Pro II Synthesizer

Music Tech Mag Review - Pro II

By: MT (Music Tech Magazine) - 04/01/2012

Although best known for exquisite electronic drum sounds, the Wave Alchemy team has been locked away capturing the sound of the classic Pro One synth to create the company's first sample instrument, Pro II.

The main version of Pro II comes with a 3.9GB ore library and 195 presets for Kontakt 4 (and above) that make extensive use of the built-in effects and scripting.

Also available are slightly cut-down versions for Ableton Live (which features controls laid out using the instrument racks) and Reason's NN-XT sampler.

WA has gone to great lengths to deliver a dashing Kontakt GUI, with simple controls and a retro look spread across five pages, including synth controls, an effects page and a sequencer page.

In order to offer the most flexible experience, you'll find raw sine, saw, square, pulse and triangle oscillator waveforms at your disposal, with the ability to mix and match two, plus two sub-oscillators from a vintage Moog Source synth.

These sounds can be played using the keyboard of the nifty built-in 16-step sequencer, with lanes for pitch, cut-off and resonance meaning acid bass lines are a breeze to input.

To give things a more contemporary edge there's an effects section with phaser, bitcrush, distortion, flanger, chorus, delay and reverb, plus some lush sounding custom IRs giving the sounds a sense of life and space.

You'll find 38 patches programmed with this setup, plus 138 superb multi-sampled Pro One patches and 19 more complex, multi-layered Kontakt instruments. You can even load one of the programmed Pro One sounds and layer in the raw waveforms on top to create rich multi-oscillator patches. Our only gripe is that there's no way to sync the LFO and delays to host, although if you know your way around Kontakt, it's not too tricky to turn this on.

Wave Alchemy has really pulled out all the stops here and created a synth instrument that both captures the analogue heart of the original while offering enough editing options to make it a serious sound design tool.

Verdict

Combines excellent original Pro One synth sounds with a flexible interface and the ability to make your own patches using raw waveforms. The built-in sequencer makes this an absolute dream for techno producers.

Rating 9/10

Waveformless Review - Pro II

By: Tom Shear (Waveformless) - 15/12/2011

After releasing a number of high quality loop and one-shot drum samples, developers Wave Alchemy are back with something a bit different this time. Pro-II is the company's first instrument built for Native Instruments Kontakt (minimum 4.2 required, and no, this won't work with the free Kontakt Player). This is exciting news in itself, but as the font on the packaging may have tipped you off, the source of these sounds is the revered Sequential Circuits Pro One. Got your attention now?

What is it?

Pro-II is a virtual instrument built in Kontakt that makes extensive use of that program's scripting and GUI capabilities. Although it includes over 150 multi-sampled presets, Wave Alchemy also provided samples of the Pro One's raw oscillators allowing you to sculpt your own. This is done via five pages of controls that mimic the look of the old Sequential synths. These pages are divided by Preset (with a basic "easy" selection of parameters to tweak on the multi-sampled presets), Raw Oscillator (with controls for the 2 oscillators, 2 sub oscillators, white and pink noise generators, and more available in the 'synth' mode), a Sequencer (to sequence Cutoff, Resonance, and Note Values), an effects section with reverb, chorus, delay, bit crushing, flanging, phasing, and distortion, and a Control page allowing you to select whether the sound is mono or poly, unison settings, etc. So clearly, while the Pro One provides the inspiration for this instrument, the Wave Alchemy team decided to bring it into the 21st Century with features you won't find on the original.

The Sounds

Anyone who has played or owned a Pro One will instantly recognize its tone here... buzzy, warm, and tight as a duck's behind. The sampling is of the quality we've come to expect from Wave Alchemy - damn near perfect. Split points among the multi-samples are undetectable, and looping is smooth as can be. There's a good selection of "bread and butter" sounds including analog strings, funky basses, and leads, as well as more unusual FM and cross-mod type sounds that blur the line between digital and analog.

The Verdict

If you're a fan of the Pro One and don't have access to one, I don't know why you're still reading this. For the price, this is an outstanding value and the additional programmability will extend its shelf life as far as you care to take it. I've often said that where a lot of softsynths fall down is in the oscillators, not the filters, as many people say (it's probably a bit of column a, a little of column b). If that's the case, there's something to be said for using samples of the real deal versus trying to emulate it in software. Honestly, some of the most convincingly "analog" sounding patches I've made are for the sample-based Omnisphere. So while you won't have the same instability of tone you might from the real deal, this gets you close and without the headaches the real thing can provide. And while this relies on Kontakt's filters instead of modeled ones (in the Raw mode), for most purposes, it sounds fairly close. Of course the multi-sampled sounds have plenty of actual Pro One filter sound, so there's a bit of that available to you as well. Overall, I'm not quite ready to sell my Pro One yet, but I can tell already this is an instrument I'll get a lot out of!

Rating 10/10

Plughugger Review - Pro II

By: Carl Lofgren (Plughugger) - 14/12/2011

if Sequential Circuits ever would have released a follow-up to the monophonic Pro One analog synthesizer, it might well have looked like this. Wave Alchemy does a truly remarkable job with its first synthesizer.

If the Minimoog is the dream synthesizer for performers who want to spend as little time as possible designing new sounds, the Sequential Circuits Pro One (and of course its older brother the Prophet 5) are definitely aimed for people who have a deeper interest in designing their own sounds.

As John Bowen once told me in an interview - they didn't add a third ocillator to the Prophet 5 in order to keep costs down, which led them to invent the Poly Mod section - the forerunner to the modulation matrixes we see in most synthesizers today.

The Pro One is basically a monophonic version of the Prophet 5 and has all of the Prophet's features - two oscillators, a resonant filter, an lfo and envelopes.

When the sampling maestros at Wave Alchemy started to sample the Pro One they did what the people at Native Instruments, Creamware and Arturia have already done - create a faithful clone of a legendary instrument.

But Wave Alchemy didn't limit themselves as hard as the other developers did. The spirit of the Prophet is there - but they allowed themselves to expand the concept and take the Pro One into the modern age.

What is it?

Pro II is built upon the Kontakt 4-engine from Native Instruments and NN-XT in Reason, which means this whole affair is constructed on samples - more than 6500 individual samples spanning over 3.9 gigabyte. The version tested here is the version for Kontakt.

To summarize the differences between the Pro II and the original Pro One

The Pro One has all its controls in one hardware panel. The Pro II has the controls spread over five tabs - Pro One, Pro II, Sequencer, Effects and Control.

The original has two oscillators. Pro II has two oscillators plus two sub-oscillators.

Pro II has effects.

Pro II has a built-in analog step sequencer.

Pro II allows stacking of many units (in Kontakt multi mode).

Pro One has oscillator sync and has pulse-wave modulation. Pro II has neither of those two functions (thanks to Ingo at Kvr for pointing that out).

Presets

There are three groups of presets in Pro II. First a group of 138 typical Pro One sounds. These sounds include everything from basses, leads to effects. The second group consists of 38 presets utilizing the extra features of Pro II. The last group is multis - in other words several Pro IIs layered. This category is made up by 19 presets, and is by far the most breathtaking.

The reason why there are presets for Pro One and Pro II is that this whole synthesizer is actually two. Sounds confusing? Yes, I admit it does - but it's quite easily explained. The Pro One presets are 100 percent Pro One, including the analog filters. Nothing else.

The Pro II part on the other hand utilizes the parts of the Kontakt 4 engine - among them the filters. Wave Alchemy told me they will release a version for Kontakt 5 with switchable filters. Although I never hesitate one moment to tell the world how annoyed I am with Kontakt 4, I think the filters works very well together with the Pro II oscillators.

As you probably can imagine. The Pro One presets sounds like typical analog sounds. The presets from Pro II sounds much more modern and the multis are... huge. Most readers of this blog knows I'm a fetishist when it comes to bass sounds and am not too fond of synth pads - but with the pads in Pro II I'd actually like to create music with pads. Huge, massive pads.

But the Pro II doesn't only excel when it comes to pads - happily I can inform you that it's almost as good with bass sounds.

Architecture

The architecture is what you expect from an analog subtractive synthesizer. Oscillators - filter - modulators. The additions here is that the two oscillators aren't analog but a huge number of sampled waveforms. The two sub-oscillators can be set to either sine or square. At the very end there is an effect section, which I'll go into further on.

Sequencer

The built-in step sequencer is a very cool addition. It looks great and is very easy to program. There is a randomization function built-in and you can control the sequencer via your keyboard. You can even trigger different patterns by pressing certain keys in the seventh octave. Very practical.

Effects

The available effects are phaser, distortion, bitcrush, flanger, reverb, chorus and delay - and are all (apart from the reverb) based on the built-in effects in Kontakt 4. Again - I am no fan of the effects of Kontakt - but here I have no complaints. I don't know what Wave Alchemy have done with the effects but they work very well with the sounds. The reverb is another cool addition that is entirely unexpected. By using the impulse-engine of Kontakt Wave Alchemy have provided 20 very nice reverbs from one of those ultra-expensive Eventide DSP-7000 Harmonizers.

Conclusion

Everybody who reads this blog knows I'm far from a friend of Native Instruments Kontakt. With that said, the amount of ultra-high quality instruments released based on Kontakt is staggering and Pro II is one of them. Creating sounds with the Pro II is easy. Sonically it doesn't feel like there is samples behind it. Apart from that you sometimes need to switch to another page - Pro II feels like your working with an analog synth - or rather an analog-digital-hybrid. Pro II is impressive in almost every aspect and for 40 pounds it's also a bargain. Two big thumbs up!