Audio Damage - Basic

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  • If you've been paying attention to Audio Damage recently, you're probably aware that they've released quite a lot of hardware—a marked contrast to the software that put them on the map. It was a bit of a surprise earlier this month to see them announce the release a new software synth called Basic. In a blog post, Chris from Audio Damage explained that the inspiration for Basic was twofold. Primarily, they wanted to create a straightforward three-oscillator software synth that could be used in an educational setting as well as in the studio. This was reportedly spurred on by a professor's request, and after some research they concluded that there was indeed a gap in the market for this kind of plug-in. Reading between the lines, it seems that a secondary motivation was to hone their chops in the art of subtractive synth DSP in preparation for a possible future hardware instrument. Audio Damage removed DRM from all of their installers in April, so installation is as easy as it gets. Once you fire up your DAW and create an instance of Basic, you're greeted with a very well-designed GUI where every parameter is up front—there is no navigation necessary, no menus to dive into. The center of the plug-in's GUI catches the eye first. There you'll find an in-motion, three-dimensional representation of Basic's envelopes and LFO, with the changes being indicated by the shapes evolving through time. This feels reminiscent of the 3D display in Native Instruments' Razor, except with more of a concentration on control rather than tone. The difference between filter and amplitude envelopes can be a tricky thing to grasp for students and producers learning synthesis, so this was a design choice that should yield some functional benefits to go along with the eye-candy. Basic features three wavetable oscillators, which means that in the place of pure mathematics there is a very short sample at the heart of the sound generation. All three can be tuned up or down one octave, and they each offer the same choice of six different wave shapes sampled from hardware synths. First is the triangle wave, taken from a Minimoog. An Oberheim SEM was used to sample the sawtooth wave as well as three different pulse waves (20%, 80% and a 50% square wave). The last of the shapes is a nasty one (in a good way: it's all teeth and high-end grit) one called Digigrit, which was sampled from a late '80s digital synth. Finally, there is a noise generator that can be mixed together with the output of the oscillators. Two more advanced synthesis techniques on subtractive synths are pulse width modulation and oscillator sync. Basic offers the latter, with oscillators 2 and 3 able to sync to oscillator 1 by way of the sync button found in the gap between the oscillator UI elements. PWM is a curious omission—especially for a synth designed for educational purposes—but understandable due to the sample-y roots of the oscillator architecture. The LFO in Basic is capable of an admirably wide range of speeds (0.01-100 Hz), and as such can be used for amplitude modulation or limited frequency modulation. It's safe to say that even with the omission of PWM, there's still an impressive amount of sonic potential built into Basic. After the oscillators, the signal path travels through a pair of cascaded filters based on the legendary Korg MS-20 filter design. Unlike the MS-20, though, which has fixed high-pass-to-low-pass routing, both filters in Basic can be switched between three topology options: low-pass, band-pass and high-pass. As expected, each filter also has controls for frequency and resonance, and yes, they will self-resonate at high res settings (which also starts to distort the signal in a lovely way). Finally, each filter has a set of sliders that control the amount of modulation to apply to the filter frequency for the LFO, the filter envelope and the velocity of incoming MIDI notes. The only minor downside here is that modulation (outside of the LFO) is always additive, meaning that if you have a high filter frequency value, the effects of any modulation will be negligible. To keep things simple, Basic has fixed envelopes for the filter and amp, respectively. These are the usual ADSR, with dials to set the attack, decay, sustain and release values. The amp envelope has two extra controls; the velocity slider sets the amount of effect that incoming MIDI note velocity has on the envelope amount and the retrig button that switches legato mode on and off. More than once, I found myself wishing for a way to set the filter envelope to retrig as well, but I assume there was a reason for that design. I had a great time testing Basic out. The manual (which also serves as a nice, brief introduction to subtractive synthesis) suggests that it is touchscreen-ready, but I also found it easy to create my own Automap plug-in template so that every control was at my fingertips on my trusty old Novation Remote SL (this is done through host automation, since Basic doesn't have any MIDI-learn capability). With that in place, Basic transformed that little MIDI keyboard into a nicely playable monosynth. The sound is powerful and feels alive despite being based on samples rather than analog-modeled. As a plug-in, they've achieved a good mix of immediate accessibility, affordability and sound. If my earlier hypothesis turns out to be true and Basic spawns a hardware descendant in the future, it should be a hit. Ratings: Cost: 4/5 Sound: 4.5/5 Versatility: 3.5/5 Ease of use: 4/5
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