Master of ceremonies
To the left of the Layer tabs, the M tab flips the interface over to the Master page, which, as the name suggests, is where Rapid’s eight layers come together for mixing and keyzoning. It’s also where presets are loaded and a couple of synth-wide tweaks are made.
The mixer doesn’t do anything beyond setting the levels for all layers – there’s no panning and no soloing, although at least layers can be muted by turning them off directly on their tabs. Below it, though, is a simple multiband compressor that proves to be much more useful than we expected. It has Threshold and Gain controls for each of its three bands, and eight presets governing the rest of its behaviour internally. It’s not a detailed dynamics processor, but as a quick patch enhancer, it’s surprisingly effective – and the input/output histogram is ace.
The Keyzone Editor lets you set each layer’s note range by dragging the ends of its representative horizontal bar – a straightforward interface that makes light work of setting up stacks and splits. The global Amp and Filter envelopes (individual layers don’t have hardwired equivalents) modulate all eight amps and filters together, while the Cutoff and Resonance knobs offset the two parameters for all filters – handy for global shaping and sweeping.
On the left of the Master page, the preset browser divides Rapid’s 650+ patches into descriptive folders, which are freely editable within Windows and OS X using their regular file browsers.