heikeghost's Reviews

Dead Before It's Time

I learned about Enzyme through an interview with OPN, who characterized it as grey and toxic. It's one of the few synths to utilize the incredibly confusing and complex method of sound generation called "Scanned Synthesis". I still have yet to figure out how it works, and there's probably a reason it's not more common due to it's complexity. What made Enzyme so great though for sound design is it's randomize function. You don't really need to know how Enzyme works to get cool, aggressive, cutting, sounds out of it. Overall, it was just a really cool and unique synth that sadly died before it's time.

Powerful Modular Physical Modeling/Granular Synthesis; Taxing on the CPU

Madrona Labs is one of my favorite plugin companies. So far they only have 3 plugins, but all of them are extremely unique and fun to use, Kaivo being my favorite. At it's core Kaivo is an 8 voice granular synth that runs into a gate,resonator, and then convolution effect that simulates the body of various instruments. Kaivo has 8 different types of resonators: metal string, nylon string, gut string, small chime, medium chime, large chime, small spring, and large spring; and 4 body profiles: large wooden box, small wooden box, metal plate, and frame drum. What makes Kaivo great for sound design is it's 5 modulation effects (a sequencer, a 2d LFO, a noise generator, an envelope, and a looping envelope) and that every voice used has separate modulators (meaning you can run 8 sequencers all at different rates, with a different amount of and offset for every independent voice).

The downside to Kaivo is it's a hungry plugin with a huge CPU cost (not surprising when it's almost like running 8 instances of a powerful synth in parallel), but the ability to make unique unique and bizarre sounds might be worth the cost. My recommendation is run it in separate sound design sessions or to exercise your DAW's freeze function often while using it.