping of MIDI Program Change messages to
the patches of your choice. Eight favorite
patches can be quickly accessed from four
front-panel M buttons.
If all this sounds kind of cramped, well, it
can be. But GForce provides a final touch for
users of small laptops and larger monitors:
you can select one of three different UI layouts from tiny to enormous: 840, 1024, or a
whopping 1600 pixels wide.
Having fun
Synth-heads will be overjoyed at the
many possibilities in impOSCar2's new layout. The oscillators alone can keep a tweaker occupied for days! In addition to standard triangle, sawtooth, pulse, and square
waves, there are powerful Pulse Width
Modulation options (present on the original
but now individually controllable in version
2) and waveforms like Full Organ,
Harpsichord, Gritty, Random, and of course
the User Waves. Audio can be input from
an external source in your DAW through
either oscillator, or chosen to replace the
white/pink noise source that's blendable
with the oscillators.
Setting controls to be modulated by the
mod wheel, aftertouch, or an expression
pedal is as easy as clicking a colored square
by the control. For some reason, selecting
expression pedal requires holding down the

Alt (on a PC)/Option (on a Mac) key while
clicking, rather than simply cycling through
the options. The color coding is easy to
remember: white for mod wheel, red for aftertouch, blue for envelope 1, green for envelope 2, yellow for expression.
The filters are worth a special mention
of their own. It's easy to understand how
to combine them in different ways, they
sound glorious, and the Separation control (a carryover from the original) lets
you create dual-peaking filter contours for
added harmonic complexity.
Every programming session reveals new
tricks, from learning the difference between
summing an envelope and LFO vs. multiplying them (impossible to describe in words,
easy to hear when you try it) to setting up
Glide Spread, where portamento times are
slightly different for every voice and produce
massive, ever-changing pitch sweeps.
There's a special MIDI Control Change
mode with Learn capability. In this mode
you can assign virtually every parameter
to a MIDI message (there are over 100 of
them) by clicking their L (for Learn) buttons, or use the preset mapping that
comes installed; it gets kind of bizarre
when you realize that you can even modulate stuff like deciding which controls are
being modulated!
And speaking of MIDI, I wouldn't be me
if I didn't yell from the rooftops about the

new version's beautiful support of both
Channel Pressure (monophonic aftertouch)
and Key Pressure (polyphonic aftertouch)
messages. This adds a huge level of expressiveness to playing impOSCar2 and makes
it feel more like a musical instrument than a
piece of software.
Summing up
If you've ever played impOSCar (or a
real OSCar, rare and precious though they
are these days), impOSCar2 will instantly
sound comfortingly familiar. It won't be
until you start playing with features like the
ring modulator, dual PWM controls, audio
inputs, and other new additions that you'll
start to hear how this new instrument greatly expands on the original's potential while
honoring its vintage sound.
If you've never played impOSCar, get out
there and try impOSCar2 (there's a demo
on the GForce website) and discover its possibilities for yourself. impOSCar2 has been
out for a good while and I'm glad to finally
bring it to your attention; as an homage to
vintage gear, as an improvement on the
original, and as a virtual instrument all on its
own, it's simply fantastic.
Price: $189
More from: GForce Software,
www.gforcesoftware.com

http://www.gforcesoftware.com http://www.realtraps.com http://www.realtraps.com

Recording - December 2014

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