Sonic Charge’s µTonic has had my vote for best non sample based drum synthesizer since it’s initial release. Two things make it stand out. Number one, the kick drums can go from tight, sharp, clicky, snappy all the way to Dutch hardcore distorted. The second thing that makes µTonic king is it’s incredibly wild random mode. WIth a single click you get the right kind of FM, self oscillating glitch sequences your searching for. Some of what the long awaited new version adds includes a Matrix Editor allowing you to see all of your sequence at once (hooray), Drag and drop patterns as MIDI files directly into your sequencer, “Edit All Channels” button enables adjusting parameters for all drum channels simultaneously (Great!) and a morph slider allows you to interpolate all eight drum patches simultaneously between two end-points.

Bitspeek has me on the buy button more than even the new 3.0 µTonic. I’m all about vocals in music. I like a message and the human voice is the most unique instrument there is. Imagine the original Speak N Spell toy had a mic input and would change your voice into it’s robotic sound in real time. That’s a start of what you get with Bitspeak. It goes further though getting you some very nice vocoder and talkbox effects. It’s $29 so if your into this kind of this it’s a no brainer.

“Sonic Charge Bitspeek is a real-time pitch-excited linear prediction codec effect. Right now you are probably thinking, “oh, another one of those”? Or perhaps not. Chances are that you have never heard about “linear prediction”, although most of us use it daily when we talk on our cell phones. Linear prediction coding is a voice compression technology that appeared in commercial products in the seventies and was implemented in some well-known speaking toys of the early eighties.” – soniccharge.com

Audio samples and more info: soniccharge.com

Sonic Charge’s MicroTonic is one of the best software drum machines. Now you can browse patterns and drum sets on their website in the Patternarium. You can thumbs up or down patterns, save patterns and if you have MicroTonic running simply copy the pattern with a few clicks. I think it’s a pretty interesting web meets sequencer diddy!

“What you are experiencing above are computer generated patterns for µTonic created through principles of evolution. All the sounds and rhythms you are hearing are produced by algorithms running on our servers (even the names are made up by random). Think of Patternarium as a giant collaborative patch randomizer. Our servers are regularly spawning new generations of a thousand unique patterns, each one being the cross product of two other patterns picked at random. The higher votes a certain pattern receives, the more likely it is to get picked and bear offspring into the next generation. This means that you may participate and influence the outcome of Patternarium simply by voting.” – soniccharge.com/patternarium

Check out the Patternarium: soniccharge.com/patternarium

Sonic Charge, the makers of the well loved µTonic (MicroTonic) have released their new creation Synplant. I would describe Synplant as a Generative music plug-in. The results from Synplant don’t sound like random bleeps though. I was checking out some of the audio demos on the Sonic Charge site and at first I thought they were human created songs. Peter Kirn at Create Digital Music has been testing the plug-in and is also working on a video walkthrough. Here’s his post: click here

Synplant is a software synthesizer with a genetic approach to sound creation. Instead of creating patches the conventional way by turning dials and knobs, Synplant lets you explore a world of organic sounds by planting seeds that grow into synth patches. The purpose of this product is to move focus away from the sometimes intricate and difficult process of sound synthesis and instead let you develop sounds by simply using your ears. – soniccharge.com

Synplant is $89. 3 week fully working demo: click here

via createdigitalmusic