It's ideal for people who don't know how to operate an FM synth, but want some simple FM weirdness. It's like a slot machine for weird sounds, and for happy accidents. I wish it branched out into additive synthesis and more operators for the FM.
Madrona Labs is supposed to be coming out with something like sample resynthesis and FM-enabled additive synthesis in its Sumu synth. This assumes it ever arrives. It was due in October and they've kind of shifted ETA forward a few times apparently. It was 'announced' in 2018. It's now due sometime this month (Dec. 2023).
The Genopatch processing is full on CPU. It is not recommended to use it in a live set. You can see the computations by clicking the i button on the right corner of the sample preview. I can tell that your CPU is more potent than mine by just watching it. What I do with Synplant is, 1.) get a good starting sound. 2.) click on the seed in the middle (now the sound is cloned to every branch in it's initial state. 3.) use the Modwheel while testing every note. Every branch morphs into a different sound while doing this 4.) select the note (branch), which morphs in an interesting way. 5.) pull back the modwheel and right-click on the chosen branch 6.) choose clone selected branch You will have a sound, which has the same morph-characteristics on every note. Go wild with the modwheel while playing a melody. It's a fun way to get nice results easy.
I see it as starting point with sounds that you are inspired by, not so much to emulate, but to extend the sound as a synth. Live sampling the iterations and remangling is part of my workflow as I love sampling . Just as one would take a breakbeat to get a groove going and layer it with sn, kicks, filtering etc. I would like it to have an additional digital oscillator/sampler was part of the re-synthesis. I really like it 👾
Very good points for sure. A cool thing for me is the branching feature with the geno patch as a starting point. You can get a whole bunch of different tones for each note rooted in the initial interpretation to quickly explore or even keep the diversity as is for interesting composition. As a person who doesn't like sound design as much as exploring what I hear in front of me to use for music, this is a great tool. Pricey, yeah, explodes my computer, yeah, but man have I had fun with it!
I reminds me a bit when the first plugins came out back in the day that recreated analogue outboard like a Fairchild for example. I remember (over)using the TDM Fairchild plug as I loved how it sounded. And then you had loads of people comparing it with the real hardware (which I also used on many occasions) and saying it's not the same thing. I couldn't care less as it did the trick I wanted it to do. For me it's the same here. I have been using Synplant extensively for weeks now. Putting all these 1 wav samples I gathered around and sample synths patches I loved over the years. I love the musically of the 'trees' where Synplant offers you all these variations. And funny enough, most of the time I prefer one of those variations he offeres over the original sample. I don't really care whatever Synplant does under the hood or if is sound 100% similar as the original. What makes me blown away is the musicality of what it's doing. It's so surprising(ly good) and I don't care about A/B-ing (anything). It's so amazing what it spits out and it's so usable and inspiring. Which so overshadows the fact that you can tweak the sound into detail. I'm still blown away until this day.. (and it also found a place in my live set on day one, also because the CPU usage is so low.. incredible) My 2 cents and my longest TH-cam post ever. :-)
Genopatch is an interesting concept, and I'd love to see it implemented with a more capable (additive/spectral) synthesis engine under the hood. Synplant is a great synth in its own right, though. Excellent for glitchy FM oneshots and forest psytrance atmospheres (once drenched in reverb). It's also great for melodic sounds rich in character, as well
I agree with this... genopatch is a great start, but I can't wait til it has more synthesis capabilities. Even for FM one-shots... this video shows some examples where it makes a sad facsimile, probably because it only is 2op FM. Even for 2op, I prefer the sounds coming out of the Nonlinear Labs C15. But I'd love this as 4op, with additive resynthesis (or you could call it "spectral" if there are enough partials🤣), which should be more straightforward to translate from analysis to recreation, vs with FM synthesis.
I agree with both of you, it's really a great concept and while some of the FM stuff from it was decent, With some setup you can get vital to generate indefinite amounts of those almost instantaneously as samples. I'd love to see just a bit more versatility in the synth engine to be able to create slightly richer sounds, but it's not bad for it's technical specs - but I don't see the $150 value personally
@@DashGlitch totally understandable perspective! I already had (and got lots of use from) synplant 1, so the the upgrade was a no brainer for me. Doubt I would have bought in at $150 for the current feature set relative to some other synths, but I do like what synplant is good at, namely, quickly generating unique sounds. Genopatch has potential as well. I like to feed it stuff I know it won't be able to reproduce. Pretty interesting for vocal samples and complex sounds. The results are not always close matches, but they're often interesting in their own right.
...I mean I don't think additive resynthesis really requires technology like Genopatch, right? Additive synths from 20+ years ago can resynthesize far larger portions of farr more complex audio farrr more faithfully than Synplant 2. If you want that kinda thing it's out there already, and I'm not sure that Genopatch could improve it much. I think the novelty of Genopatch is that it brings that type of workflow to a vastly different (and limited) type of synthesis. The "imperfect" recreation is where the charm lies for me. (It would be cool with other synths and synthesis types, but some additive synths are already practically samplers, sans ML and sans Genopatch.)
I've got some great sounds out of it, but i've never got them by getting it to create from a sample. I generate random seeds until it inspires me and the best part for me is that it will get me to a point I would never have done deliberately - either with Synplant or another synth. I agree that it's not great with certain sounds fed into it and the UI could do with some work, but I'm all for the inspiration it's been feeding me.
I'll have to disagree on this one. I'm not sure I understand why you would want this tool to recreate the exact same sound that you feed it? If it's so good as it is, you should use the original sound? The way I see this tool is it's always going to create a ''slighly off'' clone of what you fed it and that's where it gets interesting. Also if you start tweaking the seeds and branches that's where it get crazy.
I'm not saying it's a bad tool, like I said a few times in the video, it's nice but I have a few criticisms. Mainly the GUI, Price and usability within my personal workflow. The recreation part I guess is more in response to a lot of talk about it being able to do exactly that. I've seen a lot of people saying it can "recreate any sound" and other stuff like that.
@@DashGlitch I see. I've not watched a lot of videos about this beside making my own experiment on it so I don't what's the ''word on the street'' but yeah anybody who try to recreate stuff is indeed missing the point of Synplant.
@@DashGlitch I have not bought it yet but to be fair I'm in a ''I need to stop buying plugin'' diet. But I could see myself getting it at some point. The price imo is still on the fair range but I think 99$ would be better. Anyway at the risk of sounding like a cheap f**K I try to get my plugins while they are on a good deal.
Ok.. So I've obviously seen Synplant in recently suggested TH-cam videos, like everyone else. And I have an old version of Synplant somewhere, without any ai hubub. Well, I really like your channel, so I decided to watch. 11 minutes in, and you have sold me on Synplant 2! Lol. Those "generated" kick drums were very good, and now this vocal-esque weirdness is too much for me to resist. Basically, take my money, haha.
I've used synplant (v1) years ago, and it was fun for weird background sounds and really enjoyed it. Never used this one for leading sounds, but again it is fun for weird sound effects.
When you resynthesized that kick with it I actually liked a lot of the ones that came out of Synplant more than your input one. So maybe it could be argued that you don't wanna resynthesize samples to get the exact same sound out of it, but just a bunch of similiar sounds where some of them are kinda cool, maybe a little bit more interesting than the input, and then you bounce that out and use it. I find that to be quite a fast workflow, too. For mudpie-y things you could maybe use it by throwing a little sample in there, bounce it out, then throwing that bounced sample in it and bouncing some new results out, kinda recursive, you know? so you'd get an endlessly evolving train of sounds that came out of what they were before. just one of many ideas what you can do with a plugin like this and its workflow in a musical context. Lowlevel-y synths like Vital are important for precise sounddesign but I just wanna be surprised by plugins sometimes or it would just be a technical thing and not an art anymore
I agree, but I find the workflow with it for that to be a bit tedious. Why not just make a kick patch, set the note-on-random to a few parameters, and mass export/chop to drum machine. Like in the video, that takes a few minutes. It's a nice and fun synth, but I don't think it deserves the price-tag yet, I feel it needs a bit more versatility under the hood.
@@DashGlitch i've been thinking about that myself. i have a few ideas for how to improve synplant's capabilities with a custom plugin wrapper. like smth that lets you import a drumbreak n then auto-split onsets and shoves it all into individual genopatches in the background, to basically resynthesize a whole break with a single drag n drop operation. i like that synplant makes such a future and this concept possible at all, but just synplant by itself doesn't bring us there completely yet. i made a stream where i did all this from scratch lately and it was really long and unrealistically tiring for a musical jam
Yea I totally get that, and something I did mention, is that I always find myself needing extra plugins to do the things I really want with it and that brings the price into question. I'd love to see more of that kind of stuff, or just general workflow enhancement stuff in the plugin.
I usually agree to most of your conclusions but not on this one. Interestingly we share most observations about Synplant 2 but come to completely different conclusions. In first place it is not about being the most comprehensive synth. The dev itself calls the foundation of the synth simple. It is a relatively simple 2 osc synth with not so simple additions like the Genopatch and the Seed system. It is a synth that gives new ways of being creative and a one man project. And the results of the Genopatch are strongly dependent of the source, some are handled very well and results are almost identical, some not at all. But the main point is to keep you in an associative and less technical mindset. It is surely not made for adding another 100 snares your 100000 snare sample library. If you have a certain sound and you are missing something, you can use it as starting point for inspiration and since it is a system that is actually working, unique and still without any alternative on the marked (beside micromusic for Vital, which isn't working nearly as well and not very intuitive because its an external tool) i don't think its overpriced. Beatsurfings "Random" which is targeted as well on those who want to work less technical is offering only a fraction. Random is really overpriced even on sale. Yeah a separate mod matrix for Synplant 2 could be nice, but on the other side i think the idea is just two make a few changes to a otherwise good result instead of creating complex patches inside DNA on its own. I will still use other synths like Vital and Phase Plant as-well but i love Synplant 2 for its fun inspirational workflow and for certain sound Genopatch works really good most results aren't totally random at all. It is all about the ways to do things, so the same reason why you will find for any DAW reasons what makes its workflow the best. The technical advancements in synthesis are on a level where the majority of products will be distinguished by the creation process / workflow and less by having new features that will result in new unheard sounds.
My critique was less about the technology and more about how useful it actually is in practice to me, most people I know who paid for the synth haven't used it yet in a track and it's now shelved. But opinions do differ, and that's fine. I'm glad I have something different than all the other video who do say it can "recreate any sound" then they spend about a minute with it, play it in a track made up of only samples and call it a day, there's plenty of content like that too :)
@@DashGlitchI think it is also a question of style. It can recreate a certain kind of sound really good and others not so good. It works well to create atmospheric stuff, transitions etc. that matches to your track or to create transition FX based on samples. Even throwing a stereotype riser in it often creates something far more unique with the right portion of weirdness. Somehow the results often matching my taste. If you you already have a sound and you need an "answer" sound, Synplant 2 works very well to create its dystopian brother from a parallel world. So i love it what it is, more to create weird textures and sounds that matching the timbre of my track and not as a copy cat tool.
6:00 Synplant doesn't do perfect recreations. You can get pretty close occasionally, but nowhere near reliably enough for it to be considered a cloning tool. The recreation part is still useful though, because you can start with something that you might not be able to generate easily. It took me less than a minute to put an ocean wave sample into synplant and get a seemingly infinite amount of "wave like" patches out of it. Getting that kind of variation by setting up randomisations in Vital would require hours of work and planning. Synplant is a great tool that is fun to play around with, but for myself it's much too expensive for what it does.
I feel like you missed the point. Synplant has its own sound, it is not your bread and butter type of synth like phaseplant. It offers a unique workflow of sound discovery, and this is possible exactly because it has its own limits, so most of the random stuff is usable. Also I feel raw psytrance or neurofunk or other highly technical genres are not really the target audience.
Did you watch past 6 mins? Because I discuss other things like specs and gui? Not just the recreation, but when compared just as an instrument I feel the price is even more ridiculous, just my 2c
I think of Synplant more like an instrument and Vital and Phaseplant are more like tools. Synplant has its own specific way of how the user interacts with it. It's designed around experimentation and happy accidents than being a very focused collection of building blocks. Hence its emphasis on visual feedback and interactivity. Phaseplant and vital are more like tools. Much more open ended as to how you build a sound and interact with the final result. I don't look at Synplant as being a straight up mimic. I use samples to get a basic timbre and then play around with the branches in the Main UI. I rarely even use the "DNA" editor. The previous version just had random seeds so the Genopatch gives another way of directing the sound. I actually think it's exactly when you give it a sound it has no hope in replicating is where it gets really interesting.
I feel like the whole ethos of Synplant even in version 1 was about making sounds in innovative ways with less focus on skeuomorphic controls. Synplant is different, fun and innovative. That stands true in version 2 and this is what makes it fabulous.
20:32 You could use this entire sequence for a cartoon, where the coyote is bouncing off of a series of cascading metal awnings as he plummets down from the roof.
I thing it specializes at atonaloty I’m a sound designer…. Randomization with over sampling and being able to subtract elements…. I like it for mechanical sounds but I like kyma 7 for that even more ……you will have to curate it like samplebrain and Random…. Vital Cecilia 5 and wave edit and spheredit can do alot of and emissions 2 are the capable of doing similar wondrous things drum machine trick was nice Dash and would combine all of this criticism.
In terms of some of the aspects of the interface, I could see Synplant as a small part of an educational platform too. Here's a sound, any sound, and then when its algorithm tries to recreate it, Look at what parameters it used to create that. Than use those same parameters in another synth and try to recreate it. Getting sound designers started with thinking about the "DNA" of a sound.
I feel like this synth gets a lot of hype precisely because many people don't know how to actually use a synth. Also it's marketing seems to specifically target beginners, that don't know better with youtubers making videos how this is "The Best plugin ever" , "most innovative plugin", "insane AI synth" or whatever bullshit they can come up with. It is a two osc synth with the oscillators FMing each other (cross FM). If you actually read the parameters (from the intentionally hard to digest UI) you'll see all the parameters it has, that they arent actually that many. You can make something like this in reaktor, voltage modular or many other plugins that you probably already have.
I respect your opinion, but I can just say for myself that I never saw it as a tool to accurately recreate sounds to begin with. That doesnt fit to the whole idea of genomes and mutations idea that Syn"Plant" is built around. The thing with AI is also that it requires tons of data to train with, and both dry and accurately recreated versions, to take that difference between both ends to learn to infer "recreations" on never before heard sounds. So I imagine that had to be quite the daunting task already with all the parameters given, and a third operator would have added a whole new dimension of complexity to it. So I can understand if the resources were somewhat limited for that. Everything is a question of managing expectations. In my eyes, you went in with different expectations than some, and then (understandibly) were left underwhelmed with the results. A different set of questions to go into it may spark other expectations and curiosity: I think I like it for game and SFX sound design especially. Ever tried to toss in a Wilhelm's scream? Could you see the results somewhere? (What about other iconic SFX?) Game SFX? Not sure about any legal stuff behind this, but I thought it was really interesting to hear some variants of Nintendo/Smash Bros SFX.
I mentioned more criticisms beside the recreation thing, which by the way was an original hype/selling point, hence all the hype and me actually testing it
Fair criticism, however i don't get why people think it's supposed to perfectly recreate any sound. For me at least it's more about dropping the kind of sound you want to get into genopatch (kind of), and quickly check the results. You 80% of the time get either something that might fulfill the role, or on the other hand, something wild and totally off, but which inspires something else. Usually bass/lead/pad/fx is more likely to create another bass/lead/pad/fx accordingly, with similar tone if not nearly identical, but like i said, identical is boring. And for me that's the key, i can almost avoid sound design stage (with some minimal adjustments sometimes) process and quickly sketch up something in almost not time. All with one synth, and all of the sounds will be quite interesting from the get-go (ok depends on the source sound, but still). And saying that AI creates and tweaks everything for you is not a game changer, idk what is then.
Imagine if the dev/promoters said that... "That's fair, but we don't understand where on Earth people got the idea that Synplant would be able to make a very very similar synth preset out of a sample it was given to analyze, using a game changing AI feature called genopatch, so you don't have to clear the sample, and you can manipulate the sound in ways that would be impossible with just the original sample. Yeah, we're not sure who put that wacky idea into the customers' heads." We'd be like, I learned it from you, dad. Wasn't the original sponsored hype giving you that impression? You could input a sample of a sound from a commercial track, and genopatch would analyze and resynthesize it, so you could use it without clearance, and it would play across the keyboard without the artifacts of a stretched sample. That's how I remember the hype. Since it happened just now, I don't think the haze of time is making fake memories here. The hype train really got rolling, for me, with a Cuckoo vid a few months ago, before the release. Then, a bunch of the early vids were of people trying to recreate different categories of instrument sounds. They hadn't ALL misremembered what was the synth's claim to fame. Synplant is good for what it can do, but they definitely did sponsor some extraordinary hype, and that's why people think it's supposed to recreate samples into patches, not perfectly, but closely enough that you would substitute the patch for the sample. If most people WOULDN'T be willing to make that substitution most of the time, because the resynthesis couldn't get close enough, then the feature shouldn't be hyped for that purpose. They could call it a "radioactive sound garden" or something like that, even "genopatch", like it is, and say that it mutates new sounds based on the original sample... as long as they don't give the impression that you can lift any but the simplest sounds from your favorite records, then I've got no complaints about the marketing. The synth itself? I wish it sounded as clear as the Nonlinear Labs C15 (also 2op FM at heart). But it's amazing what it can get out of such a simple synth architecture. Wow, on that. I like lofi, nontraditional or broken versions of familiar sounds, and it's actually REALLY good at making those. Same with chromatic percussion... shaped noise is a big aspect of Synplant's synthesis that DG didn't mention as being part of the architecture... sometimes I think the AI is too heavy handed with it. Once you listen for the noise element, in the patches, you really notice it.
I like this synth because it creates weird stuff. If I like a sample, I'm just gonna use the sample. I use this synth for the weirdness it creates. Although you're right about the number of operators and stuff though. If It was more maybe it'd be cooler.
The problem it had with the psytrance bass comes from multiband processing (dispersion) which delays lower frequencies, so it recreated the same effect with an envelope like a kick... I don't think it's the matter of the analysis algorithm, just their underlying synth model cannot get closer to it in any way, as you said - 2 operator FM synth is just noth enough for most interesting sounds. :( FWIW: I love it for variations and experimentation,but agree that it's too expensive and over hyped...
I owned Synplant 1 so I got a good deal with 2, I would have never paid full price for it. I mostly bought it to get the other features like mapping synths to velocity or layering them. I agree with you, Synplant is good for randomness. If you want glitchy sounds to render down into one shots then Synplant is a useful tool for that. I will say to their credit at least the devs didn't obtain the AI data unethically, supposedly they trained it themselves on their own data, which is a lot more than what you can say about these other free "AI" plugins that came out lately.
I totally get the compulsion to prod at the limits of this tech. People do tend to get caught up in the inflated hype and surface novelty for these things, and the amount of clickbait youtubers propping it up as able to do "anything" certainly doesn't help, so I don't think this state of affairs is really Sonic Charge's fault who seem like they just want to do their own thing and have a particular target demographic of synth enthusiasts in mind. Apart from the lack of oscillators the other main bottleneck is lacking more flexible envelope matrixes. I'm sure there's a lot of logistical challenges making additional parameters work with the machine learning though. I still bought it as a general sound design tool. Some of the sounds I found it particularly good at reproducing are orchestra hit samples (so long as it's octaves and not harmonically layered chords) and old school anime sound effects (yeah, really). After a while you kind of get a feel for what it works best with.
I've seen/heard at least 10 demos/reviews of Synplant over the past 2 weeks, I haven't heard 1 sound that can't be made with many other synths. This seems to be a novelty product trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist !
It has nothing to do with ability to make sounds that no one other can come close, anyways what would be the synth that can do that? The point is re-creation of your old favorite samples to become analog, actually this is Digital to Analog conversion and it's not perfect but it functions pretty much very good in lot of cases, and I for one feel very inspired to work with it. Also, the modulation ring is just great, the whole concept is pretty much amazing.
3:23 I want a tutorial about this sound in Phase Plant. Vital would also do in a pinch. That patch is absolutely gorgeous and I immediately came up with a lot of use cases for it. Pretty please?
3 sine waves, play around with the fm amounts and octaves, done. So simple and bizarre that it can’t be done in what people are calling a game changer synth
The developer himself said that the interface is quite intentional and the whole philosophy behind it is that you have a sound that is your seed sound. You then drag the branches to get a new sound and when you hear something you like, you plant the seed. So it encourages to really use your ears and explore fun stuff without really thinking too much on what to do. It's not for everyone though
wow...thats a nice concept but its really hard to use like u said...i tried , but not much cuz of the difficulty of knowing what to do, i rather used vital or serum . but i loved the concept and looking at the seed...lol
When I heard about this synth I assumed it'd be incredibly complex... But it's only FM with only TWO operators? I think they're sitting on a lot of potential here, could easily become one of the ones to be recommended by just about anyone, it could round out your toolbelt amazingly. It could be great if it came with different analysis and recreation algorithms to choose between too. If this ever gets to the point I can throw in organic samples and it recreates that convincingly enough, letting me tweak parameters on the sound of my own voice or guitar etc., then we're talking for sure. Until then... Ehh, even Harmor from all the way back then impresses me more.
I've used it on my latest track, but just with the trial version. I've not bought the synth. It's definitely interesting in that, for me, the use case is different from other synths. In other synths I want to model sounds, and get something very precise. Synplant isn't really for that.. it's for making similar sounds, for sparking creativity, and for providing options for what sounds /could/ work as a progression of an existing idea. But yeah, I didn't buy it because the interface is just too heavily leaning in to the planet concept, which, when I'm making music I couldn't care less about. The interface actually breaks the flow somewhat for me. There are other options for resynthesis out there, e.g. Backbone, which you did videos on back in the day, but everyone appears to have forgotten about :)
I agree yea, the crazy thing is after editing and uploading this video, Backbone has been on my mind a LOT and thinking about how I could have totally mentioned it. I've been installing a bunch of stuff on the new PC so it was a nice reminder to grab that again. I think something like that is a bit more fitting of the "game changer" title indeed!
Wait till I tell you what I think of AI translation (as a professional in this particular field) 😊 I was initially very skeptical of the AI component, since there is nothing actually intelligent about what passes for AI today, it’s mostly hype and a huge new market bubble that will likely pop like all the bubbles before it. That said, “AI” as it is today clearly has its uses, and when I tried the Synplant 2 demo I grew to like what it does - specifically because it isn’t just random (as version 1 was), but because it’s a kind of directed randomness. Which, when it comes to music, is the (only) good kind of randomness, I think. I find pure randomness frustrating, because it makes me never stop clicking - if I stop, I may miss the next amazing sound that’s just a click away. (And which of course never comes). Here though I can feed Synplant a sample I like and get something derived from it - both similar and unpredictable. I was hoping to recreate a pre-1973 Vangelis pad (from “L'Apocalypse Des Animaux”), which I could never get close enough to with VST synths. I’m not a great sound designer, and I’ve no idea what instruments he used back then, but this is like my holy grail of warm, analog ambient pads. So what Synplant did with it wasn’t quite on the spot either, but it did produce a sound that has much of the quality of that old Vangelis pad, but is different in a very interesting way. The patch I got from Synplant sounds much more modern, in the dark, distortion-fest kind of way, and it turned out pretty awesome. So Synplant probably isn’t a synth for master sound designers, but for everyone else, it could be a source of sounds we wouldn’t otherwise make.
You seem to focus most of your video on the genopatch, but you missed to describe the whole heart of Synplant which is the seeds and how it generates unique sounds. How branches can be assigned to different keys etc. Sure genopatch is a cool tool, but thats not even close to what this little synth can do. I do agree on alot of things especially the tweaking of parameters which is a total nightmare. Still, a cool tool for getting random stuff quickly.
There’s lots of cool random tools around for far less than $150 tho. The reason I focused the first 1/3rd of the video on genopatch is that all those features you mentioned were already present in synplant 1
Well price can def. be discussed, but if you wish to produce unique stuff, and dont have the synth skills to manipulate wavetables, understand LFO, OSC and all that stuff, or if you are just lazy, then I have not come across a tool that is more suited, for that task then this. Sure there are alot of other tools that can generate random stuff, but often they need you to put in some effort to understand. I find that part of this synth is really great, would I pay 150$ for it, nope.
It's interesting how much this software has polarised opinions. I suspect people are expecting it to do things it's not designed to do. Despite the demos, I don't think imitating synths is the best use of it - and there's no way I would ever have expected to be able to use it to make Psytrance, for example. It's probably better for ambient genres, but honestly when I first came across it my main source of excitement was that I could get it to imitate field recordings of real world sounds, and then tweak them, blending the original recording into a version that can be modulated and played as a melody. Imagine a track that starts with, for example, the sound of wind in telephone wires, and then that morphs into a playable pad and becomes music. For me, that's the kind of application it should excel at. It's a tool whose natural home is in experimental music. As for the price... well, it might be a little bit high, sure, if you're not going to get much benefit from using it. Then again, it took a huge amount of development effort.
@@DashGlitch I haven't tried it yet, been too busy. I'm going to, though. My comments about Psytrance were only an example, not a comment about your video - just to be clear! I will try it out, and if I find a use for it I might pay the price. To be honest my budgets are getting a bit tight this year.
I find it funny that nobody seems to have discovered the randomization feature within Synplant on the main UI. This feature lets you create an unlimited amount of similar but unique sounds from the samples of the Genopatch. You can throw in a retro, Nintendo-type Chiptune sound and make an unlimited amount of similar Nintendo-type sounds with it, but no TH-camr has covered this feature. I think most just want to make a quick TH-cam video instead of actually studying the plugins they have. Anyways, if you believe that this is all this synth can do, then you are completely wrong. It can do much more than what is covered in any of the TH-cam videos.
I'm guessing you haven't seen any of my other videos right? the ones where I meticulously pick apart plugins and teach in-depth features. For example, I have posted one of the most watched videos on Vital - the free synth. After a couple of hours with this, it wasn't worth any more investigation for me. I'm glad you enjoy it, but it's not for power-users who know how synthesis works. Just my 2c as someone who has been working in the industry for decades.
@@DashGlitch Well, i'm glad that i found this one, and for me personally, it's a gem. If you pay for the plugin, you might as well use the whole plugin and try to understand it. That's my opinion, but everyone has their own approach to music, and i respect that.
synplant seems super impressive at first glance but the more you actually use it and realize what it can and can't do, its limitations really start to become apparent. especially at the price point it's at. it's like the Tesla of VST synths.
To be fair, each user's particular needs and preferences are very different from one another. The example sample you state at 3:45 as "totally useable" would be "totally unusable" for myself and the kinds of music I like to make. I have no need for such screeching type sound-effects and prefer leaning much more towards, let's say "traditional" sounds, for which Synplant's Genopatch is good at approximating. Also the "weird sounds" tag that Synplant is being often getting brandished with, is rather unfair, since the amount of randomisation is entirely at each users discretion. And since I don't personally go for the wacky Transformers-like sound-effects witiin my music, I simply use Synplant in a more tempered and controlled manner and get the kind of results I want.
To me it is more like an experimental sort of toy, not a game-changer for sure. The Bitwig's Polygrid, THAT piece of software was really something game-changing, but not Synplant 2 (or1). Don't take me wrong bro, I LIKE experimental toys (I produce hi-tech, so I like toys!)....but we have to say the things as they are in reality. ---SORRY FOR MY BAD ENGLISH MAN----
Fair review, however, I think it would be more appropriate to a) take some samples you wanted to sound design with, i.e voice, foley, and see where you coukd take it b) find some good sounds in synplant and take them further. People dig this thing even though it is not your conventional sound design workflow you are used to, it ould be good to figure out why.
I did exactly that in this video though? In the months since posting it, I've had many people let me know they did like it but also felt it was way overpriced/overhyped. It's fun sure, but not practical or anything groundbreaking imho.
Love it for exploration and experimentation. But when I know what I want, I will use other synths that are more capable of getting to that end result. It has some interesting concepts but is a very basic synth at heart. When the concepts are merged with a deeper synth engine, it will become one of the coolest synths out there. But at the speed the developer went from version 1 to this version, Synthplant will never really fully be ahead of the curb or at its full potential.
Couldn't have said it better myself, I was kind of hoping after all this time we would see something slightly more mature under-the-hood, but as far as I can tell the engine is just the Synplant 1 engine with genopatch retrofitted.
I just like it because it's weird. i dont own it yet, and am not in a hurry. But I hardly think it's "game changing" It's just fun and werid. I like their drum machine plugin. I'd get that first
I love it, it's an instant inspiration. So quickly 16 or 20 possibilities. It's like a little lab where you can play with sounds. For example, I started sampling the sound generation and then setup/sending it through granular processor. Really fun for me. I don't think that's a "Game Changer". That's what everyone who sells their products says. You lost a lot of credibility with your last plugin disater, that was a real "Game Changer" for me.
Not sure how far you watched in the video but I said it's decent when paired with other plugins to fine-tune the resulting sounds, but I was never very happy with the raw outputs - much like you said you use a granular to make the most of it, that begs to question whether the price is worth it. That price point is in the "workhorse" category and I feel it should have a few more tools built-in for us to make the most of the sounds we generate. Coincidently I also mentioned the exact video you're talking about, with regard to the "plugin disaster", and correct me if I'm wrong but the issue was resolved because of loud voices speaking up about the subscription - myself being one of those voices. Regardless, issue resolved & the community seems happy for the most part, I'm fine to put my credibility on the line to make a difference.
Cool video! This is exacatly why I feel Synplant is weird - you can't really grab the synth parameters in an easy way - and the underlying synth structre is simple. This is not capable of creating for example a six operator fm sound. This is too experimental synth, I rather like synths where the structure is simple and logical and every parameter is in reach. At a glance, Synplant is easy to use, but IMHO it comes with many disadvantages...
I am far away from really understanding how to build sounds in synths. But what I thought first when I saw this plugin: if you don’t know how to do it, it wouldn‘t be so good as you want it. Thats why I said don’t give a f*** about this plugin
I've always felt it was a gimmick despite what I read by others. I tried it, and felt the same way. I'd never use the sounds it was making. It makes some weird sounds that can sound interesting at times, but they were always harsh and unattractive.The concept is great, but it was unusable for my use.
I think its kinda gimmicky for sure, as someone who makes hitech and darkpsy. The damn thing takes forever too... i could make a better sound faster than synplant manually patching my bazille
I can't justify my verdict on this plugin as technically as you, but my experience was also underwhelming. Great plugin, nice sound, not much variability in characteristics(to me at least), as i know the sound engine doesn't really changed vs version 1 and it is overpriced. I know it's not a big company and the dev poured his heart into it probably. Still, the market is big, and the majority of producers and enthusiasts only have so much money.
it seems to me there is a basic misunderstanding of what this synth is for, what it does, and how it does it going on here. you complained about all the things that are the exact reasons people like it. like a moog fan talking about how confusing and weird buchlas are. why would you want to recreate a sound you already have? you used that sound as a sample in synplant...why? because you want more of that sound? no...why would you need that? you already have it. genopatch is not meant to recreate sounds...its meant to MIMIC a sound. mimic that sound and then morph it into an infinite amount of other sounds. you never even loaded one of those genopatch patches to hear what it actually sounded like...that sound you hear when you are auditioning them is not the whole thing. move the mod wheel...there is an entirely different sound on each key. i think maybe synplant just isnt for you...nothing wrong with that.
Please watch more than just the recreation 6 mins btw, I mention other quantifiable and not personal criticisms, and also mention that maybe it’s just me and that’s ok ;)
As a few others have said in the comments, I feel like you my have missed the point of this plug-in. The stated purpose is not to precisely recreate a given sound or sample, but as an experimental tool to develop new sounds from a seed. Whether or not you like the results is more of a subjective thing, but it does seem like a quick and easy way to generate new sounds. Definitely pricey for what it does though. That said, I appreciate you demonstrating similar sound design ideas and techniques in Vital. Great stuff!
I'm certainly not going to pull the trigger on this thing. It is a pretty neat idea though. They may need to do some more work on the interface and maybe add some more capabilities, but as you said, the concept is cool. Someone like you also has a distinct advantage in that your in-depth experience and knowledge of synthesis and sound design tools makes it fairly easy to get similar or better results using advanced synthesis techniques. I appreciate the fact that you continue to share those with us!
tbh I didn't even get that far with it until I put it on the shelf, never touched it again and now the demo period expired so I can't answer that fully, sorry
![ILLSLICK - KILLSHOT REMIX [FULL VERSION]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/RIK8RrqIAzE/mqdefault.jpg)
It's ideal for people who don't know how to operate an FM synth, but want some simple FM weirdness. It's like a slot machine for weird sounds, and for happy accidents. I wish it branched out into additive synthesis and more operators for the FM.
Well put yea
@@DashGlitch bro pls try talamasca overload intro melody lead synth
@@DashGlitch bro I'm waiting your video you do talamasca overload intro lead melody Synth yes or no tell me brother
Madrona Labs is supposed to be coming out with something like sample resynthesis and FM-enabled additive synthesis in its Sumu synth. This assumes it ever arrives. It was due in October and they've kind of shifted ETA forward a few times apparently. It was 'announced' in 2018. It's now due sometime this month (Dec. 2023).
The Genopatch processing is full on CPU. It is not recommended to use it in a live set. You can see the computations by clicking the i button on the right corner of the sample preview. I can tell that your CPU is more potent than mine by just watching it.
What I do with Synplant is,
1.) get a good starting sound.
2.) click on the seed in the middle (now the sound is cloned to every branch in it's initial state.
3.) use the Modwheel while testing every note. Every branch morphs into a different sound while doing this
4.) select the note (branch), which morphs in an interesting way.
5.) pull back the modwheel and right-click on the chosen branch
6.) choose clone selected branch
You will have a sound, which has the same morph-characteristics on every note.
Go wild with the modwheel while playing a melody.
It's a fun way to get nice results easy.
Ikr even on my 13g i7 64gb ram, but there’s a commenter who apparently does use it in live sets? Sometimes I wonder 🤣
finally someone gets it
I see it as starting point with sounds that you are inspired by, not so much to emulate, but to extend the sound as a synth. Live sampling the iterations and remangling is part of my workflow as I love sampling . Just as one would take a breakbeat to get a groove going and layer it with sn, kicks, filtering etc. I would like it to have an additional digital oscillator/sampler was part of the re-synthesis. I really like it 👾
Very good points for sure. A cool thing for me is the branching feature with the geno patch as a starting point. You can get a whole bunch of different tones for each note rooted in the initial interpretation to quickly explore or even keep the diversity as is for interesting composition. As a person who doesn't like sound design as much as exploring what I hear in front of me to use for music, this is a great tool. Pricey, yeah, explodes my computer, yeah, but man have I had fun with it!
I reminds me a bit when the first plugins came out back in the day that recreated analogue outboard like a Fairchild for example. I remember (over)using the TDM Fairchild plug as I loved how it sounded. And then you had loads of people comparing it with the real hardware (which I also used on many occasions) and saying it's not the same thing. I couldn't care less as it did the trick I wanted it to do.
For me it's the same here. I have been using Synplant extensively for weeks now. Putting all these 1 wav samples I gathered around and sample synths patches I loved over the years. I love the musically of the 'trees' where Synplant offers you all these variations. And funny enough, most of the time I prefer one of those variations he offeres over the original sample.
I don't really care whatever Synplant does under the hood or if is sound 100% similar as the original. What makes me blown away is the musicality of what it's doing. It's so surprising(ly good) and I don't care about A/B-ing (anything). It's so amazing what it spits out and it's so usable and inspiring. Which so overshadows the fact that you can tweak the sound into detail. I'm still blown away until this day..
(and it also found a place in my live set on day one, also because the CPU usage is so low.. incredible)
My 2 cents and my longest TH-cam post ever. :-)
Genopatch is an interesting concept, and I'd love to see it implemented with a more capable (additive/spectral) synthesis engine under the hood. Synplant is a great synth in its own right, though. Excellent for glitchy FM oneshots and forest psytrance atmospheres (once drenched in reverb). It's also great for melodic sounds rich in character, as well
I agree with this... genopatch is a great start, but I can't wait til it has more synthesis capabilities. Even for FM one-shots... this video shows some examples where it makes a sad facsimile, probably because it only is 2op FM. Even for 2op, I prefer the sounds coming out of the Nonlinear Labs C15. But I'd love this as 4op, with additive resynthesis (or you could call it "spectral" if there are enough partials🤣), which should be more straightforward to translate from analysis to recreation, vs with FM synthesis.
I agree with both of you, it's really a great concept and while some of the FM stuff from it was decent, With some setup you can get vital to generate indefinite amounts of those almost instantaneously as samples. I'd love to see just a bit more versatility in the synth engine to be able to create slightly richer sounds, but it's not bad for it's technical specs - but I don't see the $150 value personally
@@DashGlitch totally understandable perspective! I already had (and got lots of use from) synplant 1, so the the upgrade was a no brainer for me. Doubt I would have bought in at $150 for the current feature set relative to some other synths, but I do like what synplant is good at, namely, quickly generating unique sounds. Genopatch has potential as well. I like to feed it stuff I know it won't be able to reproduce. Pretty interesting for vocal samples and complex sounds. The results are not always close matches, but they're often interesting in their own right.
...I mean I don't think additive resynthesis really requires technology like Genopatch, right?
Additive synths from 20+ years ago can resynthesize far larger portions of farr more complex audio farrr more faithfully than Synplant 2. If you want that kinda thing it's out there already, and I'm not sure that Genopatch could improve it much.
I think the novelty of Genopatch is that it brings that type of workflow to a vastly different (and limited) type of synthesis. The "imperfect" recreation is where the charm lies for me.
(It would be cool with other synths and synthesis types, but some additive synths are already practically samplers, sans ML and sans Genopatch.)
I've got some great sounds out of it, but i've never got them by getting it to create from a sample. I generate random seeds until it inspires me and the best part for me is that it will get me to a point I would never have done deliberately - either with Synplant or another synth. I agree that it's not great with certain sounds fed into it and the UI could do with some work, but I'm all for the inspiration it's been feeding me.
I'll have to disagree on this one. I'm not sure I understand why you would want this tool to recreate the exact same sound that you feed it? If it's so good as it is, you should use the original sound? The way I see this tool is it's always going to create a ''slighly off'' clone of what you fed it and that's where it gets interesting. Also if you start tweaking the seeds and branches that's where it get crazy.
I'm not saying it's a bad tool, like I said a few times in the video, it's nice but I have a few criticisms. Mainly the GUI, Price and usability within my personal workflow. The recreation part I guess is more in response to a lot of talk about it being able to do exactly that. I've seen a lot of people saying it can "recreate any sound" and other stuff like that.
@@DashGlitch I see. I've not watched a lot of videos about this beside making my own experiment on it so I don't what's the ''word on the street'' but yeah anybody who try to recreate stuff is indeed missing the point of Synplant.
@@BlackMarvin Totally, that's why it was just a small portion of the video. Did you go further than the demo and do you think it's worth $150?
@@DashGlitch I have not bought it yet but to be fair I'm in a ''I need to stop buying plugin'' diet.
But I could see myself getting it at some point. The price imo is still on the fair range but I think 99$ would be better. Anyway at the risk of sounding like a cheap f**K I try to get my plugins while they are on a good deal.
@@BlackMarvin at $80-$99 I feel I would probably be a lot more charitable ;)
Thanks for your entertaining video, Dash!
I’ll just wait for Synplant 3
Ok.. So I've obviously seen Synplant in recently suggested TH-cam videos, like everyone else. And I have an old version of Synplant somewhere, without any ai hubub. Well, I really like your channel, so I decided to watch. 11 minutes in, and you have sold me on Synplant 2! Lol. Those "generated" kick drums were very good, and now this vocal-esque weirdness is too much for me to resist. Basically, take my money, haha.
I've used synplant (v1) years ago, and it was fun for weird background sounds and really enjoyed it. Never used this one for leading sounds, but again it is fun for weird sound effects.
When you resynthesized that kick with it I actually liked a lot of the ones that came out of Synplant more than your input one. So maybe it could be argued that you don't wanna resynthesize samples to get the exact same sound out of it, but just a bunch of similiar sounds where some of them are kinda cool, maybe a little bit more interesting than the input, and then you bounce that out and use it. I find that to be quite a fast workflow, too. For mudpie-y things you could maybe use it by throwing a little sample in there, bounce it out, then throwing that bounced sample in it and bouncing some new results out, kinda recursive, you know? so you'd get an endlessly evolving train of sounds that came out of what they were before. just one of many ideas what you can do with a plugin like this and its workflow in a musical context. Lowlevel-y synths like Vital are important for precise sounddesign but I just wanna be surprised by plugins sometimes or it would just be a technical thing and not an art anymore
I agree, but I find the workflow with it for that to be a bit tedious. Why not just make a kick patch, set the note-on-random to a few parameters, and mass export/chop to drum machine. Like in the video, that takes a few minutes. It's a nice and fun synth, but I don't think it deserves the price-tag yet, I feel it needs a bit more versatility under the hood.
@@DashGlitch i've been thinking about that myself. i have a few ideas for how to improve synplant's capabilities with a custom plugin wrapper. like smth that lets you import a drumbreak n then auto-split onsets and shoves it all into individual genopatches in the background, to basically resynthesize a whole break with a single drag n drop operation. i like that synplant makes such a future and this concept possible at all, but just synplant by itself doesn't bring us there completely yet. i made a stream where i did all this from scratch lately and it was really long and unrealistically tiring for a musical jam
Yea I totally get that, and something I did mention, is that I always find myself needing extra plugins to do the things I really want with it and that brings the price into question. I'd love to see more of that kind of stuff, or just general workflow enhancement stuff in the plugin.
I usually agree to most of your conclusions but not on this one. Interestingly we share most observations about Synplant 2 but come to completely different conclusions. In first place it is not about being the most comprehensive synth. The dev itself calls the foundation of the synth simple. It is a relatively simple 2 osc synth with not so simple additions like the Genopatch and the Seed system. It is a synth that gives new ways of being creative and a one man project. And the results of the Genopatch are strongly dependent of the source, some are handled very well and results are almost identical, some not at all. But the main point is to keep you in an associative and less technical mindset. It is surely not made for adding another 100 snares your 100000 snare sample library. If you have a certain sound and you are missing something, you can use it as starting point for inspiration and since it is a system that is actually working, unique and still without any alternative on the marked (beside micromusic for Vital, which isn't working nearly as well and not very intuitive because its an external tool) i don't think its overpriced. Beatsurfings "Random" which is targeted as well on those who want to work less technical is offering only a fraction. Random is really overpriced even on sale.
Yeah a separate mod matrix for Synplant 2 could be nice, but on the other side i think the idea is just two make a few changes to a otherwise good result instead of creating complex patches inside DNA on its own.
I will still use other synths like Vital and Phase Plant as-well but i love Synplant 2 for its fun inspirational workflow and for certain sound Genopatch works really good most results aren't totally random at all. It is all about the ways to do things, so the same reason why you will find for any DAW reasons what makes its workflow the best. The technical advancements in synthesis are on a level where the majority of products will be distinguished by the creation process / workflow and less by having new features that will result in new unheard sounds.
My critique was less about the technology and more about how useful it actually is in practice to me, most people I know who paid for the synth haven't used it yet in a track and it's now shelved. But opinions do differ, and that's fine. I'm glad I have something different than all the other video who do say it can "recreate any sound" then they spend about a minute with it, play it in a track made up of only samples and call it a day, there's plenty of content like that too :)
@@DashGlitchI think it is also a question of style. It can recreate a certain kind of sound really good and others not so good. It works well to create atmospheric stuff, transitions etc. that matches to your track or to create transition FX based on samples. Even throwing a stereotype riser in it often creates something far more unique with the right portion of weirdness. Somehow the results often matching my taste. If you you already have a sound and you need an "answer" sound, Synplant 2 works very well to create its dystopian brother from a parallel world. So i love it what it is, more to create weird textures and sounds that matching the timbre of my track and not as a copy cat tool.
6:00 Synplant doesn't do perfect recreations. You can get pretty close occasionally, but nowhere near reliably enough for it to be considered a cloning tool. The recreation part is still useful though, because you can start with something that you might not be able to generate easily. It took me less than a minute to put an ocean wave sample into synplant and get a seemingly infinite amount of "wave like" patches out of it. Getting that kind of variation by setting up randomisations in Vital would require hours of work and planning.
Synplant is a great tool that is fun to play around with, but for myself it's much too expensive for what it does.
I feel like you missed the point.
Synplant has its own sound, it is not your bread and butter type of synth like phaseplant. It offers a unique workflow of sound discovery, and this is possible exactly because it has its own limits, so most of the random stuff is usable.
Also I feel raw psytrance or neurofunk or other highly technical genres are not really the target audience.
Did you watch past 6 mins? Because I discuss other things like specs and gui? Not just the recreation, but when compared just as an instrument I feel the price is even more ridiculous, just my 2c
I think of Synplant more like an instrument and Vital and Phaseplant are more like tools. Synplant has its own specific way of how the user interacts with it. It's designed around experimentation and happy accidents than being a very focused collection of building blocks.
Hence its emphasis on visual feedback and interactivity. Phaseplant and vital are more like tools. Much more open ended as to how you build a sound and interact with the final result.
I don't look at Synplant as being a straight up mimic. I use samples to get a basic timbre and then play around with the branches in the Main UI. I rarely even use the "DNA" editor.
The previous version just had random seeds so the Genopatch gives another way of directing the sound.
I actually think it's exactly when you give it a sound it has no hope in replicating is where it gets really interesting.
I feel like the whole ethos of Synplant even in version 1 was about making sounds in innovative ways with less focus on skeuomorphic controls. Synplant is different, fun and innovative. That stands true in version 2 and this is what makes it fabulous.
20:32 You could use this entire sequence for a cartoon, where the coyote is bouncing off of a series of cascading metal awnings as he plummets down from the roof.
and then lands on a flatulent robot xD
I thing it specializes at atonaloty I’m a sound designer…. Randomization with over sampling and being able to subtract elements…. I like it for mechanical sounds but I like kyma 7 for that even more ……you will have to curate it like samplebrain and Random…. Vital Cecilia 5 and wave edit and spheredit can do alot of and emissions 2 are the capable of doing similar wondrous things drum machine trick was nice Dash and would combine all of this criticism.
Thanks for confirming my uneasy feeling about Synplant 2, especially regarding the price. It's novelty will quickly fade out.
Cool design though.
In terms of some of the aspects of the interface, I could see Synplant as a small part of an educational platform too. Here's a sound, any sound, and then when its algorithm tries to recreate it, Look at what parameters it used to create that. Than use those same parameters in another synth and try to recreate it. Getting sound designers started with thinking about the "DNA" of a sound.
That would be cool, then I would hope we would get a much better GUI tbh, for me Vital is the best educational tool because it's very WYSIWYG.
I feel like this synth gets a lot of hype precisely because many people don't know how to actually use a synth. Also it's marketing seems to specifically target beginners, that don't know better with youtubers making videos how this is "The Best plugin ever" , "most innovative plugin", "insane AI synth" or whatever bullshit they can come up with.
It is a two osc synth with the oscillators FMing each other (cross FM). If you actually read the parameters (from the intentionally hard to digest UI) you'll see all the parameters it has, that they arent actually that many. You can make something like this in reaktor, voltage modular or many other plugins that you probably already have.
Exactly yea
I respect your opinion, but I can just say for myself that I never saw it as a tool to accurately recreate sounds to begin with. That doesnt fit to the whole idea of genomes and mutations idea that Syn"Plant" is built around.
The thing with AI is also that it requires tons of data to train with, and both dry and accurately recreated versions, to take that difference between both ends to learn to infer "recreations" on never before heard sounds. So I imagine that had to be quite the daunting task already with all the parameters given, and a third operator would have added a whole new dimension of complexity to it. So I can understand if the resources were somewhat limited for that.
Everything is a question of managing expectations. In my eyes, you went in with different expectations than some, and then (understandibly) were left underwhelmed with the results.
A different set of questions to go into it may spark other expectations and curiosity:
I think I like it for game and SFX sound design especially. Ever tried to toss in a Wilhelm's scream? Could you see the results somewhere? (What about other iconic SFX?)
Game SFX? Not sure about any legal stuff behind this, but I thought it was really interesting to hear some variants of Nintendo/Smash Bros SFX.
I mentioned more criticisms beside the recreation thing, which by the way was an original hype/selling point, hence all the hype and me actually testing it
that nails it. Optimus Prime really needs to see a Mechanic with that flatulence!
Fair criticism, however i don't get why people think it's supposed to perfectly recreate any sound. For me at least it's more about dropping the kind of sound you want to get into genopatch (kind of), and quickly check the results. You 80% of the time get either something that might fulfill the role, or on the other hand, something wild and totally off, but which inspires something else. Usually bass/lead/pad/fx is more likely to create another bass/lead/pad/fx accordingly, with similar tone if not nearly identical, but like i said, identical is boring. And for me that's the key, i can almost avoid sound design stage (with some minimal adjustments sometimes) process and quickly sketch up something in almost not time. All with one synth, and all of the sounds will be quite interesting from the get-go (ok depends on the source sound, but still).
And saying that AI creates and tweaks everything for you is not a game changer, idk what is then.
Imagine if the dev/promoters said that... "That's fair, but we don't understand where on Earth people got the idea that Synplant would be able to make a very very similar synth preset out of a sample it was given to analyze, using a game changing AI feature called genopatch, so you don't have to clear the sample, and you can manipulate the sound in ways that would be impossible with just the original sample. Yeah, we're not sure who put that wacky idea into the customers' heads."
We'd be like, I learned it from you, dad. Wasn't the original sponsored hype giving you that impression? You could input a sample of a sound from a commercial track, and genopatch would analyze and resynthesize it, so you could use it without clearance, and it would play across the keyboard without the artifacts of a stretched sample. That's how I remember the hype. Since it happened just now, I don't think the haze of time is making fake memories here. The hype train really got rolling, for me, with a Cuckoo vid a few months ago, before the release. Then, a bunch of the early vids were of people trying to recreate different categories of instrument sounds. They hadn't ALL misremembered what was the synth's claim to fame. Synplant is good for what it can do, but they definitely did sponsor some extraordinary hype, and that's why people think it's supposed to recreate samples into patches, not perfectly, but closely enough that you would substitute the patch for the sample. If most people WOULDN'T be willing to make that substitution most of the time, because the resynthesis couldn't get close enough, then the feature shouldn't be hyped for that purpose. They could call it a "radioactive sound garden" or something like that, even "genopatch", like it is, and say that it mutates new sounds based on the original sample... as long as they don't give the impression that you can lift any but the simplest sounds from your favorite records, then I've got no complaints about the marketing.
The synth itself? I wish it sounded as clear as the Nonlinear Labs C15 (also 2op FM at heart). But it's amazing what it can get out of such a simple synth architecture. Wow, on that. I like lofi, nontraditional or broken versions of familiar sounds, and it's actually REALLY good at making those. Same with chromatic percussion... shaped noise is a big aspect of Synplant's synthesis that DG didn't mention as being part of the architecture... sometimes I think the AI is too heavy handed with it. Once you listen for the noise element, in the patches, you really notice it.
I like this synth because it creates weird stuff. If I like a sample, I'm just gonna use the sample. I use this synth for the weirdness it creates. Although you're right about the number of operators and stuff though. If It was more maybe it'd be cooler.
My pc nearly dies every time 😂 the best i can use it for is weird sounds. Robot farts specifically.
The problem it had with the psytrance bass comes from multiband processing (dispersion) which delays lower frequencies, so it recreated the same effect with an envelope like a kick... I don't think it's the matter of the analysis algorithm, just their underlying synth model cannot get closer to it in any way, as you said - 2 operator FM synth is just noth enough for most interesting sounds. :(
FWIW: I love it for variations and experimentation,but agree that it's too expensive and over hyped...
I owned Synplant 1 so I got a good deal with 2, I would have never paid full price for it. I mostly bought it to get the other features like mapping synths to velocity or layering them.
I agree with you, Synplant is good for randomness. If you want glitchy sounds to render down into one shots then Synplant is a useful tool for that.
I will say to their credit at least the devs didn't obtain the AI data unethically, supposedly they trained it themselves on their own data, which is a lot more than what you can say about these other free "AI" plugins that came out lately.
Hey dude if you don't mind
talamasca overload intro melody and synth ? Pls a toturial video
I totally get the compulsion to prod at the limits of this tech. People do tend to get caught up in the inflated hype and surface novelty for these things, and the amount of clickbait youtubers propping it up as able to do "anything" certainly doesn't help, so I don't think this state of affairs is really Sonic Charge's fault who seem like they just want to do their own thing and have a particular target demographic of synth enthusiasts in mind. Apart from the lack of oscillators the other main bottleneck is lacking more flexible envelope matrixes. I'm sure there's a lot of logistical challenges making additional parameters work with the machine learning though.
I still bought it as a general sound design tool. Some of the sounds I found it particularly good at reproducing are orchestra hit samples (so long as it's octaves and not harmonically layered chords) and old school anime sound effects (yeah, really). After a while you kind of get a feel for what it works best with.
Thank you
I've seen/heard at least 10 demos/reviews of Synplant over the past 2 weeks, I haven't heard 1 sound that can't be made with many other synths. This seems to be a novelty product trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist !
It has nothing to do with ability to make sounds that no one other can come close, anyways what would be the synth that can do that? The point is re-creation of your old favorite samples to become analog, actually this is Digital to Analog conversion and it's not perfect but it functions pretty much very good in lot of cases, and I for one feel very inspired to work with it. Also, the modulation ring is just great, the whole concept is pretty much amazing.
3:23 I want a tutorial about this sound in Phase Plant. Vital would also do in a pinch. That patch is absolutely gorgeous and I immediately came up with a lot of use cases for it. Pretty please?
3 sine waves, play around with the fm amounts and octaves, done. So simple and bizarre that it can’t be done in what people are calling a game changer synth
The developer himself said that the interface is quite intentional and the whole philosophy behind it is that you have a sound that is your seed sound. You then drag the branches to get a new sound and when you hear something you like, you plant the seed. So it encourages to really use your ears and explore fun stuff without really thinking too much on what to do. It's not for everyone though
wow...thats a nice concept but its really hard to use like u said...i tried , but not much cuz of the difficulty of knowing what to do, i rather used vital or serum . but i loved the concept and looking at the seed...lol
Nice concept, totally unusable- seems to be the chorus on this one
Sonic Charge has best plugin till today using the drum and effect and robotic vocoder
When I heard about this synth I assumed it'd be incredibly complex... But it's only FM with only TWO operators? I think they're sitting on a lot of potential here, could easily become one of the ones to be recommended by just about anyone, it could round out your toolbelt amazingly. It could be great if it came with different analysis and recreation algorithms to choose between too. If this ever gets to the point I can throw in organic samples and it recreates that convincingly enough, letting me tweak parameters on the sound of my own voice or guitar etc., then we're talking for sure. Until then... Ehh, even Harmor from all the way back then impresses me more.
I've used it on my latest track, but just with the trial version. I've not bought the synth. It's definitely interesting in that, for me, the use case is different from other synths. In other synths I want to model sounds, and get something very precise. Synplant isn't really for that.. it's for making similar sounds, for sparking creativity, and for providing options for what sounds /could/ work as a progression of an existing idea.
But yeah, I didn't buy it because the interface is just too heavily leaning in to the planet concept, which, when I'm making music I couldn't care less about. The interface actually breaks the flow somewhat for me. There are other options for resynthesis out there, e.g. Backbone, which you did videos on back in the day, but everyone appears to have forgotten about :)
I agree yea, the crazy thing is after editing and uploading this video, Backbone has been on my mind a LOT and thinking about how I could have totally mentioned it. I've been installing a bunch of stuff on the new PC so it was a nice reminder to grab that again. I think something like that is a bit more fitting of the "game changer" title indeed!
Lol it is a neat idea but as a noob, I've stayed away from it because it doesn't seem like a tool that will help me understand fundamentals..
Hi mate, just wanna leave a comment and say I personally will always appreciate sincere, honest feedback.
If you could stretch the samples across the keyboard and play it i would probably buy it
Wait till I tell you what I think of AI translation (as a professional in this particular field) 😊
I was initially very skeptical of the AI component, since there is nothing actually intelligent about what passes for AI today, it’s mostly hype and a huge new market bubble that will likely pop like all the bubbles before it. That said, “AI” as it is today clearly has its uses, and when I tried the Synplant 2 demo I grew to like what it does - specifically because it isn’t just random (as version 1 was), but because it’s a kind of directed randomness. Which, when it comes to music, is the (only) good kind of randomness, I think.
I find pure randomness frustrating, because it makes me never stop clicking - if I stop, I may miss the next amazing sound that’s just a click away. (And which of course never comes). Here though I can feed Synplant a sample I like and get something derived from it - both similar and unpredictable.
I was hoping to recreate a pre-1973 Vangelis pad (from “L'Apocalypse Des Animaux”), which I could never get close enough to with VST synths. I’m not a great sound designer, and I’ve no idea what instruments he used back then, but this is like my holy grail of warm, analog ambient pads. So what Synplant did with it wasn’t quite on the spot either, but it did produce a sound that has much of the quality of that old Vangelis pad, but is different in a very interesting way. The patch I got from Synplant sounds much more modern, in the dark, distortion-fest kind of way, and it turned out pretty awesome.
So Synplant probably isn’t a synth for master sound designers, but for everyone else, it could be a source of sounds we wouldn’t otherwise make.
Yea like I said right in the beginning, I’m a big fan of assisted random, because that’s what this is.
You seem to focus most of your video on the genopatch, but you missed to describe the whole heart of Synplant which is the seeds and how it generates unique sounds. How branches can be assigned to different keys etc.
Sure genopatch is a cool tool, but thats not even close to what this little synth can do.
I do agree on alot of things especially the tweaking of parameters which is a total nightmare. Still, a cool tool for getting random stuff quickly.
There’s lots of cool random tools around for far less than $150 tho. The reason I focused the first 1/3rd of the video on genopatch is that all those features you mentioned were already present in synplant 1
Well price can def. be discussed, but if you wish to produce unique stuff, and dont have the synth skills to manipulate wavetables, understand LFO, OSC and all that stuff, or if you are just lazy, then I have not come across a tool that is more suited, for that task then this.
Sure there are alot of other tools that can generate random stuff, but often they need you to put in some effort to understand. I find that part of this synth is really great, would I pay 150$ for it, nope.
Yes that's my point, cool concept but it's not for me and $150 is a far-stretch :)
It's interesting how much this software has polarised opinions. I suspect people are expecting it to do things it's not designed to do. Despite the demos, I don't think imitating synths is the best use of it - and there's no way I would ever have expected to be able to use it to make Psytrance, for example. It's probably better for ambient genres, but honestly when I first came across it my main source of excitement was that I could get it to imitate field recordings of real world sounds, and then tweak them, blending the original recording into a version that can be modulated and played as a melody. Imagine a track that starts with, for example, the sound of wind in telephone wires, and then that morphs into a playable pad and becomes music. For me, that's the kind of application it should excel at. It's a tool whose natural home is in experimental music. As for the price... well, it might be a little bit high, sure, if you're not going to get much benefit from using it. Then again, it took a huge amount of development effort.
Did you try it for that? Was it good and did you pay $150? Because these aren’t just Psytrance sounds
@@DashGlitch I haven't tried it yet, been too busy. I'm going to, though. My comments about Psytrance were only an example, not a comment about your video - just to be clear! I will try it out, and if I find a use for it I might pay the price. To be honest my budgets are getting a bit tight this year.
I find it funny that nobody seems to have discovered the randomization feature within Synplant on the main UI. This feature lets you create an unlimited amount of similar but unique sounds from the samples of the Genopatch. You can throw in a retro, Nintendo-type Chiptune sound and make an unlimited amount of similar Nintendo-type sounds with it, but no TH-camr has covered this feature. I think most just want to make a quick TH-cam video instead of actually studying the plugins they have. Anyways, if you believe that this is all this synth can do, then you are completely wrong. It can do much more than what is covered in any of the TH-cam videos.
I'm guessing you haven't seen any of my other videos right? the ones where I meticulously pick apart plugins and teach in-depth features. For example, I have posted one of the most watched videos on Vital - the free synth. After a couple of hours with this, it wasn't worth any more investigation for me. I'm glad you enjoy it, but it's not for power-users who know how synthesis works. Just my 2c as someone who has been working in the industry for decades.
@@DashGlitch Well, i'm glad that i found this one, and for me personally, it's a gem. If you pay for the plugin, you might as well use the whole plugin and try to understand it. That's my opinion, but everyone has their own approach to music, and i respect that.
synplant seems super impressive at first glance but the more you actually use it and realize what it can and can't do, its limitations really start to become apparent. especially at the price point it's at. it's like the Tesla of VST synths.
To be fair, each user's particular needs and preferences are very different from one another. The example sample you state at 3:45 as "totally useable" would be "totally unusable" for myself and the kinds of music I like to make. I have no need for such screeching type sound-effects and prefer leaning much more towards, let's say "traditional" sounds, for which Synplant's Genopatch is good at approximating.
Also the "weird sounds" tag that Synplant is being often getting brandished with, is rather unfair, since the amount of randomisation is entirely at each users discretion. And since I don't personally go for the wacky Transformers-like sound-effects witiin my music, I simply use Synplant in a more tempered and controlled manner and get the kind of results I want.
Yep, it is my opinion as stated
To me it is more like an experimental sort of toy, not a game-changer for sure. The Bitwig's Polygrid, THAT piece of software was really something game-changing, but not Synplant 2 (or1). Don't take me wrong bro, I LIKE experimental toys (I produce hi-tech, so I like toys!)....but we have to say the things as they are in reality.
---SORRY FOR MY BAD ENGLISH MAN----
Agreed
@9:00 to me these are two different sounds.
Fair review, however, I think it would be more appropriate to a) take some samples you wanted to sound design with, i.e voice, foley, and see where you coukd take it b) find some good sounds in synplant and take them further. People dig this thing even though it is not your conventional sound design workflow you are used to, it ould be good to figure out why.
I did exactly that in this video though? In the months since posting it, I've had many people let me know they did like it but also felt it was way overpriced/overhyped. It's fun sure, but not practical or anything groundbreaking imho.
love the Bruce lee quote 🤣
Love it for exploration and experimentation. But when I know what I want, I will use other synths that are more capable of getting to that end result. It has some interesting concepts but is a very basic synth at heart. When the concepts are merged with a deeper synth engine, it will become one of the coolest synths out there. But at the speed the developer went from version 1 to this version, Synthplant will never really fully be ahead of the curb or at its full potential.
Couldn't have said it better myself, I was kind of hoping after all this time we would see something slightly more mature under-the-hood, but as far as I can tell the engine is just the Synplant 1 engine with genopatch retrofitted.
I just like it because it's weird. i dont own it yet, and am not in a hurry. But I hardly think it's "game changing" It's just fun and werid. I like their drum machine plugin. I'd get that first
A.I. is in many cases a printer versus a real painter ..... Nice B.L. Adjusted Quote 😂
@3.38 mins... That face says it all 😂
I love it, it's an instant inspiration. So quickly 16 or 20 possibilities. It's like a little lab where you can play with sounds. For example, I started sampling the sound generation and then setup/sending it through granular processor. Really fun for me.
I don't think that's a "Game Changer". That's what everyone who sells their products says. You lost a lot of credibility with your last plugin disater, that was a real "Game Changer" for me.
Not sure how far you watched in the video but I said it's decent when paired with other plugins to fine-tune the resulting sounds, but I was never very happy with the raw outputs - much like you said you use a granular to make the most of it, that begs to question whether the price is worth it. That price point is in the "workhorse" category and I feel it should have a few more tools built-in for us to make the most of the sounds we generate.
Coincidently I also mentioned the exact video you're talking about, with regard to the "plugin disaster", and correct me if I'm wrong but the issue was resolved because of loud voices speaking up about the subscription - myself being one of those voices. Regardless, issue resolved & the community seems happy for the most part, I'm fine to put my credibility on the line to make a difference.
Cool video! This is exacatly why I feel Synplant is weird - you can't really grab the synth parameters in an easy way - and the underlying synth structre is simple. This is not capable of creating for example a six operator fm sound. This is too experimental synth, I rather like synths where the structure is simple and logical and every parameter is in reach. At a glance, Synplant is easy to use, but IMHO it comes with many disadvantages...
It doesn't even support alternate tunings so the answer is no, not a game changer. It's not even in the game.
I am far away from really understanding how to build sounds in synths. But what I thought first when I saw this plugin: if you don’t know how to do it, it wouldn‘t be so good as you want it. Thats why I said don’t give a f*** about this plugin
Synplant 1 was cool back then and the new Genopatch feature is interesting but overall Synplant 2 was just a MASSIVE disappointment for me.
any time you see animation of some mysterious "ai" process,
it is a scam
I've always felt it was a gimmick despite what I read by others. I tried it, and felt the same way. I'd never use the sounds it was making. It makes some weird sounds that can sound interesting at times, but they were always harsh and unattractive.The concept is great, but it was unusable for my use.
Nothing I threw at Synplant 2 resulted in a usable patch. Very disappointed. The hype is not real.
It's odd to me that you are choosing 1 example of what it made, cause it makes like 30 different recreations and some are much closer than others...
I think its kinda gimmicky for sure, as someone who makes hitech and darkpsy. The damn thing takes forever too... i could make a better sound faster than synplant manually patching my bazille
I can't justify my verdict on this plugin as technically as you, but my experience was also underwhelming. Great plugin, nice sound, not much variability in characteristics(to me at least), as i know the sound engine doesn't really changed vs version 1 and it is overpriced.
I know it's not a big company and the dev poured his heart into it probably. Still, the market is big, and the majority of producers and enthusiasts only have so much money.
it seems to me there is a basic misunderstanding of what this synth is for, what it does, and how it does it going on here. you complained about all the things that are the exact reasons people like it. like a moog fan talking about how confusing and weird buchlas are.
why would you want to recreate a sound you already have? you used that sound as a sample in synplant...why? because you want more of that sound? no...why would you need that? you already have it. genopatch is not meant to recreate sounds...its meant to MIMIC a sound. mimic that sound and then morph it into an infinite amount of other sounds. you never even loaded one of those genopatch patches to hear what it actually sounded like...that sound you hear when you are auditioning them is not the whole thing. move the mod wheel...there is an entirely different sound on each key.
i think maybe synplant just isnt for you...nothing wrong with that.
The synth was hyped and promoted as such.
Please watch more than just the recreation 6 mins btw, I mention other quantifiable and not personal criticisms, and also mention that maybe it’s just me and that’s ok ;)
The interface is absolutely terrible.
error :)
Study the plugin before making a review.
watch the video before make a comment
the worst video ever @@DashGlitch
As a few others have said in the comments, I feel like you my have missed the point of this plug-in. The stated purpose is not to precisely recreate a given sound or sample, but as an experimental tool to develop new sounds from a seed. Whether or not you like the results is more of a subjective thing, but it does seem like a quick and easy way to generate new sounds. Definitely pricey for what it does though. That said, I appreciate you demonstrating similar sound design ideas and techniques in Vital. Great stuff!
But it was hyped and promoted as being able to recreate any sound?
And that’s just 6 mins of the video ;)
I'm certainly not going to pull the trigger on this thing. It is a pretty neat idea though. They may need to do some more work on the interface and maybe add some more capabilities, but as you said, the concept is cool. Someone like you also has a distinct advantage in that your in-depth experience and knowledge of synthesis and sound design tools makes it fairly easy to get similar or better results using advanced synthesis techniques. I appreciate the fact that you continue to share those with us!
Take note Sonic Charge.
Hello friend, I have a question this Synth plant 2 making automation? I trying to do it ...I guess it's not working... thank you
tbh I didn't even get that far with it until I put it on the shelf, never touched it again and now the demo period expired so I can't answer that fully, sorry
@DashGlitch thank you. Actually I can tell you I found really weird sounds there .just f.... really organic.ill try to find out .❤️