Hydrasynth Desktop

Product Information

Parameters like RATCHET and CHANCE will generate other rhythmic patterns with some randomness to add life and spontaneity to your performance. It requires a bit of tweaking stuff to develop convincing saw pads with no resonance and open filter because of this.

If you’re on the lookout for a hardware digital synth, the Hydrasynth should really be at the top of your list. The real-world principle applies to the envelopes too, in what must be one of the best implementations I've seen in years.The first two are capable of wave scanning through user-created wavetables while all three can play one of 219 waveforms.

The Oscillators can be further shaped via 4x "Mutants"; besides FM, 3x different types of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM), Hard-Sync and Harmonic Sweep, there is also Wavestack. It's genius and makes editing super fast, a rare feat for a mod matrix, but there's no way to know this from the front panel alone. As Darcey explained, “(Product Manager) Dominic (Au) and I come out of modular backgrounds so being able to route anything to anything was in our DNA, so to say. It would also be super cool if the effects section had something added that digitally alter/degrade whatever wave was sent to it, like sample rate/bit rate decimation, but perhaps also modes which mimic directly the sort of digital grunge or grit of some past synths of old. It includes 11 types, ranging from Moog ladder homages to impressions of the MS20 LPF and HPF, plus a Doepfer Low-pass Gate and a trio based on a boutique modular from Threeler.

Holding down shift and turning the first wave in a wavetable moves all the waves up by one, making all sorts of intermediate wavetables between sets.

The second big UI issue that isn't apparent at first go is the trick about how to make easy mod-matrix assignments: hold down the module button for a source, and while keeping this held, hit the button for the destination module, and hydra just makes a mod-matrix assignment for you, and takes you to the mod matrix page to tweak it. While it's possible to use the current presets in such a way to some extent, this also often requires stripping a way a lot of other stuff to make it work, when a relatively bare template (ie: FM sweep, Sync sweep, etc. It can reach parts of the synth not always open to modulation, such as the effects, arpeggiator parameters, envelope stages and even the levels of other slots, with only a few omissions as of the current firmware (such as Glide and envelope shapes). This is a common trait of most Mutants when pushed, and ASM are to be applauded for not limiting their baby to tame or 'normal' results. The Wavelist Edit page simplifies the selection process in various ways, and if you have no particular plan to start with, the Random button will choose waveforms for you.The Hydrasynth comes with 2x Pre-Set Banks of 128x Sounds each; 5x Banks with a total capacity of 640x Sounds available.