Get with the programmers
We have a big update to a favourite in this issue, produced by a Seaweed Audio. It’s Fathom CM2!
“I insisted that we used some common sense techniques”
How did you get into music software?
ES “Designing music software was a natural progression. I was playing piano from five and programming computers in school which led to an engineering degree. Over the next 20 years I was writing telecomms and medical software by day and producing music by night, and finally decided to design a synth. Fathom took three years to develop. We teamed up with sound designers Solidtrax and Scrubbing Monkeys to build our factory banks and interface. We started small and gradually expanded by responding to user feature requests on KVR Audio.”
What is Seaweed’s philosophy?
ES “When we started work on Fathom I insisted on some common sense techniques such as incremental delivery, object-oriented design and constant user feedback. We were able to eliminate distractions and code all day long which explains our feature depth. Fathom was essentially an effort to bring more sophisticated software principles into a synth. I had been using many of the best synths for a decade prior but often found myself frustrated by some of the limitations. As a software developer I knew that limiting the number of oscillators or modulations was largely meaningless and that users would welcome an open architecture.”
How will Fathom change the way we make music?
ES “The concept behind it was to break through limits and offer more choices. I wanted to provide a modular signal flow which allowed musicians to connect any unit to any other unit. We also added free-hand wave drawing since that was something I had always wanted myself.”
What are your favourite plugins made by other people?
ES “The five masterpieces of synth technology are SynthMaster, Omnisphere, Serum, Dune and Diva. I mention SynthMaster because it opened the door to everything we are all doing and is still one of the best. Omnisphere was the first instrument to prove that hardware audio quality could be implemented in software. My personal favourite is Serum mostly for the audio quality and interface – the first synth to prove how important UI design is to the creative process. I also mention Dune since it is very simple but has a remarkably rich sound. u-he’s Diva is currently on the leading edge of DSP and hardware emulation.”
What would you like to see developed in terms of software tech?
ES “More audio companies abandoning the anachronism of hardware to pursue sophisticated methods of visualising and creating sound. Examples are Arturia Pigments, AIR Music Loom, iZotope Iris, Tracktion Biotek, Nuance, Waves Flow Motion, Output Portal and Initial Audio Sektor. Another great trend in audio is the development of processes like JUCE which free the developer to concentrate on features. The smartest decision we made was building Fathom on JUCE.”
What have you got planned for the near future?
ES “The holy grail of audio is real-time manipulation of individual partials in a waveform. It creates infinite possibilities in timbre modulation. The challenge is that it really requires massive parallel processing.” fathomsynth.com