MusicRadar

The Studio Units Plug-in Collection comes complete with a very steep learning curve.

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• Review

They say that first impressions count, and the graphical interface of the Studio Units Plug-in Collection lets it down on that front. We're not sure about the slate texture, for example, and the primary colour scheme reminds us of plug-in design circa 1998 rather than 2010.

But the functionality behind the GUI is very much 21st century, and can be approached from two directions. Firstly, there's a library of 11 VST effects plug-ins that can be inserted into your own projects just like any other. These range from compression and equalisation through to filtering and vocoding - we'll have more details shortly. They sound good, and the manual goes into plenty of detail on how to get the most out of them. They're not going to rival dedicated high-end plug-ins, but that's OK - they won't be the reason you buy Studio Units.

The real power lies in the prosaically named 'SU synth' and 'SU effect' VST plug-ins. These are portals to an underworld of sound design, audio manipulation and synth creation. They allow you to build sound processing patches in the Studio Units modular environment, and alongside the standard stereo versions, there are alternatives that can handle 4, 8, 16 and 32 channels, if your host is up to the task. Each offers an empty window of opportunity, where a patch can be created from scratch using a range of bundled modules.

In detail

A clunky point-and-click interface opens a module and preset browser. Studio Units takes the same modular paradigm used by industry stalwarts like Reaktor and Max/MSP. Each of its integrated modules has MIDI, audio and parameter nodes, coloured red, blue and green, and these can be dragged to the inputs and outputs of other modules to connect them. The GUI displays these connections very effectively with nicely anti-aliased cables, and even when the patch gets complicated, you can usually find your way around the routing without too much difficulty.

Studio Units does all this in real time, which aids immediacy and tempts you into making fine adjustments you might otherwise leave alone.

Understanding how to combine the building blocks is difficult, however. You won't find oscillators, LFOs and envelopes, and you won't find the inputs and outputs labelled as you would with Reaktor or SynthEdit. Instead, you'll find modules more familiar to programmers and synth enthusiasts; and - the biggest hurdle of all - there's a seriously steep learning curve.

The trouble is that generating sound isn't purely drag and drop - it also involves some programming. Many of the modules feature a small 'blackboard' area that's used to hold mathematical expressions describing their function, and each module's capabilities are far from intuitive. The scariest example of this is the 'transform' module, an immensely complex beast that's mostly used to generate sound. It features over 40 separate mathematical functions, the list of which reads like a primer in applied mathematics.