SOUNDSPOT UNION
This innovative new hybrid synth has the ability to make its own wavetables – but you’d better be prepared to go modal…
The first virtual synth from erstwhile effects plugin developers SoundSpot made quite a splash with its bonkers £6 launch price, before rising to its full tag in December. Hopefully, you picked it up then, because if you didn’t, you’ll be kicking yourself by the end of this review…
Union, man
Union is a three-oscillator synth with a couple of key points that set it apart. First, the interface goes out of its way to make programming quick and intuitive – to varying degrees of success, as we’ll see. More importantly, though, it enables ‘rendering’ of Oscillators 1 and 2 for use as a wavetable in Oscillator 3. Bouncing synths down and converting them to wavetables is a popular technique these days, so having it built into the synth itself is clearly an inspired idea.
Oscillators 1 and 2, then, each output one of seven analogue-style waveforms: Sine, Square, Saw, Triangle and Noise, plus the more elaborate
Organ and Metallic. The full complement of pitching and detuning controls are in place, and up to 32 unison voices can be dialled in for each, although you don’t get any control over their detuning or panning – both simply increase with every new voice added. The two oscillators feed into a bank of effects – Phaser, Delay, Distortion and Reverb – and clicking the Generate
Wavetable button instantly converts the mixed, effects-processed output of Oscillators 1 and 2 into a wavetable in Oscillator 3, which has the same controls as its siblings, including the 32 unison voices. The wavetable can be used to provide an interesting additional harmonic layer, or deployed as the main voice, and all three oscillators are blended in a simple mixer and routed to the Master FX – see Master blaster.
The wavetable generation is a brilliant trick, and clicking that button just never gets old, but scanning through the wavetable manually or via modulation (see below) reveals a sizeable fly in the ointment: there’s no interpolation between waves in the ’table, so transitioning between them always sounds ‘stepped’, which can be fine or problematic, depending on the sound you’re trying to make. Perfectly smooth sweeps aren’t currently an option, essentially.
Clicking the magnifying glass button at the bottom of an oscillator reveals a panel housing
“The wavetable generation is a brilliant trick, and clicking that button just never gets old”
its main controls – Phase, Detune, unison Blend, M/S balance, Pan and Level – as well as a dedicated filter (low- or high-pass, at 12, 24, 36 or 48dB/octave), and the modulation system for that oscillator/filter combo. The Wavetable panel in Oscillator 3’s panel also offers buttons for saving and loading wavetables, and these are independent for the left and right channels, opening all manner of wild stereo possibilities.
You won’t get me…
Union’s unusual modulation setup sees an ADSR envelope hardwired to the amplifier, and a second ADSR envelope and a free-running (not retriggerable) host-synced (1/32 to 32/1) LFO freely assignable to any combination of parameters in the oscillator/filter panel, as well as the Fine and Coarse tuning controls. Well, we say ‘freely’ but actually, each parameter can only be modulated by the Mod Env or the LFO, not both. This isn’t a huge issue, but if the design decision behind it was guided by the drive to keep things simple (a single assignment button is used to toggle between mod sources), it feels like a wholly unnecessary compromise.
The envelopes feature handles for curving the attack, decay and release stages, while the LFOs are actually looping multi-stage envelopes. You can add as many breakpoints to these as you like, and apply curves to make waveshapes of limitless complexity. If you just want a standard analogue wave (sine, triangle, square, etc), though, you’ll have to make it yourself – hopefully a menu of preset shapes is on the to-do list. And even more maddening than that is the lack of a reset button – manually deleting every breakpoint to return an LFO to its default state is no fun at all.
With all that said, the envelopes and LFOs are undeniably powerful, versatile and easy to work with, and provide excellent visual feedback. The stereo wavetable setup comes good again here, too, with the ability to modulate the left and right wavetable positions independently proving just the thing for spectacular widening and ear-tickling spatial manoeuvres.
A la modal
Union fulfils its sonic remit with aplomb. The wavetable generator is awesome and unique, the effects are solid, and the scale of the sounds it makes is enormous, thanks to all that unison and stereo jockeying. However, the modal (ie, taking over the whole UI) windows used to access the oscillator, effects and modulation controls are annoying. We appreciate
SoundSpot wanting to keep the main interface clean and simple, but the constant opening and closing of windows quickly becomes a chore. We’d much prefer to have the oscillator and filter controls – of which there aren’t even that many – immediately to hand on the front page. The lack of wavetable interpolation is also a downer, as are the single-mod-source-per-parameter restriction, ‘fixed’ unison and omission of a retriggering option for the main LFOs.
In sum, Union is a scaled-down, thoroughly modern alternative to Serum, Massive and their ‘super synth’ ilk, with a big, characterful sound, hampered by a few niggles of varying severity. Obviously, it was unmissable at £5.99, but even at full price, it’s well worth a look.
“The scale of the sounds it makes is enormous, thanks to all that unison and stereo jockeying”