MusicRadar

Komplexer has much in common with Waldorf's Micro Q

1 of 3 » View in gallery

• Review

At its heart, Komplexer is effectively a subtractive synthesizer, and this fact is reinforced by the presence of a pair of resonant, multimode filters.

You get the expected low-, high-, band-pass and notch filters and there's a drive control for adding some grit and grime to the proceedings. One nice touch is the ability to apply cutoff FM - a trick used by modular synthesizers.

Of course, there are envelopes and LFOs onboard too. The four envelopes come in ADSR and ADS1DS2R, one-shot and looping varieties, and there are three LFOs with selectable waveforms. These can be synchronised to host tempo and you can customise the waveforms by playing with the contour functions.

All of the modulation sources can be applied to the desired destinations with the modulation matrix, and with 39 sources and 58 destinations, you can easily achieve the kind of sounds you might expect of a modular synthesizer.

What's more, Komplexer offers an Arithmetic modulation source - this can link two 'operands' (sources) using logical functions and then apply the result as a mod source. Heady stuff indeed!
Finally, you're given a pair of effects processors for sweetening everything up. The fare is pretty standard: delay, reverb, chorus and the like. FX1 is available per layer, while FX2 is globally assigned.

If you've still not had your fill of big, fat trance leads, the unison function can thicken things up.

Summary

Undeniably, TerraTec have delivered the goods here. Komplexer is a terrific synthesizer that comes packed with functionality and brimming with possibilities.

On the downside, we'd like to see the arpeggiator being offered as a mod source in the matrix and while some of the preset patches are superb (Summa and DocT deserve special mention for their excellent programming), others are bland and redundant. How many trance leads do we really need?

Ultimately, though, Komplexer is a true thoroughbred that will appeal to computer musicians who like their sounds unashamedly electronic. And at just £155, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a used Microwave.