ATOMS Review
Plugin Boutique hooked me up with a copy of Baby Audio’s Atoms, a simple physical modeling synth with intuitive UI. The layout of this one is simple, you get six main controls, each with a built in modulator, four sonic “profiles” a simple envelope, motion and reverb. The UI is nice and easy, adding modulation to each control is pretty straightforward, though you’re limited to saw, sine, drift, and modwheel sources. You can set saw to one shot mode for additional envelopes as well.
The four profiles all have distinct characteristics, with standard sounding stringlike, atonal being more metallic, alternative being a bit of a fuzzier string quality, and lo-fi has a digital glassy quality.. I found the sounds to be nice and dimensional, but a bit dark, these definitely benefit from a touch of “ott”. The filter is low pass only (unless I’m missing something) and the order control also dampens harmonics over time.
The chaos control adds some fun tonal instability, a nice one to map to modwheel or slide. Drive adds distortion, roughing things up quite a bit more than I’d want with this plugin. Force is a fun control, as it emulates stronger physical velocity, this paired with movement which emulates bowing can lead to some nice textures.
The overtones control is the most fun, changing the position of the “box” on the strings to bring out various harmonics. Adjusting and modulating this control causes interesting frequencies to bloom from the sound. I particularly enjoyed this with the inharmonic profile. That said, I wish there was a way to spread partials or play with the harmonic structure more. I’d like to be able to recreate membranes and other materials.
I wanted to try Atoms because I thought it would be a more advanced version of the “tonal” engine from Tekno, which sounds nice. Atoms is completely different, I’m not sure where I imagined they’d have anything to do with one another. I found some very nice pad sounds with atoms, and a few pleasant plucky keys, but it does have a very limited sound palette. Like many physical modeling synths, you have to strike a balance between variety and safety, while something like Objekt has a ton of variety, there are many many ways to make it sound bad as well. On the other hand, synths like Atoms and Derailer stick to a narrower range of sounds, with more control over nuance, but within “safe” bounds.
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ATAOMS: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth/11906-Atoms?a_aid=61c378ab215d5