Rumble Review
UVI sent me a copy of their new bass synth Rumble for review. Rumble is a three oscillator synthesizer focussed around bass design. I actually really apreciate purpose driven plugins like this. While “do-it-all” synths like Phase Plant and Serum 2 are incredible, it is nice to have tools that get straight to a particular sound and design their interface around this sound.
Rumble streamlines its bass design by placing each of the three oscillators into their own band-split regions. Low, mid, and high bands can be adjusted individually with their own oscillator settings and effects. This gives a surprising amount of control over bass design by allowing you to separate your workflow between each tonal region.
The UI comes in dark or light mode, with a mostly vector style design accented by soft shadows for a touch of skeuomorphism. Everything is laid out nicely with little visual clutter and the color coding helps to remind you which band you are working with.
Each band contains an oscillator, shaper, filter, and effect. Each module has a variety of options, and each band can contain any combination of options and settings. Surprisingly enough, rumble can be played polyphonically as well, but is set to monophonic mode by default. You also get unique unison settings per band which is great for adding top end stereo dimension without messing with your low end imaging.
There are nine different oscillator modes to chose from: analog, fold, sampler, morpho, timbral, kick, phonem, noise, and prism. Each mode has a variety of unique controls with some being more interesting than others. I will say they all tend to be on the buzzier more “analog” sounding side of things, I would have liked an additive engine for those more crisp polished modern bass sounds. The “timbral” engine has a variety of wavetables to chose from as well as a handful of phase distortion modes and FM. Fold, morpho, and prism are all capable of dirty distorted tones that are fun to play with as they provide a nice range of textures for bass design.
Ten different shapers are available for distorting the oscillator: clipper, damped, sine, diode, fold, noise, hyperfold, soft ring, rectify, and hard ring. Each of these has a depth and curve control for shaping the distortion. Given most of the oscillator engines are already on the dirtier side of things, I found these shapers were best for a subtle touch, but they do offer some nice shaping for softer waves.
This distorted signal is then filtered by one of six filter engines: analog, swirl, variable, scream, ripple, formant. Each filter type also has their own subset of filter modes so there’s a lot to pick out from. Unfortunately, this stage of the signal chain is shared across all three bands, but this honestly doesn’t create too many issues while making workflow just a bit easier, but keep this in mind while working with Rumble as the rest of the chain is per band. The swirl filter is probably the most fun and interesting from the group. It is a simple phaser style filter with up to eight notches. Unfortunately the spacing between those notches can not but manipulated, but I do apreciate some options beyond the usual analog modeled filters.
Finally the signal is routed into one of ten different effects engines: cabinet, neuro, chorus, reverb, delay, shifter, digital, smasher, drift, and thrasher. It is worth remembering at this point this is per band. So you can apply different effects to the low, middle, and high frequency oscillator regions. The cab is a nice touch, I think having some acoustic modeling can really add some realism. The neuro effect is a nice touch, kind of a dimension expander/ distortion. You can apply even more distortion with the digital bit-crusher, thrasher distortion, and the shifter frequency shifter.
As for modulation, Rumble has three envelopes, four LFOs, two MSEGs, and three randomizers. The LFOs also have an interesting “LFO mix” modulator that seems to combine the LFOs, but it’s not exactly clear how it is combining them. The MSEGs are a nice touch and provide custom motion, though I think I’d want at least one per band. As for the randomizers, each can be set to sample hold, lorentz, or rossler modes and you also get an “analog drift” modulator for more subtle motion. Modulation is done via drag and drop and you can right click any control to bring up its modulation handles.
All in all, I think Rumble is a surprisingly deep synthesizer given its surface level “analog bass” design choices. The variety of oscillator, filter, shaper, and effects options combined with three band layers really lets you sculpt a wide range of sounds. I would have liked to have seen a global effects section, but you do get a compressor and EQ at the end of the chain. In some ways Rumble reminds me of Massive X, everything just kinda “sounds good”. While that is a meaningless statement on its own, you really get the impression that time was taken to ensure every control has meaningful impact without too much range into unpleasant territories.
I think the one thing that really holds this one back is the simple fact that so many of the powerhouse synthesizers exist already and work incredibly well for bass. That said, having band-splitting built in by default does hone in a particular workflow, which could either be looked at as a positive or negative depending on your perspective.
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RUMBLE: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth/17445-Rumble?a_aid=61c378ab215d5