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A big, ballsy synth sound for under £100? You betcha!

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As a long-time patch designer for some of the most popular synths on the planet, Rob Papen knows how to squeeze amazing sounds from any synth he touches. More than that, he knows exactly what he needs from a synthesizer in order to create his much sought-after tones.

Rob previously worked with LinPlug to bring us the wildly popular Albino. Now he's releasing his second collaboration with Jon Ayres of ConcreteFX fame (the pair previously conspired to bring us Blue).

The freshly minted Predator is a three-oscillator hybrid synth that runs on both Mac and PC. It comes in VST, RTAS and AU flavours and costs a very reasonable £99. This starts to seem like chicken feed when you consider the big, ballsy sound this instrument offers.

Overview

On the surface, Predator's feature set looks very familiar: three oscillators are pumped through a multimode filter and a handful of modulation sources. These functions are augmented by an assortment of effects and the now-obligatory arpeggiator.

Given this rather pedestrian signal path, it's not terribly challenging to put Predator through its paces with a minimum head-scratching.

However, you shouldn't be fooled by this apparent simplicity: the devil, as they say, is in the details, and it's only when you start poking the parameters that Predator's powerful punch really becomes apparent.

Let's look again at those oscillators. No mere virtual wannabes, these pack a whopping 128 waveforms. Naturally, some are based on the standard saw, square and sine waves we know and love, but the majority draw on additive or spectral synthesis to produce a sizzling sonic palette that sounds decidedly modern.

But it doesn't end with the waveforms. Predator offers pulse width modulation (with a dedicated LFO, no less), frequency and ring modulation and a sub oscillator to boot. What's more, you can control the symmetry of each wave.

Oscillators have a free-running mode and the second and third oscillators can be synced to the first. Oh, and you get noise generators, too.

Turn your attention to the main filter and you're transported back to Retroville. This is a multimode affair that offers 6dB, 12dB, 18dB and 24dB low- and high-pass filtering, and 12dB and 24dB band-pass, notch and comb filters. Cutoff and Q knobs are provided, as is a dedicated five-stage envelope generator.

A dedicated filter LFO with all the trimmings is tucked in there, as is a pre-filter distortion that offers convincing, edgy crunch. Another nice touch is the dedicated control for determining how much effect the mod wheel has on the filter.

Harking back to Roland's classic Juno series, Predator also throws a second filter iunto the signal path. This, too, is a multimode model, but includes just a lone cutoff knob.