GENERATE Review
Newfangled Audio’s Generate is a dirty and gritty synth based around chaos, disorder, and double pendulums. Generate combines somewhat unpredictable oscillators with interesting wavefolders and a lowpass gate and semi modular workflow to make a sort of virtual “west coast” synthesizer. The UI is rather bizarre with square controls and animations of each stage of processing in the background for a very vectorized hacker feel. It looks like the Browser has been updated recently and looks much nicer, settings even get their own page now, howver I struggled to find an initialization option. The sounds Generate produces are particularly rough and raw, but can also be tamed into some nice pleasing textures and pads. It wont cover all your needs, as Generate is more of a specialty synth, designed to experiment and explore. I tend to use it when I want a more organic wild tone that stands apart from the more predictable stable options in my collection
ENGINE: The sound engine is comprised of a “chaotic generator” followed by a wavefolder which is then fed into a lowpass gate. A lowpass gate is simultaneously a filter and a VCA, they produce a bit more of a rounded percussive sound compared to typical filters. Most of the sound design will be done with combining different chaos and folder engines while exploring their settings. Between these two sections there’s a lot of potential for really nasty and harsh sounds, which is where you’ll dial things back with the LPG.
Chaotic Generator: The core of Generate is the chaos generator,. This section contains 8 different chaos algorithms, each with their own tones and textures. Chaos amount and chaos shape are you’re main timbral controls here, shape will be different for each mode, and animate seems to rotate the shape through the oscillator. I tend to avoid the interval control, as it seems to become very unstable fast, but used with lower chaos amounts can add some nice harmonic variation. It’s a bit difficult for me to find words to describe this oscillator, you just kinda have to play around with it and get a feel for what sorts of sounds each mode produces.
Wavefolder: This is where you’ll add a bit more texture, brightness and tone to the chaos engines. Each of the 5 folding modes provides different qualities for roughing up your sound a bit. The fractal mode is one of my favorites, it’s a sort of folding wavefolder that quickly adds a lot of top end harmonics. The symmetry control is a DC offset of bias, allowing you to apply the folding more to to either the top or bottom half of the waveform. but between shape, drive, and folds, you get quite a variety of sculpting to work with.
MODULATION: Generates modulation is pretty simple, 2 envelopes, 2 LFOs, a random, and a sequencer. Routing is done from either the destination or source, for example if you pick a destination, you can adjust the modulation depth for all sources and vice versa. What makes generate interesting is that they’ve treated modulation sources more like modular synth panels. What this means is instead of selecting whether an LFO is square, sin, triangle or saw, it is simply all at the same time, and you pick the output for whichever shape you want to use. This allows you to route the same LFO to cutoff as a sine wave, but map it to drive as a triangle wave. This gets pretty interesting with the random and sequencer where each output does something quite different, but sharing the same seeded value per position.
EFFECTS: generate provides you with 5 effects; an EQ, chorus, delay, reverb, and limiter. Newfangled gives you the option to modulate the EQ, which is a very welcome addition, but unfortunately only the mix and a couple delay controls of the others. I’d almost always prefer for all controls I can adjust by hand to be potential destinations. The chorus and reverb sound lush and give Generate a much needed tool for softening things up a bit. Delays are often pretty similar, but I’ve found this one to do some interesting stuff when it comes to glitch sound design. The feedback goes up to 120% so be careful, but you can do some real short delay feedback stuff here, modulating the time control with a sample hold especially in beats mode can produce some rather interesting glitches and tones you don’t normally find in a delay (or at least this particular flavor). Additionally the “warp” mode creates a smoother transition for more more warble and pitched results.
I feel like every time I use Generate I find something new, but usually have to work a bit to find it. It’s worth really exploring different combinations of controls within synths like this. Because of the chaos and unpredictability, you may want to record or sample your takes if you’re particular about reproducibility. I like to use Generate as a sound source for my glitch sampling sessions by running it into various effects. The chaos gives me a wider range of results and the occasional surprising moments. I haven’t tried it yet, but there’s also a free version called Pendulate, which has less options, but can give you a better idea of the sounds to expect from Generate. The rest of Newfangled’s collection seems to be focussed on mixing tools, there’s some really cool stuff in there that I’m still trying to learn and understand, but Generate makes me wish they’d produce a couple more creative tools, maybe explore this concept of double pendulums, but in an effect.
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GENERATE: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth/6792-Generate?a_aid=61c378ab215d5