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The Morph panel in the lower right controls the synth's primary feature, allowing users to morph between two presets.

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• Review

Coded by LinPlug, the Rob Papen-designed LinPlug Albino 3 is a soft synth classic that's enjoyed enduring popularity since its release in 2006. The company have only released one comparable synth since - the relatively simple but great-sounding Alpha 3.

It came as some surprise, then, when MophoX, their latest, dropped out of nowhere at the end of October. Like most of LinPlug's synths, MorphoX is based around subtractive architecture.

Its headline feature is its Morph Wheel, which can be used to smoothly morph between two patches. We'll explore this in a moment, but first, let's take a look at the instrument's fundamental synthesis capabilities.

"While MorphoX isn't a one-stop shop for all your synthetic needs, it's capable of some awesome tones."

MorphoX is based on a pair of oscillators, each of which can be interpolated between two waveshapes (chosen from a selection of 48) using the Wave knob, creating a balance between the harmonics of the two waveforms.

Each oscillator has its own Volume knob, and turning this up not only increases the volume but also drives the built-in saturation. In addition to the standard virtual analogue fare, there's also ring and amplitude modulation accessed from a single knob, a Frequency Modulation knob for the second oscillator, and Albino 3-style Spread controls for each oscillator.

Unusually, spread works differently for each oscillator, giving you five voices for oscillator one and three voices for oscillator two. You can set oscillators to be free-running, and oscillator one also has a Phase control.

See you later, oscillator

The oscillator section is, by and large, excellent. The raw sound is great to start with, which always helps, and it's possible to get some really meaty tones using the spread and modulation features.

However, there's no direct way to detune the oscillators by semitones. This isn't a major problem because you can use the modulation matrix as a workaround, and there are Fine-tune knobs for creating detuned sounds.

More seriously, while the Wave knobs are automatable, it's not possible to modulate them via the mod matrix. This is a missed opportunity, as great results can be had by sweeping them rapidly. LinPlug reckon they left this out for simplicity's sake, but we hope they change their minds and make it available in a future update.

After the oscillators comes MorphoX's filter section, which boasts a couple of interesting features. Rather than offering switchable modes, it has Level knobs for its low, high, and band-pass filters, with shared Cutoff and Resonance controls.

While this might not sound particularly useful, in practice, being able to dial a little treble into the mix using the high-pass filter level is really effective. We'd like to see this included in more synths in the future.

Another nice touch is the reappearance of the filter FM function from Alpha 3. The frequency of oscillator 1 can be used to modulate the cutoff of the filter (even when the oscillator output to the amp is turned down), making it possible to apply extreme pitch modulation to the oscillator for mad, full-on cutoff frequency modulation action.