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The interface pops open to reveal all Gladiator's functions.

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With Gladiator, Tone2 is claiming to have created a brand new type of synthesis known as Harmonic Content Morphing (HCM).

It works something like this: Gladiator’s oscillators employ a method by which the waveform in question is broken down into a collection of harmonic snapshots, with 256 of them comprising a morphtable. The user can then manipulate the morphtable in a wide variety of ways

Now, we’re not sure if this method is technically similar to, say, Krishna Synth’s Frame Oscillator, or even the graintables that fuel Reason’s magnificent Maelstrom, but in practice, they have some things in common. The technology probably won’t flummox synthesists weaned on Waldorf or PPG wavetable synthesizers, either, though it’s considerably more complex than those.

But is it really the “revolution” in sound design that Tone2’s marketing department suggests?

The details

Gladiator is a cross-platform VST and AU plug-in. It’s a Universal Binary and available as a download. Copy protection takes the form of a simple and non-intrusive key file, and you’re free to use a single licensed version on a Mac and a PC. Multi-core and 64-bit machines are supported.

When you first fire up Gladiator, you’re met with a collapsed rack view that offers immediate access to the most used features: the patch browser, microtuning functions, master volume controls and more. The Editor button opens the full interface.

Annoyingly, whenever we opened a project using Gladiator, the interface was collapsed into the default rack view, even though the Editor button was lit up to show that it had been saved otherwise.

As we’ve suggested, Gladiator’s strengths begin with its powerful HCM oscillators. There are five sections, one of which is devoted to various sorts of noise, and not just the obligatory white or pink varieties. You get dozens of sampled transients, plucks, pops and even burps.

These oscillators employ a fairly unusual approach to synthesis that takes some time to get one’s head around, but with a bit of perseverance and the PDF manual, the experienced sound designer should be able to get to grips with what’s happening under the hood.

You’ll find yourself in more familiar territory once you’ve left the oscillator sections. Gladiator comes armed with an arsenal of filter options, including low-pass in nine different flavours, a quartet each of high-pass, band-pass and FM filters, along with formant, comb, phase and a few more besides

We’re particularly keen on the Resample filter, which imparts a metallic grunge to the input.