- When Native Instruments announced their new instruments for Komplete 10, the one that left me scratching my head was Rounds. The modern user interface, while attractive, doesn't exactly make it clear what the instrument is about at first glance. Outside of reminding me of the game Simon, the purpose of Round's prominent circular structures remained a mystery until I got my hands on the instrument. After a few tests, and a thorough read of the manual, it became clear that there was indeed something innovative on offer.
Despite the somewhat complex front panel, the core of Rounds is a four-voice synthesizer. Those four voices can be played by two different sound engines: a two-oscillator subtractive "analog" engine and a three-oscillator FM "digital" version. The architecture of these engines is fairly straightforward—in each case you get a multimode filter, a single LFO, an AD filter envelope and an ADSR amp envelope. Each engine has sends for delay and reverb, the pair of global effects found in Rounds. While this may seem a bit utilitarian, especially when compared to Kontour's impressive array of effects, there's more than meets the eye with these. The delay can be configured to use either classic or grain algorithms, and the reverb reportedly uses some brand new DSP exclusive to Rounds. There's quite a bit of room for sound design in these two engines, and when you're happy with your creation, you can save up to eight sounds for each synth engine within a given snapshot (Reaktor-speak for "preset").
Even as a regular four-voice instrument, the synth in Rounds would be enough to impress. But that would be missing the point. What really sets Rounds apart is the Voice Programmer, its innovative sequencer. This is the main panel prominently featured in the Reaktor UI views, consisting of eight segmented circles. NI calls them Sound Blocks, and the four individual segments found in each of these are called Sound Cells. The main purpose of the Voice Programmer is to give you the means to sequence and morph between the sounds you've designed using the two synth engines. As stated before, you can have up to 16 sounds at hand to play with here, and you can slot them into the Sound Cells by clicking and dragging.
Once you've got some sounds assigned to cells in the Voice Programmer, you'll notice that when you send MIDI notes to Rounds it rotates through those sounds in different ways. The main two settings that Rounds uses to determine what sound to play at what time are Voice Mode and Progress Mode. You can set the value of each of these via the UI elements that sit above the Sound Blocks. The Voice Mode selector is the one at the top, and it provides a menu of five icons that determine how notes are routed within a single Sound Block. This is where, for example, you can tell Rounds to rotate through the four cells clockwise, playing a different cell with each note received. Or maybe you'd rather have it play all of the cells in a layered fashion for each note received. Next to the icons there's also a poly-mode selector that lets you tailor the Voice Mode further with respect to how it should handle incoming chords.
Below the Voice Mode icons is the selector-based menu for Progress Mode. To understand what this does, you first need to realize that only one Sound Block can be active at a time. Progress Mode essentially lets you choose which one is active at any time. The sequence of Sound Block activation is always left to right, starting with Sound Block A and ending with Sound Block H before looping back to the beginning. You can base timing on the number of notes received, the number of clock cycles passed or a combination of the two (sequencer steps triggered by incoming notes). No matter what choice you make, you can tell Rounds to always reset back to Sound Block A on each bar (or number of bars) to keep things in line.
Each of the eight individual Sound Blocks can be disabled by clicking their letter labels, which causes the Voice Programmer to skip over them, allowing you to create polyrhythms or new variants of your melodic sequence. If you want more hands-on control, you can also enable and disable Sound Blocks (and Cells) via a specific octave on a MIDI keyboard. This is where the integration with NI's Kontrol S keyboards really shines, as the LED indicators above this octave gives you helpful visual feedback of what's going on.
Hopefully you're now understanding what's at the core of Rounds: the ability to sequence and play multiple presets or sound variations of a nice-sounding synth. Once I grasped that I was immediately reminded of one of my favorite hardware instruments, the Elektron Analog Four, which also has four voices. Some might find that, as with the Analog Four, there's a learning curve with Rounds. The Voice Programmer controls are not immediately intuitive, and even with a few sessions under my belt I had to revisit parts of the manual to re-establish exactly how things worked. There are some more advanced tricks that I didn't have time to get to in this review that add to the possibilities and complexity of Rounds, like the ability to morph between adjacent sound cells of the same engine type. The ample preset library that's included will be enough to satisfy many people, but if you're willing to spend some time learning the instrument, you'll be rewarded with a tool that can do things that others can't.
Ratings:
Cost: 4.4
Versatility: 4.4
Sound: 4.6
Ease of use: 3.5