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DCAM: Synth Squad's Fusor shell enables you to stack up the three synths.

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Putting aside the rather minimal freebies Orca and Mysteron (remember them?), DCAM: Synth Squad is the first synthesizer product from plug-in veterans FXpansion.

The package includes three synths – Amber, Cypher and Strobe – and while each has its own sonic speciality, they share some common parameters and a unified modulation system. The package also includes a shell instrument, Fusor, enabling you to layer up the synths, add effects and more.

Strobe

The simplest of the synths is Strobe, a subtractive job with a mixer that enables you to blend sawtooth, pulse and noise oscillators. In addition, you can mix sine, triangle, saw and square sub oscillators, each of which can be set to any of the three octaves below the root note.

The pulse width of the main oscillator and sub oscillators can be set independently, and there's a drivable, self-resonating multimode filter with a whopping 22 types to pick from.

For phattening things up, the Stack and Detune knobs essentially give per-oscillator unison of up to five voices – with Detune at the maximum setting, gradually increasing Stack introduces tones an octave above and below, then a fifth above and a fourth below – this is in addition to DCAM's generic unison capability. For creating hard sync effects, modulation of the Sync knob is absolutely where it's at.

Amber

Amber is a little more exotic than Strobe, being based on the architecture of classic 'string machine' synths, such as the ARP String Ensemble. These achieve polyphony using 12 oscillators to create an octave's worth of notes that are then 'divided down' to lower frequencies to enable the full range of the keyboard to be utilised.

Amber has two sound-generating sections, each with their own amplitude envelope. One features standard 8" and 4" saw oscillators, plus a noise generator and a resonant multimode filter with eight filter types, while the other has 8", 4" and 2" divide-down sawtooth oscillators with a four-band formant filter and three-mode chorus effect.

The amplitude envelope for the string section only has attack and release times, and has no voice number limits.