MusicRadar

Morphine can be very addictive

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• Review

Programmer Maxx Claster is quickly becoming one of our favourites. We loved his previous solo offering, Toxic III, which we awarded 9/10 in cm103, and now he's weaving his magic in the service of those boffins from Belgium, Image-Line – they of FL Studio fame.

The result of Maxx's labours this time round is Morphine, a cross-platform synthesizer available in VST, AU and standalone incarnations.

Addition addicts What's so special about Morphine, then? Well, it would seem that the developers have rolled up a bona fide additive synthesizer with all of the trimmings.

'So what?' we hear you groan, and perhaps with good reason. There have been a handful of additive synthesizers released in recent years.

However, they often trade in the complexity of true additive synthesis for hybrid approaches that, while relatively easy to use, are not capable of the complex and realistic timbres of a 'pure' additive (for more details, see the Artificial additives boxout).

Overview

The designer of Morphine has found a solution that retains the depth and complexity of a fully additive instrument without giving up some semblance of user-friendliness. Mind you, user-friendliness is relative, and we don't mean to imply that first-time additive explorers won't be scratching their heads a little.

At first glance, it's obvious that Morphine bears little resemblance to the conventional subtractive synthesizers that most of us are used to. Gone are the simple, familiar oscillators we know so well, replaced here by a vast vista of vertical lines representing individual partials.

There are 128 partials per generator, and there are up to four generators per patch. Traditionally, a purely additive instrument would offer at least one pitch and amplitude envelope generator per partial. Morphine turns this idea on its head, offering what the developers call a Spectrum.

This is a sort of infinitely variable envelope generator. You can create as many breakpoints (nodes) as you like, and the amplitude, pan position and detuning values for all 128 partials are stored for each breakpoint.

This means that you can create timbres that change in an infinite variety of ways over time. While not quite as meticulous as having a separate envelope generator for each and every partial, it's still pretty flippin' flexible, and much less daunting.

While an additive instrument doesn't need filtering, Morphine offers a PWM Filter for each of the four generators. Based on pulse width modulation, the PWM Filter gives the tone a sort of hollow chorused or phased effect.

We found it worked quite well when modulated with an envelope generator from the Modulation page. While we're on the subject of envelopes, Morphine's Modulation page sports a quartet of them for twisting your timbres.