Big effects
With six insert slots drawing on a roster of 11 effects, SynthMaster One has plenty of signal-processing and polishing scope. The effects share a tabbed space in the interface’s centre with the Arpeggiator, the six modules are reordered by dragging and dropping, and the whole rack can be bypassed with a click of the FX On/Off button.
The effects themselves are clearly lifted from SynthMaster 2.8. Despite a few controls having been trimmed off along the way, they still make for an impressive and colourful bunch. The highlights for us are the Distortion, which is an instant toughener; the tidy six-band EQ; and the Delay, which retains 2.8’s shelving EQ and ping-pong mode, but loses the distortion.
As well as those, there’s filtered digital distortion (sample rate and bit depth reduction) with LoFi, modulated delay action with Chorus and Ensemble, and LFO-based channel offset with Phaser. Apart from the lack of sidechain input, Compressor is identical to its surprisingly well-equipped 2.8 counterpart (it’s even got variable Knee), and Reverb retains the vast majority of its original functionality and parameters, too.
Finally, the 16-band Vocoder requires loading as a MIDI-controlled effect, and Tremolo features independently adjustable speed and phase for the left and right channels. It’s a very solid turn-out, then, marred only by the inability to load more than one of each effect into the rack at a time.