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Omnisphere's interface makes the synth's power easy to control.

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Filters, envelopes and LFOs

Once you've chosen the sound source of your choice, to the right you can activate the filter section, which offers variants in three categories: high-pass, low-pass and speciality. Below the filter type, cutoff, resonance, Key Follow and Envelope dials allow you to adjust your filter treatment, with a handy gain slider available at this stage too.

Below this, the envelope section provides tabs to let you adjust the amp and filter envelopes, while also allowing access to four modulation envelopes.

You can keep envelopes in simple ADSR forms, or expand their functionality, which is where the fun really starts. By clicking on the microscope button you can bring up an in-depth graphical display for the envelopes, which offer break-point, fully editable steps.

These can be shaped manually, one step at a time, or you can rely on the Chaos envelope designer to take control for you. The Chaos button randomly adjusts the curves and envelope steps to yield unexpected results, though you can restrict the amount and type of randomisation if you don't want something wildly off the scale.

Envelopes can be looped and synced to the tempo of your host sequencer, so you can achieved anything here from bubbly, filtered basslines to wild, eternally shifting soundscapes.

There are six independent LFOs with a variety of waveforms too, and as with all things relating to the Omnisphere interface, you can either keep things simple by setting up a single modulation routing directly in the main window or you can maximise the view to get an overview of all routings on a single pop-out page.

There are 24 routing options available for any patch and you can control which of the layers will be affected by routings you set up.

Arpeggiators

Spectrasonics has gone arpeggiator crazy in Omnisphere, with a powerful engine capable of taking any patch and sending it spiralling into tempo-sync'd madness.

There are 32 steps available for any sequence, with buttons below each step acting as on/off switches. A variety of modes let you decide whether movement will be chord-based, upwards, downwards, randomised and the like, while the range can be extended from anything from one to four octaves.

Clock is available from 1/1 to 1/32 notes, while a Length dial knob lets you restrict the note length of the sequence globally. You can introduce swing via another knob, which shifts the 'even' steps late, so that straight patterns can become progressively 'skipped'.

What's particularly impressive is that an independent arpeggiator is available for every layer of a multi, so if you have eight patches loaded simultaneously, they can all be independently arpeggiated.