Quote:
Originally Posted by sentokan  Does anyone know any good additive synthesis hardware synths? |
Long story cut short, there are but they are not a good idea .
Additive like it or not needs a mouse. Its not substractive and not even fm.
Editing even 32 partials , is a huge pain with buttons and menus , even knobs. While with the mouse, with just a simple move you can draw as many partials as you want.
Second reason is that soft synths have gone light years ahead of hardware counterparts. Most importantly they do sample resynthesis, that hardware does not do. With the exception of neuron maybe .
I was lusting for a proper additive synth for a long time, I even bought a cheap k5r , but I quickly realised that for partial editing I needed a mouse. Editor for k5r came to mind at first but then I was rethinking going back to Chameleon 5000.
And then I read somewhere that Alchemy was a sequel to chameleon. I knew Alchemy but I though it was an omnisphere clone, rompler with synthesizer abilities.
But I found out that its far from that. Actually alchemy does not only do additive but also spectral and graintables. Spectral is alot of fun , works similar like additive but you actually paint coloration that Alchemy translates to sound, it can even use image files. Its super cool. You can draw lines, paint circles, copy paste part of your image or use your own custom brushes all of them translating into sound texture.
Now Additive concerned it offers a mind blowing 600 partials, each partial has its own , amp , pitch and phase multipoint envelope. So we are talking about extremely flexible/powerful partials here. Meaning that the envelop may have as many points as you like, there is even a detail knob that make it dead eays to suplify your envelop so that you can make broad changes, you dont lose points , you just make broader changes. Alchemy with these envelops can resynthesize even moving highly complex sounds, it works pretty well for instance with human voice, or just any crazy sample you may find. Its possible to use combined additive and spectral , spectral is better at noisy non harmonical samples and sounds.
Also the synth is dead easy to use , it offers loads of tools that simplify the process that traditional additve hardware synths can only dream of. If you seriously thinking additive I will say to save your money and buy Alchemy with a good midi controller , like a novation remote, Alchemy has many virtual knobs that are all midi assignable.
Another cool thing about the synth is the random functionality , it uses templates so instead of making completely random results it makes sounds tha make perfect sense and are extremely usable, so if you are in a big hurry , pressing one button and choosing the right template is all you need to make your sound. You can then jump in and edit any of the 600 partials you want. Or use all 5 engines at the same time (additive, spectral, VA, graintable and sampler) . Each sound is made up to 4 sound sources , each source may use any one of the engines with the exception of additive and spectral that can be used together combined.
Alchemy can also do graintable, it has a VA engine and is also a regular sampler. All engines support multisample SFZ files which can even be used for resynthesis. There is also some crazy routing inside, there are filters inside the source, filters outside the sources and even filters as effects. There is an extremely deep mod matrix that can do crazy thing but unlike other mod matrixes is again completely knod driven and all those knobs can be midi assignable. There multiple point enevelops that can have an infinite amount of points. There is a sequencer and a arpeggiator, actually if I am not mistaken there 16 for each and they can be used as modulation sources. There is a perfomance section that you can use to make map modulation routing, there are 2 XY pads and one pad that can go through 8 vraitions of your sound. The source can do crossfading but also real morphing between themselves and all of this can be mapped to the perfomance section. The effects also are very good, as Camel Audio used to sell them seperately and I think it still does. And the list goes on and on and on. If alchemy was a hardware synth would cost around 6000 euros easily.
It is the first soft synth I have ever bought, and the only soft synth I use.
I use it to spice up my Andromeda , and it work like a charm, bringing textures that are very difficult and time consuming to do with andromeda or any va/analog out there in matters of minutes.
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various old roland synths and a smattering of modules and drum machines 
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