Previewed earlier this year, Tone2's Icarus synth is now available. Said to be exceptionally powerful, this is boosted by what the company is calling '3D wavetable synthesis'.
The '3D' prefix has been added because, as well as being able to cross-blend waveforms, Icarus also offers an additional morphing 'dimension'. The result, says Tone2, is a synth that has a signature sound that's very hard or impossible to create in other instruments.
In fact, the company reckons that Icarus is so good and can produce such a wide variety of sounds that it will be able to replace the majority of your existing hardware and software synths. It promises an easy-to-use interface and an inspiring collection of factory presets.
Check out the spec list below, and find out more on the Tone2 website. Icarus is available as a 32/64-bit VST/AU plugin and costs £138. There's also a demo for you to try.
Tone2 Icarus features
- 3D wavetable synthesizer: wavetables can be morphed in several dimensions
- Powerful and flexible sound engine with true stereo architecture
- High-end sound quality with low CPU requirement
- Easy to use interface with direct visual feedback makes tweaking accessible to everyone
- Huge sonic range
- Unique signature sound: lots of exclusive sounds which are not possible with other synthesizers
- Perfect for modern, as well as all other music styles
- Over 1000 sounds by professional designers
- Patch browser and flexible preset management
- New resynthesis method, which is easy to use and quickly gives good results
- Modular effect section with 53 effects
- High quality vocoder with 1024 bands
- 3 oscillator blocks, each offering up to 10 stereo oscillators, which can play hypersaws, unison, stacks or chords
- Wavetables can be morphed with 54 different modes (FM, PWM, formant, phase distort, sync...)
- All morph modes can be combined with any kind of wavetable or hypersaw
- Wavetable editor with many features
- A wavetable generator can create completely new wavetables
- Waveforms can be painted using the mouse
- Additive spectrum editor
- Import and export of wavetables/waveforms from other synthesizers
- Dual multimode filter section with 62 filter types and 9 distortion types
- Programmable arpeggiator with advanced features like chords, glides, swing and shuffle
- Fast and punchy envelopes
- LFOs with audio-rate modulation speed and BPM sync
- Flexible mod matrix
- MIDI learn support
- Dynamic microtuning to enhance chords
- Customisable user interface with 40 colours schemes
- Expandability
- Detailed manual in English and German
