MusicRadar

Pacarana does the DSP work so your computer doesn't have to.

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• Review

Should you be feeling jaded at the thought of yet another me-too soft synth, Kyma-X provides the ultimate high-end antidote.

Firstly, it's not so much a soft synth, more of an audio construction kit, like Reaktor or SynthEdit, but on a shop full of steroids. Kyma-X arrives with an external DSP box called Pacarana for the number crunching, which means that patches – they're called 'sounds' – always work, even if you're running them on a basic laptop.

In the latest update, you can add extra DSP power by plugging in more boxes, to create an expensive but powerful planet-eating über-Kyma network.

In terms of that power, Kyma-X is way, way beyond anything else you can buy. Compared to, say, Reaktor, Kyma-X adds more options than you can wave a Visa card at, including resynthesis, morphing and scripting, and live MIDI processing and improvisation.

You don't just get total control over audio, you get a brain-expanding education in how to think about sound. The basic system is a patchable pseudo-modular, but there's also a timeline you can use to assemble a complete performance, with patch automation, or sync a mix to timecode.

Kyma chameleon

Kyma-X is smart, and Kyma-X can listen. With the supplied modules you can build all of the usual basics, including digital and virtual analogue synthesizers, vocoders and custom processors. But the extra processing power means that you can also do insane things like patch together polyphonic synth voices with 64 sawtooth oscillators each.

You can also trigger, mutate, re-patch or process audio in ways that depend on what's happening at the input. Sidechain FX are trivially easy. But you can take the smart processing much further, recognising certain words in a vocal line, and sending them to different FX chains.

This kind of Kyma-Fu takes advanced skills, so you won't be doing it immediately. But it's a few hundred steps beyond what's possible with a synth construction kit.

Naturally, the power comes at a price. By soft synth standards, Kyma-X isn't cheap – but to be fair, as a professional unit Kyma-X isn't any more expensive than some more upmarket hardware reverb units.

The rest of the cost is in the learning curve. Getting around the basics is easy and you'll be making sounds in no time. After that, you'll need to spend some time getting used to Kyma-X's unique approach.

Morphing

Kyma has the unique ability to morph sounds, melting them into each other like plastic. This is completely different to the usual crossfade effect, because pitch, timbre and rhythm all change simultaneously.

Kyma-X has been used in heaps of films to create the sound of an androgynous singing voice, half way between male and female pitch and timbre. But it's also been used in adverts, morphing the sound of typing into a Caribbean holiday jingle.

There's a lot happening behind the scenes to make morphing possible. To morph two sounds you run them through an analysis process which creates a special non-audio file that includes all of the ingredients needed to rebuild the sound, and then plug them into one of the morphing modules.

After analysis pitch, timbre and time stretching can all be controlled independently, and with only a little more effort you can morph manually with a slider, or under LFO or envelope control.

You can also control a morph by listening to incoming audio, and pick out whatever feature you want to use as a controller – from average loudness, to the volume of one very specific frequency band.