GrooveCube's Exciton : :
www.GrooveCube.com

review brought to you by Devon Brent.
www: Traxmusic.org

Intro

Beauty is in the eye, or in the case of music, in the ear of the beholder. In a soft synth world calling for better oscillators, smoother filters, must sound closer to analog cousins, or the call for vintage synth re-creations, it’s the unusual little guy in the corner that gets passed over. We are always searching out something distinctive, something a bit atypical to add its savory flavor to an otherwise bland dish of sound. Sometimes, one must realize that the best ingredients don’t necessarily make the best meal. Let us celebrate a synth that’s not necessarily the best at everything, but offers to liven up our palette with a splash of color. That instrument is Exciton, and comes to us courtesy of GrooveCube.

What She Has

When it comes to soft synths, there is a fine line between an interface that is crowded with too many controls and one that devotes too much real estate to too few controls. At a glance, Exciton is a bit on the crowded side, but once you start working with it, you begin to appreciate the economical use of space.

When you first take a peek, you might be a bit disappointed that you have been saddled with yet another 2-oscillator synth, but that’s not entirely true. Yes, you are given the standard waves of sine, triangle, sawtooth, and pulse, but there’s more. From the mixer section, you have the ability to add noise, you can control the color shaping of the noise, and you can add ring modulation.

Also, from the oscillator section, you can control whether the two oscillators will sync together, manipulate the Pulse Width Modulation on the pulse waveform, or you can turn Oscillator 2 into the carrier for FM type sounds.

Think the sound is a bit on the thin side? Fattening it up is easy to do by selecting unison mode, twisting the De-tune knob, and setting your polyphony (all the way up to 64 notes if you so choose). Hit a key on the keyboard and listen to all those detuned oscillators charm your ears with their glory. Granted, your CPU will suffer, but the end result is one massive wall of audio. Moving right along to our filter section, we have our standard low and high pass filter with 6, 12, 18, and 24 dB slopes with resonance control. New to version 2, we also have band pass and band reject filters with 12 and 24dB slopes. A saturator is provided with 6, 12, 18 and 24dB slopes to help limit the output and add a bit of edge to the sound. It’s also now available for all filter types, not just the low pass filter. This is a wonderful touch.

We have an awesome LFO section that has the ability to sum any of the six provided LFO shapes of sine, square, triangle, sawtooth, sample and hold, and random to give us 64 possible combinations. Also new to version 2 is the inclusion of tempo-synch, a very welcome addition for us rhythm heads out. In addition, you now have the ability to set the waveform phase with MIDI triggers. You can also select if every voice has its own LFO, or if the LFO is applied to all voices at the same time with a flick of the mono switch.

The modulation section is certainly beefy with 8 possible modulation sources and destinations. You have your choice of envelopes, LFO’s, key, aftertouch, pitchbend, velocity, control change and sense, and each of those can control the oscillators’ pulsewidth, pitch, oscillator 2’s FM, cutoff, resonance, mixer level, saturation, the amplifier, LFO’s speed and phase, and both ADSR envelopes. Not bad for this seemingly little synth.

So what about the included effects? The effects section consists of a basic delay with the ability to change the time, sync the time to tempo, diffusion, feedback, drive, high and low cut, speed and depth. With the proper settings, you can easily make a chorus, flanger, overdrive, reverb, stereo delay, and more.

For those of you who judge your synths on how many patches are shipped with it, Exciton now includes 256 presets. It also now has 4 banks of 128 slots to give you a total of 512 presets that can be in at any one time, an improvement over version 1’s 128 presets limitation. Several user banks are available online for download, and there is one company selling a bank commercially. For the tweak freak, Exciton does accept MIDI CC messages for real time control and offers MIDI learn. And let’s not forget about the portamento control for some gliding goodness.

How She Moved Me

Over time, the more hardware and software synths you play with, the more jaded you become with each passing synth. It’s so rare to actually be ‘excited’ by anything like you were in the beginning, or make some revolutionary discovery to a sound that just makes you want to write. Exciton, true to its name, gave me that excitement. You know, that smile that lights up your lips, and entices you to play the keys. What “did it” for me was Exciton’s character. I’m starting to find too many synths trying to outdo each other in ‘best of’ everything. Sometimes one needs something that doesn’t do it the best, but does it well, and in another way. So what’s so different, you ask?

Typically, when you’re looking to give your sound that ‘edge’, one of the tricks is to lower your sample rate for the whole shebang, but not with Exciton. Exciton gives you the unique ability to change the quality on each oscillator with high, mid and low quality buttons. This can add ‘grittiness’ to the sound and ease the CPU load on low or can improve the sound quality, but at the price of increasing the CPU load on high. What’s great is that the oscillators on low quality mode alias like there is no tomorrow, yet this aliasing is fairly inaudible for low notes. Aliasing can also be nice if you want that high end ‘crunch’ that an alias-free synth can lack or for making weird digital sound effects. If the sound quality annoys you, it’s so easy to just click on “H” to push it into high quality mode, and the aliasing disappears. Nice feature, as you normally aren’t offered that level of control on a per-oscillator basis. The included presets are set for Mid, to give you a compromise of CPU usage versus sound quality. If you have a powerful DAW, by all means, kick up the quality level if you so desire, or play with it at low to add some dirt to that grime.

The filters and effects I found were not very smooth as they swept the audio spectrum. While this might turn a few of you off looking for the ‘purest’ form of analog silkiness, I personally found it a bit refreshing. Smooth is nice in some cases, but sometimes I want that “sound” that is obviously more digital than analog.

Another nice feature that I rarely find in soft synths is the ability to sum up multiple waveforms to create your LFO’s. This can give your sounds more unique rhythmic feeling when you do sync to tempo, and with 36 total combinations, you have a lot to work with. This is certainly something I’d welcome on other soft synths besides our typical fare of LFO waveshapes, and no way to combine them. It’s features like these that make a synth into something great.

The effects section in Exciton is certainly going to throw a few people for a loop as well. If you understand the basic principle that most common effects such as reverb, chorus, and flanger are all delay effects and know how to work it from that angle, Exciton will feel comfortable to you. If you’re reading this wondering what the heck I’m talking about, it’s going to take a few moments to get used to.

Fortunately, the manual gives you good examples of settings for typical effects to get you going, and it’s always a good idea to increase your audio knowledge, in my opinion. What would have been nice though is if we had ‘presets’ to choose from for the effects to give you a quick launching point than having to remember things like very quick delays give you flanging, while slightly longer delays give you chorusing, etc.

Another little niggle I had was the fact that the manual is online and in HTML format. Nice and easy if you’re on the network with your DAW box, and hypertext references make it effortless to traverse the manual swiftly and painlessly. This isn’t so nice though if your DAW isn’t online.

While Exciton does have 256 presets, those of us in a hurry are always finding ourselves wanting more. This is particularly true for those of us who depend on presets to get the work done. At the price point of $75, I find it hard to complain or compare with other offerings. As for what we get, we are presented the most wonderfully deep and rich pads, quite a few bread and butter type sounds, and an interesting array of sound effects.

I found the pads in particular an excellent starting point for those of us who like to tweak presets here and there, and give you ideas on how to make new pads for yourself. My feelings are that you can never have enough pads, as good pads are always highly sought after and hard to come by. Also, with most everything on one page except the modulation matrix, Exciton is fairly straightforward for the person who swears off presets and likes to roll their own too.

In Conclusion

I’m surprised, in this day of everyone looking for something a little ‘different’ that I rarely hear a mention of this wonderful synth. This is such a great synth for its relatively cheap price tag of $75 US dollars. For the synth tweakers, this synth is simply a delight to work with. For someone who wants a sound that’s different than the rest of the herd, Exciton delivers on that end too.

With the improvements to version 2, which seemed to address many of the complaints in reviews for version 1, looks like Exciton is being pushed into bigger and better territory with more possibilities for your music. Be sure not to miss the demo over at groovecube.com and give Exciton a chance for yourself; you might find your wallet a bit lighter after the experience.

Pros: Great sonic character, unique features other synths typically don’t have.
Cons: The “digital” sound might turn some people off.

Sound samples coming soon!