Get with the programmers

The comapny’s head honcho and coder gives some insight into the development of the amazing Dune 3

What’s your favourite Dune 3 feature? RH “The new wavetable editor and the dual filter offer a lot of new sound design possibilities. There are also many new effects – like the new graphic equaliser. But if I had to pick one, it’d be the Shimmer Hall, which is just a wonderful tool to create ethereal pads and string sounds.” What challenges did Dune 3 present? RH “The biggest challenge was to develop a good-looking, scalable user interface. Many producers these days work on Full HD, 4K or even 5K monitors, so a fixed-size GUI is no longer an option. The new Dune 3 skin is ready for such display resolutions, and future ones as well. A further challenge was to develop unique, high-quality effect algorithms like the Shimmer Hall and the new Chorus modes, and to implement all of this at a reasonable CPU usage.”

You’ve included some rather unusual new filter modes in Dune 3: Polaris and Saturn, for example. What was behind those choices?

RH “Some of the filter models are precursors to new analog-modeled synths we are working on. Those filter models offer a somewhat different timbre, particularly when used with resonance. The new filter modes are also oversampled more than the previous ones, thus providing better quality, particularly when using extreme filter settings.”

The Legend is a very different synth to Dune. What made you want to get into classic emulation? RH “Most software emulations are not fully convincing. Most developers focus on one aspect of a vintage synthesiser that seems most important (usually the filter) and tend to ignore other areas. As a result, some very basic features – like the attack or release envelope – differ from the vintage analogue originals. Those minor flaws add up quickly, and in the end such software emulations tend to sound rather different to the originals. When creating an emulation, our goal is to get as close as possible in all aspects of the vintage analogue synthesiser being emulated, not just one. We also provide A/B comparisons with the original hardware, so that users can assess the quality of the emulation themselves – something few developers do – and introduce new features into our emulations, like polyphony or The Legend’s new filter modes.”

“With vintage synth emulations, minor flaws add up quickly”

What’s next for Synapse Audio beyond those two synths? RH “The Legend was received very well, so we started working on multiple analogue emulations in parallel. This time we looked at polyphonic vintage analogue synths – a yet bigger challenge compared to emulating a monophonic instrument like with The Legend. An analogue polysynth with, say, eight voices can be thought of as having eight distinct mono synths, each with its own timbre. Those deviations between voices add a lot of character to the overall sound, which differs strongly from your average digital synth. Unfortunately for us, this means we have to (almost) emulate eight synths rather than just one, especially if the instrument has aged a bit. So overall, this is a much more time-consuming task than emulating a mono synth, but it is a fun challenge regardless!” synapse-audio.com