Post Description

If I had to compile a 'memorable products of last year' list, I would definitely reserve a place for Virsyn's Cube software synth. With Cube, which I reviewed in SOS September 2003, Virsyn made the powerful but neglected technique of additive synthesis truly accessible for the first time. You could create fascinating new sounds by manipulating the level and pan of every individual partial, and you could draw on a useful range of preset harmonic spectra derived from real instruments and human voices. Cube was a very powerful and original synth; but what it lacked was the ability to analyse an input sound automatically, work out its harmonic content, and translate that information into an additive synth patch.

Resynthesis, to give this technique its proper name, has been the ultimate goal for the developers of additive synths since the days of the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, promising to combine the realism of sampling with radical freedom to repitch, morph and generally monkey around with the sound. Even last year, I suspected that this might be too ambitious for current technology, but things move fast in the world of soft synths, and only six months later I find myself sat in front of another additive synthesizer — one that promises fast, powerful and accurate resynthesis of sounds based on user samples. Cameleon 5000 is the first synth to emerge from Ben Gillett's Camel Audio stable (do camels live in stables?), and runs as a VST Instrument under Windows and Mac OS X, with an Audio Units version also available on the latter platform.

Presets & Programs
If you set aside the resynthesis and some stylish virtual walnut panelling, Cameleon 5000 actually bears a fairly close resemblance to Virsyn Cube. As with Cube, the basic structure of a Cameleon patch consists of four separate additive sound sources, which are visualised as being at the corners of a square. And as with Cube, you can use MIDI controllers and complex multi-stage envelopes to morph between these four sources. This allows you to create lengthy, evolving patches, or hybrid sounds which seamlessly combine, say, the attack portion of a duck's quacking with the sustain of a saxophone and the decay of a marimba. The morphed output of the four additive sources is then fed through an effects section comprising a formant filter with up to 128 breakpoints, distortion, a conventional resonant filter, chorus, stereo delay and reverb.

Like Virsyn, Camel Audio have realised that additive synthesis can be daunting for the newcomer, and they've tried to make it possible to get a lot out of Cameleon without getting too deeply involved in editing the individual additive sources. There are, in effect, two 'levels' of Cameleon patch: Voice Programs, which contain all the parameters associated with an individual source, and Presets, which assign different Voice Programs to the four sources and store global information such as morph envelopes, modulation and effects settings. Voice Programs are independent of Presets, and a single Voice Program can be used in different Presets (or even more than once within the same Preset). Presets are, in turn, arranged in banks. The Cameleon interface is divided into a total of eight editing pages; four deal with the parameters for Voice Programs A, B, C and D, while the other four address the global parameters that make up a Preset.

A browse of the factory sound banks reveals that Camel Audio have focused far more than Virsyn on recreating real instruments, showing off their resynthesis technology. The Preset that's loaded by default, for instance, is an acoustic bass every bit as good as your average workstation S&S sound — but no samples are involved in playing back this sound. Some of the other 'real instruments' are even more impressive, and with Presets like Celesta, Finger Bass and Steel Drums, it's only the utter lack of multisample split points and aliasing artifacts that tell you this is not a sampler. Others, such as Oboe and Alto Sax, are much wider of the mark, but at the very least, the tonal quality of the real instrument always comes through. Of course, resynthesis isn't restricted to samples of acoustic instruments, and Camel Audio have also applied it to classic analogue and FM synths such as the Minimoog and DX7, often with excellent results. There are also numerous excellent sound effects, along with a small bank of percussion Presets, though this is clearly not one of Cameleon 's strengths.