So löschen Sie Sandbender

FM synthesis has always had a bit of an image problem. Everybody loves the sound, but nobody wants to program it, which is why most of the FM you've heard in your life was a factory preset that nobody dared to touch. (Touching it was a fast way to turn an electric piano in to a fax machine.) With Sandbender, the four operators are where a sound starts. They're all here, in ten factory algorithms or any routing you feel like drawing, but every operator has a wave shaper of its own, there's a wavefolder, a sub oscillator, and six flavors of noise alongside them, and the whole lot runs through a proper filter and a low pass gate. If all you want is a nice FM bell, I'm happy to report that Sandbender makes a very nice FM bell. It just seems a shame to stop there.

We also tried to make the programming part less of a chore, since that was the whole problem in the first place. Modulation is drag-and-drop: grab a source off the rail (envelopes, LFOs, a couple of function generators, a step sequencer, the macros, and all the MIDI and MPE stuff) and drop it on pretty much any knob. And if you'd rather not program at all, nobody's going to blame you. The GENETICS page breeds new patches out of whatever you're playing, and PERFORM gives you two nodes to shove around the screen, plus a gesture recorder for when you stumble on something good. Six of our effects sit at the end of the chain, in whatever order you like, and there are 260-odd presets in the box to get you going.

On iPhone and iPad, Sandbender is an AUv3 for whatever host you like, and a standalone app for when you'd rather skip the host.

FEATURES

• Four-operator FM: ten factory algorithms plus an algorithm designer for drawing your own. Each operator tunes by harmonic ratio, free ratio, or fixed frequency.
• Warp and Fold: a one-knob shaper on every operator morphs its wave from triangle through sine to pulse, and the wavefolder adds harmonics without rearranging the sidebands.