Hey I couldn’t remember the name of Cherry Audio’s new bespoke synth dropping today. Breaking from typical emulations, this is an original all digital VST synth, not a classic emulation.
It dropped while Brett was kindly hosting me today on “Backstage with Gig Performer” and it’s called “Sines” - I couldn’t remember the name because they hadn’t announced it yet.
So, great… More fuel for my advanced-stage soft G.A.S.
Edit: Ok I just looked at the specs on this thing. It’s an absolute sound design beast. They have a 30-day demo. Comes with 700 designer patches. Fresh coffee for me.
One look at that UI had my head spinning, but I really like their new Elka-X synth, so I should give this a try. It’s not expensive. And I do, sort of, remember the complex wave shapes we created in engineering school back in the '70s by mixing a bunch of different sine and cosine waves of various frequencies and amplitudes. Never thought of it as sound design, it was just wave design viewed on an o-scope.
EDIT: Just purchased and installed. Will have a go at it later. The installer had an option to deselect the AAX install. Nice. In Preferences, logging was enabled by default. Turned that off. The first execution of the standalone version downloaded all of the presets; they weren’t part of the installer.
Maybe spell it as SineS for emphasis over the nearly same named player? I watched the very well done Schoeman intro video to it and this ‘all the knobs’ layout is actually an ease of use feature that prevents menu diving like Cherry Audio did last year on their “EIGHT” Ob emulation. It’s pretty intuitive to use and the sine wave only notion is quite misleading.
The oscillators only offer sine waves but the controls and display let you readily dial in any other shape. The little onboard waveform displays make it a very visual synth like Vital does — AND — it’s a fully stereophonic synth end to end starting with the 4 oscillators. I noticed it’s a bit heavy on CPU as you might expect but some very satisfying results from the 700 included designer patches.
It would be funny to try to run the numbers on building a discrete design 70s style hardware synth like this without custom ASICs. Probably not doable. It would be as heavy as a Buick and it would need a climate room to keep it at stable temperature! You’d be back to Moog’s 19” rack cabinets. For $39 what a time we live in huh?
After i had watched the (very good!) introduction video on YouTube, i wasn’t completely sure if this synth really would catch my ear, but after having played a few of the presets, i fell in love instantly.
Such an incredible soundmachine…
and as @kevinf already mentioned: “For $39 what a time we live in huh?”
yeah, same here.
loved the presets, dislike they GUI.
the sound is good. exactly up my alley.
and: i mean, within GP can we patch our own “multis”.
its 39$, and definitly a top contender to layer some synths with flexible routing,
“Sines” taking nicely place in such context.
to notes:
a speciality it has: you can acess the “modulation index” of the modulators with another level of HW controls and CCs.
This will make it VERY jammable/musical.
i´m not aware of other softies who have that.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by touch sensitive, but as far as I have seen Sines is a fully realized modern synthesizer that can respond to MIDI aftertouch, channel pressure, breath, expression etc. if that helps?
The good “news” is:
With Gig Performer you can make any plugin to be “touch sensitive”, just by using the Aftertouch messages on widgets which then can be connected to any plugin parameter - even if the plugin wouldn’t support Aftertouch natively.
But with Sines you don’t have to worry… most of the patches support channel Aftertouch and quite a few even are designed for MPE.
Many thanks - I meant by “Touch Sensitive”: Can you simply control the volume of the sound using the midi velocity of the keyboard to control it?. So thanks for the answer…
I just had a closer look at the plugin again, and yes, it also reacts on velocity - of course the effect always depends on how the regarding patch has been programmed, some don’t react at all, some react very strong, some react with a diffrent filter setting, others react with volume changes… lots of variations to find!
i can report:
“sines” creates problems on my system vs. GP ! (M1mac, Monterey, using the AU)
i had allready several times problems when opening the GUI.
Mostly freezes kind of, or at least veeeery looooong times to open the GUI.
but now, i could no longer open my old project which incorporates “sines”, at all.
Tryed to open it for the last two days.
GP would allways crash while starting up.
so, i tryed now this: i deleted the sines “component”* ( AU)
and now i can open my GP project again.
(* very glad that idea occoured to me)
so, veryfied, it was the “Sines” beeingv the cause.
so be aware. This thing has code flaws.
i would guess its a GUI/graphics thing
not tested with the VST3 version.
i have also “note release”-based audio crackles with my Cherry audio plugins when used in GP. Sines less so, most prominent with the Elka-X.
Be aware.
i will report to cherry audio, when i get the time to do so.
