DUNE 3 Review
I recently worked on a preset pack for Dune 3, so I figured what better time to finally get around to reviewing it than now. Synapse Audio’s Dune 3 (simply called Dune from here on out) self describes as a “differential unison engine”. At its core, Dune’s oscillators have incredibly powerful unison options utilizing virtual analog, wavetable, and FM based oscillators. The over all UI is simple, reflecting the design of a hardware analog synthesizer. I particularly enjoy the included grey theme as it has a slick brutalist industrial vibe. I do think they should probably include a flat design for the folks that can’t stand skeuomorphism.
On its surface, Dune looks deceptively simple, but it hides some rather advanced techniques under its sleeve. Additionally, the sound engine is quite spectacular, the oscillators and filters simply sound great. The two oscillators come in three flavors: virtual analog, wavetable, and FM. There’s not really anything exciting to any of the individual engines, but each oscillator can be set up to 32 voices of unison, this can then be multiplied further by the unison voice stacking. Unison voice stacking duplicates the entire synth engine up to eight times, each voice can be detuned and spread, but more importantly, each voice can have its own settings for the entire synth engine. This means you can stack a variety of sound types, mix and match tones, or my favorite trick: use the “voice# “ modulator to adjust a control per unison voice. You can easily create lush pads with hundreds of oscillators or pseudo additive synthesis with eight partials.
The filters are very solid, other than a comb filter there’s nothing too exciting, but each filter type has a nice creamy “analog” feel. There is a nice filter effect which has some fun stuff, including distortions, bit crusher, filters, formant, and my favorite a phasor filter. I find the filter effect can add quite a lot of character to the signal. There’s a few different routing configurations that can be adjusted with the balance control. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but it opens up some variety in signal routing. Each filter has built in envelope depth controls, another old school “analog” touch.
As for modulation, Dune offers three LFOs and four MSEGs. The LFOs can be any of the basic LFO shapes as well as SH, random, and a binary random. It’s worth noting that the smooth random is per voice when you have poly mode activated, which can be a fun way to get overlapping motion across voices. The MSEGs are pretty solid, it’s a bit awkward starting out without any nodes, but it works well enough. As mentioned earlier there’s a “voice#” modulator, which modifies a target parameter by the modulation depth times the voice index. This is one of my favorite modulators when available, as it allows you to spread a control across unison voices. You can also use oscillators as modulators for some crazy audio rate modulation, but it does get scratchy pretty easily.
I find the built in filter and amp envelopes to sound very pleasant, snappy short decays have a nice rounded pluck to them, it’s like they rounded off the corners, you don’t get as much of that clicking crunch that some other envelopes produce with short attack/decay times.
The effects are pretty simple, you get two parallel effects busses each with the same nine effects: Distortion, two EQs, phaser, chorus, two delays, reverb, and a compressor. The distortion has over a dozen distortion types including a pleasant exciter. The reverb is nice enough to use in a mix. I don’t think any of the effects are super exciting, but as with any synth, it’s nice to have them and having two busses opens up some various mixing configurations.
Dune 3 is definitely on the simpler side compared to many of the other hybrid synthesis engines I have used and reviewed, but it gets the job done very well. Everything sounds very clean and lush especially with large unison counts. I don’t often comment on CPU, but I rarely find Dune to ever use up my resources. It’s a very solid synth that gets the job done and has a few hidden tricks up its sleeve if you really explore the engine. Admittedly stuff like Serum 2 and Zebra 3 are a fair bit more exciting, But I do find myself reaching for Dune when I want something that just has a polish to it with very little effort. I’m very curious if they have a version four in the works.