Published on April 30th, 2009.
Author: Victor.Eijkhout
Category: Featured, Virtual Instruments.

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(11 votes, average: 4.27 out of 5)  Loading ...

Devine Machine Krishna Synth review

For a supposedly progressive field, software synthesis often seems very conservative. From the first Neon synth to the latest announcements, people can’t seem to get enough of imitations of analog sounds. More of the same, just better, seems to be winning market strategy. It is therefore refreshing to find companies such as Devine Machine who move in an entirely different direction, going for innovation rather than imitation, staking out their position far from the crowd.

Krishna Synth has been on the market…

for a good two years, but was recently revamped, to make its engine more efficient. While this synth has some familiar features, two analog type oscillators, a filter, LFOs and ADSRs, its main sound generating principle is quite unusual. Oscillator 1 is a so-called Frame Oscillator. This will take some explaining.

The Frame Oscillator does not have any waveforms or other classical sound sources built in; instead, you need to load a sample into it. No, that does not mean that this is a sampler. For starters, you can only load one sample, which will be used for all pitches and all velocities. But more importantly, whereas a sampler will simply playback its content when triggered by a keystroke, Krishna synth, eh, sits back and waits for you to tell it what to do with the sample. Here’s the deal: each sample gets analyzed as if it were a movie with a number of frames, and each frame in this sound movie is a little tonal event. If you tell Krishna to just play the frames in sequence, you will get the original sound back, but you can just as easily tell it to play the frames in reverse order, or to scrub back and forth over a number of frames. This idea is a bit like granular synthesis, but the authors of Krishna say it is a different technique.

The way this happens …

is that the frame position has to be animated by either an ADSR or an LFO. Krishna is fairly generously endowed here: there are three ADSRs and five LFOs, each of which can modulate three different targets. If you want to reproduce a sound, you would use an ADSR: the Attack slope would determine how fast you traverse the frames, the Sustain level determines the frame that will be sustained, and during the Decay, frames get played in reverse order. This is a little counter intuitive, but you’ll get used to it. You can make use of an LFO to play a movie, but an LFO, from its very nature, keeps repeating, so the sound will be repeated every cycle of the LFO. I found the LFO more useful to bring sounds to life by modulating the frame that is played during the Sustain phase of the ADSR.

The other two oscillators are far more traditional. While they can be used on their own to make your usual VA sounds, I found them more useful to thicken up the sound of the Frame Oscillator.

Now, if this was all there was to Krishna Synth,…

it would not be terribly interesting. The other part of what makes Krishna a great sound design tool is the various modulation tools. For instance, there is a possibility of having the oscillators interact through Frequency, Amplitude, or Ring modulation. Another possibility is to introduce Tube distortion. However, the most varied way of altering the sound is to use the Frame Effects that are part of the Frame Oscillator. While these effects are clearly visualized (for instance, choosing the Mirror effect gives a Frame picture that is mirrored), it is not intuitively clear what the effect on the sound is. Here you will just have to experiment, but the results are often surprising and quite useable. For instance, using the PWM effect I turned a Rhodes sample into a very funky Clavinet-like sound.

That is often the case with Krishna: when you start turning knobs it is not clear what is going to happen, but the results are quite often interesting. Experimentation definitely pays off here.

Another important way of altering the sound is to apply any of a number of drawing tools to the wave form. This can be done to any frame of the movie separately. In fact, going this route quickly can become of a lot of work, since the possibility of editing more than one frame simultaneously are limited.

Interface.

The Krishna interface uses plain colours, and makes little attempt to look 3D. There is some amount of shadow around the interface elements, but in general simplicity rules the day. I find this refreshing: this is among the more legible interfaces that I have seen. No peering at light grey lettering on a dark grey background here.

Some aspects of the interface are not optimal. For instance assignment of LFOs to targets is quite confusing: you need to right-click to bring up menus. There is no reason for this, since the left-click does nothing. Then, clicking on a send knob makes various possible target light up, but the use of this is unclear. The manual suggests that you can drag send knobs to a target, but this is confusing: you need to drag the _label_ of the send knob to a target to assign it. In general, the manual is not very well written. It is clearly neither written nor proofread by a native speaker of English. There are many phrases such as “you can drag to the destination control”, that leave me wondering “_what_ can I drag here?”

Another thing that tripped me up a couple of times, is that many presets have a drawing tool selected. This means that if you click in the waveform display, for instance to get rid of a menu, you have just edited the waveform. And there is no Undo button.

Presets.

Krishna Synth comes with several Gigabytes of presets. While these are sorted in traditional categories such as Guitars or Pads, none of them sound very traditional. In fact, I found it much more rewarding to ignore the presets and start experimenting with importing samples. Since Krishna is rich in modulation possibilities, I also found it hard to take apart a preset, and find out what makes it tick.

Conclusion.

Krishna Synth is an innovative instrument a great number of ways of generating unique sounds by manipulation of samples. The interface can be a bit confusing, and the manual definitely needs improvement. Krishna’s sound manipulation tools have a tendency to turn a sample into something completely different, and typically with a rougher, edgier character. If smooth and warm is what you desire, I would not recommend this synth. However, if you’re looking for sound with some grit to it, sounds that quite unique, then you should definitely check out Krishna Synth. Considering that Krishna is not an all-round work horse synth, its price is somewhat steep.

– Victor

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