Gravity Halo's resident waveform scientist and beat destroyer extraordinaire - the incomparable Ms. Alexandra C. Sendy - not only entertains you with her spastic tunes and eccentric video game hacks, but she educates as well.  Sendy now brings her l337 production skillz and years of knob-twiddling experience to the world of synthesizer reviews and we'll be featuring them here on the blog for all those geeks out there.  Enjoy! 

Re-fx aka Tone2 made their first impression on me with their offbeat and retro-sounding synths, QuadraSid and PlasticZ, both of which are recreations of outmoded and unique synthesis models popular in the 80's (and who doesn't love them some 80's?). I've found myself using a lot of their instruments and happily parting with cash, so clearly I must think they're onto something special. I decided to write up my experiences of their instruments, starting quite a way back with the synth I never expected to see in my arsenal - Vanguard.



Vanguard has been around for a while now, but I discovered it only a few months ago. It seems to be pitched mainly as a trance workhorse, with it's emphasis on multiple Pulse-Width Modulation types, heavy detune and arpeggiator with trance-gate. I expected to hate this synth, but I ended up stuck to it! Their synthesis engine has gone through a few revisions, and initially the synth was accused of sounding 'plasticy', but to me (and many others) this is plasticy in a good way, globules of plastic that melt and drip down to form fizzing pools, which slowly cool and go crusty and crunchy in the filter. Later revisions fixed a lot of the artifacts, and you can choose to switch between 'old' and 'new' style oscillators. While the new ones are a lot smoother, there is a lot to be said for the old method, with it's treble exciter creating a raspy top end and adding knife-sharp peaks to the transition edges of it's modulating pulse waves, which seem to draw more attention to the movement of the wave geometry.

The first thing you will notice about Vanguard is it's sexy GUI, which has a logical layout and a hardware look which is enjoyable. If only they had made the knobs slightly larger, this GUI would basically be perfection on a stick.

At your disposal are three oscillators with 31 waves available, tuning and volume for each one, a master stereo unison with adjustable number of voices and offset, and a subtle pitch destabilizer for analog emulation, or noisy out-of-tune buzzing at the extreme. Many of the wave types offer PWM (Pulse-Width Modulation), including the rare delicacy of PWM Saw waves, and some of the other waves use the 'PWM' value to modulate another parameter instead, such as AM and FM with various classic waveforms, morphing oscillators (similar to PlasticZ), oscillator synch (for blazing leads) and the like. Needless to say this enables the creation of the abstract sounds I am such a fan of. Some of the waves are duplicates with different modulation options, which some people seem to overlook at first glance and assume that they are different waves that are boringly similar to eachother. Some of the choices are doubled and tripled PWM waves in fifths and octaves, making one oscillator sound like two or three, and there are some very interesting static choices such as biting comb waves, the 'Saw I/o' wave, and even an emulation of the pitched noise wave of the Commodore 64, which is musically more useful than purely random white or pink noise.

Next is the filter section, which can either sound quite weedy, or rather massive, depending on how good you are at setting the oscillators up. The filters can lack lower mid and bass power, though this can be remedied somewhat by doubling up waveforms and other tricks, and there are 13 types, with some pretty unique shapes, such as whippy distorted bandpasses, formant filters, and dual filters where the resonance parameter sets the offset between the peaks. I was disappointed to find the 'notch' filter seems not to cut a trough in the spectrum as you'd expect, but boost it (I've checked with a sonogram to be sure), making it very similar to the peaking and formant filters; but you can create some very interesting sounds without even using the filter, so it's a minor niggle.

Each oscillator has it's own dedicated LFO which only has a triangle wave, and similarly all routing is fixed. There are two envelopes, but they both have a bunch of different destinations you can dial in to mix and match, in the form of a row of knobs, allowing you to modulate the volume, cutoff, resonance (a nice touch), PWM, detuning, pitch and the like. As I have said the routing scheme is completely fixed and this creates limitations, but they are also carefully chosen such that so very much is possible, and for me, these limitations only serve to foster my creativity, and it constantly amazes me what you can do with this synth. Fuzzy abstract pads, steeply filtered basses, analog style warmth, Commodore 64 style sounds, and soaring leads are all possible, and have a certain uniqueness to them which intrigues the ear. Of course, if you're producing trance, you'll love the presets, though I'm not, and I get infinitely more pleasure from creating my own sounds, a process which I find fun and morish. In the end, I ended up liking the limitations set by this synth, because they provide a focus for your creativity, and give the synth character.

The finishing touches are the stereo trancegate, portamento, and arpeggiator, which are all very simple and yet very effective. While I don't use these as much as a trance lover would, I still find them very tweakable and musically useful in any genre of electronic music. There are also effects which are delay, a reverb suitable for leads or thickening duties, and a distortion section, which can make many of the peaking filters sound almost comb-like, and also let me program a very convincing overdriven guitar power-chord patch.

There are so many things you can do with the fixed architecture of this synth that often programming feels like an experiment in audio science. It doesn't have an autopan option, but using the stereo gater and it's smoothing parameter, and mixing the gated signal with the original creates stereo motion which is better than an LFO because it's step-driven. Setting the arpeggiator to the maximum speed creates Commodore 64 style burbling chords, you can use one envelope with instant attack and decay to set the PWM offset for the oscillators with the sustain level, providing a way to specify a range to the sweep, without having to start from the top or bottom of the range, and the LFO's can be set to reset upon keypresses, or run free... There are just so many things you can do that digging deep into the workings of Vanguard has been a fascinating journey for me, and has landed me with some very striking sounds in my music.

The Eternal Return by Sendy

You can hear multiple instances of Vanguard put through their paces in my track 'The Eternal Return' - most of the stand-out sounds and some of the background ambiance was programmed on it.

-Alexandra Cornhill