You can then choose a play mode from the tab to the left of this, and select exactly how that oscillator will be played.Īmong the mono and stereo approaches you might expect, this is where you’ll find options such as chords and hypersaw, which offers multiple detune arrows that you can spread or narrow for more or less detune. Some of these are straight-laced waveforms, others are wavetables. To tweak or create sounds from scratch, start by choosing a wave(table) type from the central tab above oscillator 1’s controls.
Alongside wavetables, the synth offers comprehensive yet user-friendly resynthesis techniques, hypersaw oscillators and even a vocoder (which lets you load an audio file as a modulator) among a number of other synthesis starting points. But producing new sounds inside Icarus 2 doesn’t end there. Its primary synthesis approach allows you to blend waveforms, either from those offered directly within Icarus 2, drawn from scratch or created from imported audio files. Tone2 refers to Icarus 2 as a 3D wavetable synthesizer. Musically worthwhile? Let’s find out.Īs its name suggests, the Icarus 2 is the second iteration of an already powerful instrument.
It’s as if you’re being prepped for a massive Las Vegas-style EDM drop or to blast off into space. Load up its initial patch and you’ll hear a computerised voice that says, ‘Welcome to Tone 2 Icarus’, alongside a resonant pad and swirling white noise. We had a brief flashback to those days when we fired up Icarus 2 for the first time. To get something musically useful out of these instruments – and to build something you could truly call your own – you had to find out how to turn 90 per cent of their features off.
Eventually, the workstation era of synths allowed you to hold down one key to trigger layered sequences, basslines, rhythms and textures all at once. If one maker produced an instrument with a massive-sounding first preset, its rivals had to go bigger and bolder. For a while from the late 1980s onwards, the manufacturers of new digital synthesizers were embroiled in a sonic skirmish redolent of mastering’s loudness wars.
0 kommentar(er)
