PLASMONIC Review
Brian Clevinger, the creator of the now discontinued Absynth is releasing Software under his own brand: Rhizomatic. Plasmonic is the first synth from Rhizomatic and a welcome departure from both traditional and typical modern synthesis. Plasmonic is a hybrid subtractive/ physical modeling synthesizer that is capable of some other worldly yet oddly “realistic” sounds. It’s strange to describe an unreal sound as “realistic”, perhaps “believable” is the right word here, Plasmonic can create very alien yet believable sounds.
Plasmonic’s UI is quite unordinary, using sliders instead of knobs, it creates a futuristic look. More importantly, the sliders have two clickable regions, one for fine control resolution, and one for coarse control. This may be a bit tricky at first if you are used to traditional controls, but having a way to easily fine tune without needing a keybind is nice. When adjusting parameters, a gear icon will appear, clicking this or right clicking any control brings up its modulation matrix. This page displays every possible modulation source and many adjustable modulation settings for the focussed parameter. Modulation is fairly basic, five ADSR envelopes, four LFOs, and a “trigger” modulation source. The trigger modulation can be used to activate the impulse and and envelopes, it can be a great way to add rhythmic or chaotic textural elements to a sound.
The main sound source is a pair of oscillators, each containing a handful of wavetables. The oscillators also have a phase distortion “skew” control and a control for wavefolding. While wavetable import is not supported, the timbres you can create from these three controls are more than adequate. Besides, the real heart of Plasmonic is in its filter and resonator. The multimode filter can be keytracked and has a variety of configurations. The resonator is keytracked by default and just sounds incredible. The frequency shift and mod controls add a wide variety of sounds and textures on top of the various tone controls present in the resonator. Combining the filter and resonator with the right oscillator or impulse can lead to vast array of sounds that seem to bloom when you find the right sweet spot.
All of this is fed into a saturator, a basic EQ, and two effects slots. Each effect can be one five different delay based effects: single delay, dual delay, FDN, FDN formant, and a sympathetic resonator. Delays speak for themselves, sympathetic is a string resonator that rings out based on a set chord and root note. FDN stands for “feedback delay network”, a type of reverb that is capable of some juicy resonant tones. These effects add a lot of space and dimension to Plasmonic, but aren’t always the easiest to tame.
Plasmonic is far from a “bread and butter” synth, it can do all sorts of sounds, but I often find I have to let it be what it wants to be, rather than trying to impose my own sounds onto its synth engine. When you allow Plasmonic to work its own magic, you’ll discover sounds you didn’t know you wanted, It’s great at producing cinematic quality textures and ambience, as well as some incredible plucks, strings and other physically modeled sounds if you know how to work with it. I wont pretend that Plasmonic is “easy” to use, the modulation system is a bit cumbersome compared to drag and drop and you have to take your time finding those sweet spots. But it is worth it when you get the combinations just right. Plasmonic is worth spending time with if you want a unique dimension in your arsenal, or if you just want to get away from the prototypical sound design methods of classic subtractive and wavetable synthesizers.