Recording - January 2016 - 48

The Edit page lets you balance the levels of
the two Layers in a preset, turn five effects on
and off for each, and blend them with two
effects buses for global processing. Once
again, all effects settings are preloaded and
you only have the option of turning them
on/off and adjusting their bus levels. Note that
every preset will have different assigned parameters. Some won't have parameters assigned
to all of the Easy Knobs and XY pads, and
many only use one global effects bus rather
than two... whatever the preset demands.
The scrollable/lockable keyboard is surrounded by pitch and mod wheels, transport
controls for use with Inter-App Audio, a
tempo selector for arpeggios and sequences,
and four buttons marked Menu, Scale,
Chord, and Hold. The Menu button brings
up a list of internal settings, registration information, and recent news announcements
(keep an eye out for promotions, discounts,
and upgrades). Scale lets you choose key
and scale type; unlike some apps, which
remove out-of-mode notes, SynthMaster
Player just highlights the appropriate keys
with grey dots. This can be bad (if you have
thick fingers) or good (if you like passing
tones). Chord brings up a set of chord types
that can be played with one finger, and
Hold lets you choose to latch a single note
or an entire chord.
It seems petty to gripe about anything in
an app that starts out free and gives you so
much for so little extra outlay, but I will mention a few items that I think could be
improved. I won't say much about the very
limited MIDI Learn implementation, since
KV331 Audio has already announced full
assignment of all parameters in a forthcoming update. The user interface could use a
bit of polish: the "dot matrix" font for patches is hard to read, and there are a few
gotchas that can confuse newcomers until
they get used to them-for example, there
are Arpeggiator on/off buttons for each
Layer in every preset, but if the preset wasn't
programmed with arpeggiation turned on,
they won't do anything. Recorded XY pad
movements are global to all presets; the
Store button doesn't save them with your
own tweaks, although static XY settings store
perfectly.
The patch browser can also be frustrating.
A fully loaded app has over 3000 presets in
it, and there's no way to tag favorites or
organize your own hierarchy other than a
48

RECORDING January 2016

blanket "My Presets" bank where you can rename and save patches you like. If
you own SynthMaster for your main computer, you can create and organize
your own banks and download them to the iPad app, but at least some deeper
organization on the iPad itself would be nice. Otherwise, be ready to rename
and save every single preset you ever want to find again!
That's all minor stuff, however. The real love in this app went into its sounds,
and those organizational glitches are trivial as long as the sounds are good...
and boy, are they ever good! Keep an eye on the CPU meter in the patch display as you use SynthMaster, because it will work your iPad hard... I was getting 40% and higher loads on some patches, even on my iPad Air 2. But that
CPU load translates into sounds that wouldn't be out of place on a hardware
synth costing hundreds of dollars. There's motion, liveliness, and a huge variety
of sonic possibilities (weighted toward EDM, but that's not a huge surprise)... a
significant chunk of what makes the SynthMaster DAW plug-in so well-respected
among those in the know.
If you're looking for a very inexpensive source for usable and musical keyboard and synth presets, SynthMaster Player for iPad should be among your
very first choices!

iMusicAlbum SoundScaper and FieldScaper
$8.99 each; motion-soundscape.blogspot.com

http://motion-soundscape.blogspot.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2016