Rhizomatic’s next effect: SYNESTIA
Rhizomatic, the creator of Plasmonic, has released their second plugin Synestia for pre-order, a modulation heavy multi effects unit. Synestia is currently in beta, so this will not be a full review, but a quick rundown of what to expect inside and a few of my favorite features. Synestia takes some of the effects and filtering you find in Plasmonic, and expands them into a customizable multi effects unit.
From Wikipedia: “A synestia is a hypothesized rapidly spinning doughnut-shaped mass of vaporized rock”
Inside you’ll find two copies of each effect, including, diffuse delay, echoes, “sympathetic” harmonizer, dual filter, formant filter, distortion, flanger, and in the future, a sideband modulator. These effects all have a very pleasing sound to them, sometimes a bit difficult to wrangle in volume-wise, but they all handle modulation very well for some nice “liquid” like motion. My favorites have to be the diffuse delay, which can behave much like a reverb, and the flanger, which can be modulated up to 1 kilohertz, for some ringing metallic tones.
My least favorite has to be the distortion, distortions can be quite a mixed bag in terms of how they sound and where their energy is focussed. The distortion here just doesn’t provide the sounds I’m used to working with, but this all comes down to taste, you may find that it is perfect for your methods. I also found the formant filter to be a bit lacking, I think I’d prefer if it were just an option in the dual filter, rather than a whole effect type. Speaking of filters, each effect has a high and low cut filter on the input so you can target individual frequency regions.
The routing system is a bit tricky compared to typical effects chains, it allows you to combine effects in any combination of parallel/ serial you can imagine, as well it gives you control over input modulation at any point in the chain, but this comes at some costs when re-ordering effects. As for modulation, there’s a lot of options here, you get three of each, MSEG, LFO, ADSR, Random, and Trigger, as well as an envelope follower. Modulation is very similar to Plasmonic, but the inclusion of some MSEGs really opens the doors to some fun patterns, wish these were in Plasmonic.
Synestia is still in development, so things are subject to change upon official release, I’ve had the pleasure to alpha test this one and make some presets for it already. I understand there are a million effects on the market, so wether or not you’ll want this one depends on how it fits into your collection. I think the one major challenge facing Synestia is the current collection of included effects. If you only look at these for their namesake, you’ll be missing the character they bring to the table. Just like with Plasmonic, there’s something sweet and fluid about the DSP in these effects, and you can get some very surprising results if you are willing to experiment a little.
You can pre-order Synestia from Rhizomatic’s website here: https://rhizomatic.fr/index.php/synestia/