Tracktion Software BioTek
Combining field recordings and a vector synthesis-style X/Y pad sounds like a recipe for ambient soundscape success – so is it?
The success of Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere “power synth” (10/10, 220) has proven there’s a market for virtual instruments combining natural and synthetic sounds, and BioTek – pitched as an “organic synthesiser” – offers a similar mixture of field recorded audio and software synthesis at a lower price point.
Simplicity has clearly been prioritised in BioTek’s design, its interface centring on a single screen with panels for all the usual sections: Oscillators, Envelopes, Filters, Effects, LFOs, Master, and, er, Mana, which is essentially a ‘miscellaneous’ section. There’s also a large animated window at the centre that is actually an X/Y pad – see the boxout below for details.
The parameters housed in each section vary depending on your preset. There’s no way to adjust these assignments, and – crucially – it’s not possible to create your own patches from scratch, so BioTek immediately feels like a cutdown ‘player’-style instrument rather than a fully featured synth. This is something of a disappointment as it’s marketed as an ‘organic synthesiser’, but neither the online product page or the manual go out of their way to explain this fundamental limitation. We could perhaps forgive it if BioTek was packed with fantastic sounds, but the paltry selection of 128 presets is extremely underwhelming – they’re at best dated, and at worst unpleasant, with a harsh, shrill quality.
Bio Menace
BioTek uses a variety of synthesis techniques, including virtual analogue, FM, ring modulation, hard sync and comb filtering; but because you’re given just four (at most) pre-assigned Oscillator controls for each patch, it’s not exactly a sound design playground. Most presets offer a meagre two Envelope controls (usually filter envelope attack and amp envelope release) – astounding, considering you could be dealing with four sound sources for each patch – though some swap the Envelope and Filter panels around, giving six envelope parameters and two filter parameters. Nevertheless, that’s still not a huge amount of envelope control, considering that in some cases these six controls are assigned to single parameters from all those in the filter, amplitude and frequency modulation envelopes – inadequate, to say the least. The Mana section, meanwhile, hosts a couple of extra pre-assigned controls per patch, covering things like FM amount, oscillator tuning and distortion level.
The list of Biotek’s shortcomings goes on and on: the arpeggiator is limited to a single octave, with no length or direction controls; there’s no way to adjust the pitchbend range; many of the patches disintegrate into unpleasant FM noise when you move the X/Y handle too far in the ‘wrong’ direction; the manual is just hopeless, making no attempt to explain what’s happening under the hood; oscillator octave parameters use an arbitrary 0-100 range, rather than telling you how many octaves you’ve transposed up or down by… it’s a real mess, and ultimately falls way short of our expectations of a modern synthesiser instrument.
It may seem unfair to directly compare the $150 BioTek to the £276 Omnisphere 2, but if you’re serious about high-quality sounds, Spectrasonics’ monster synth is well worth saving up for; and if you’re on a budget, the vector synthesis-based Korg Legacy Collection Wavestation ($50) offers better sound and far more flexible programming capabilities.