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Nuklear's main selling point is its unique sound.

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We love innovation here at - after all, where would computer music be without it? We particularly like to see new things happening in the world of soft synths, purely for the reason that it's not often we get one that requires us to sit down, pull out our reading glasses and put the phone on silent.

Nuklear, from hamburg-audio, is one of those few. Nuklear is a VST/AU plug-in based around so-called pulsar synthesis. Described as related to granular synthesis, it has some unusual and distinctive features that result in similarly unusual and distinctive sounds.

Finger on the pulse

So how do pulsar oscillators differ from typical ones? Well, instead of using 'looping' waveforms such as sine, saw, square, etc, played at different pitches, they use individual pulses of varying shapes repeated at slower or faster rates.

"Nuklear has some unusual and distinctive features that result in similarly unusual and distinctive sounds."

To get an idea of how this works, use your wave editor to make a sample consisting of a super-short sound (ideally a single cycle snipped from a waveform) followed by silence of, say, a second.

Put that sample in a sampler and loop it, and you should hear a "blip… blip… blip…" sound. If you gradually reduce the loop length, you'll hear how the 'blips' eventually repeat so fast that they create a solid tone, with the loop length dictating pitch - shorter lengths give higher pitches.

Pulsar synthesis uses this concept of repeating a fixed-length pulse at varying intervals to produce a pitched tone. Unlike basic sample looping, though, each pulse plays in its entirety, potentially overlapping with the previous and subsequent pulses.

Nuklear's pulsar synthesis makes possible novel features such as alternating the panning of pulses to create a super-wide sound; and omitting certain pulses, which gives rise to sub-harmonics.

There are four oscillators termed pulsar trains. Each has a Pulsar knob; when set to zero, it causes the pulses to be 'stretched' so that the results are just like normal synth oscillators.

The maximum setting results in 'pure' pulsar synthesis, while intermediate values give something in between the two. Further knobs include Freq, which sets the length of the pulse (it adjusts the resultant timbre, not the pitch); Width, which pans alternate pulses left and right (when set to zero, the results are mono); and Phase, which offsets every other pulse, producing a tonal shift.

The filters are much more traditional and offer few surprises, with low-, band- and high pass in 12 and 24dB/octave flavours available. They can be used in parallel or series.

For modulation, there are eight ADSHR envelopes with curve controls for the attack, decay and release. Eight LFOs share the same GUI space - clicking the panel label toggles between them. Here you get four waveshapes and Sync, Phase, Offset and Retrigger controls.