Well, I’ve been biting my tongue on this one for a couple of weeks, since I got the privilege of a sneak peak. Wake up this morning and, bang, it’s out, and the music tech blogs have weighed in, more or less (here, here and here, as well as others I’m sure).

Just to be clear, what we’re talking about is Sonic Charge Synplant. As I’ve written, Sonic Charge’s brilliant µTonic (or microTonic) is a long-time digital lofi favorite. A fun, useful and versitile drum synth.

Well, the genius behind that, Magnus Lidström (he has a team as well, but I’m not sure if they actually work on the plugins or just keep the commercial/promotional side of the company going) decided to tackle the perennial and gnarly synth forum topic: Is there a new way of interacting with synthesis that doesn’t at least reference the familiar topology¹? Not new synthesis; I’ll leave it for better minds than myself what, how and why on that Gordian Knot. But a new interface. A new way of generating the sounds that doesn’t have an equivalent (more or less) in the hardware world. Even something like Zebra, which I consider one of the most smartly designed synth GUIs I’ve seen ², still under the hood relies on a fairly established synth paradigm, albeit one that is modular and flexible.

Synplant tackles the problem, erm, organically. Each sound is a seed, and utilizing its hypnotic and clever interface, you “grow” sounds. If you want to drill down and micro manage your sound, there’s the DNA screen, that presents the list of editable strands. (A nice bit of simple animation that.)

So how different is it? Well, if you approach it as you might a more conventional synth, you might find it maddening. But if you are generally open to ideas, and/or a part of composition process is equal parts intention, discovery and happy accidents, then you will probably get something out of Synplant. Aside from which, it sounds fantastic.

Anyway, it’s a pretty established fact that synth users are just preset whores, right? Especially with softsynths. Some of us use presets to get in the general ballpark, and tweak from there; sometimes we’ll spend a few hours generating sounds/learning the interface and we’ll use those ideas in our work or as the genesis for new work. And to that end, Synplant has a perfectly workable preset system (the same as microTonic’s). Perhaps not a “bread and butter” tool, but if you just want to dial up a bass or lead you can certainly use it for that.

But I’ll cop to the fact that a lot (not all or even most) of my “electronic” music is me just mucking about and coming up with shit I think sounds cool and then just throwing a lot at the canvas and seeing what sticks. Eventually (hopefully) a picture emerges and I begin a more methodical composition process. And to those ends, Synplant is really a novel and useful way of skinning the cat. And once you get generating sounds it’s pretty hard to stop.

Even better, also like microTonic, it’s very sensibly priced. If you have microTonic you get a little bit of a break on it; if you don’t you can buy a discounted bundle.

So, if you’ve ever found yourself opening up a synth and being uninspired by its architecture, or baffled by obtrusive complexity, or you rely on at least a measure of uncertainty, chance and/or chaos in your process, then I cannot recommend Synplant enough.

^{1i.e. variations on Moogs and modulars.
2Esp. with the new 2.3/2.5 updates that are coming down the pike; on that, more later.}