HIVE Review

U-He Hive is a straight forward wavetable synthesizer with some strangely unique modulation options, at least for how stripped down and simple it otherwise is. Hive features two wavetable oscillators each with incredibly nice multimode filters, a unique modulation system, effects and an arp/ sequencer. The UI is quite lovely with a rather unique hexagonal display in the center for various operations. Hive also comes with an alternative skin that looks incredible as well, giving it two completely unique identities. It’s up to you to decide which one inspires you most. 

The oscillators sound nice, they seem to be a special type of wavetable created by U-he. I have not tested wether this means they are any higher of a resolution than others, but it does make it a bit trickier to import your own tables. Luckily the included selection is perfectly serviceable. I don’t generally use Hive for wavetable synthesis anyways, as the oscillators lack any form of warping or oscillator effects. You get wavetables, table position, unison, and that’s it.

This shortcoming in the oscillators is completely made up for in the filters, Hive has some incredible sounding filters and some really cool filter types. You get all of your standard filters, including a comb, and three specialty filter types: dissonant, reverb, and sideband. Each of these specialty filters sounds incredible and the additional controls can be used for all sorts of creative sound design. Dissonant is an inharmonic resonator, perfect for metallic sounds. Reverb is a tuned reverberator, it behaves like a wild highpass at low resonance and can create lush tones at higher resonances. Sideband is one of the juiciest frequency shifters I’ve ever heard, it can create all sorts of sweeping tones and with the right settings some incredible drips and zaps.

The effects section is fairly simple and basic. You get the typical effects: distortion, chorus, reverb, phaser, eq, compressor, and delay. You can organize these in whichever order you want. They sound fine but are nothing too special. I’d almost prefer a couple more filter types and a couple more filters to the effects, as the effects you can produce with the filters outweigh those of the effects section.

Modulation is where Hive really diverges from the beaten path, in addition to the four envelopes and two LFOs, they’ve opted to add a pair of modular style function generators, and a four part shape sequencer. The function generators can react to many different inputs and have a variety of output modulation results they can produce. I can’t say I’m too familiar with them, but they are capable of some strange and unique things. I almost feel they’d be more at home on Ace or Bazille, but it’s nice to see such a creative decision on this rather normal synth.

The shape sequencer is an interesting choice, I can’t say it’s any more powerful than an MSEG, and I don’t believe it can do anything you couldn’t do with 4 MSEGs instead. But I can imagine some unique workflow experiences one could derive from this system. There are 8 steps, each can hold one of three shapes than can be manipulated in a handful of ways. Per each step you can adjust the shape height, curve, bottom, and with the scroll wheel, the amount of repetitions (up to 4). The four shape modulators let you select any of the 8 steps to play through in various orders. So you can randomly play through steps, or play through different steps per keypress. They share the same pool of steps, but can utilize those steps in different ways. It can be interesting to create a motion sequence, and click through different configurations to generate a nice arrangement you might otherwise not have created via other modulation systems.

There is an arpeggiator and sequencer, combining these leads to some interesting results. Hive also has a four part XY macro system, these an be broken down into 4 different xy pads, or one large shared xy pad. There is a very interesting scope built into Hive, by default this shows the audio left and right channels, but you can map up to four modulation sources into the scope, giving you an inside peak at what is going on with the modulation. If you want a better understanding of the LFOs or the function generators, this is a great visual reference to utilize.

One thing worth mentioning is just how great Hive sounds, U-he are quite incredible with their synthesis DSP. While I don’t find the feature set of Hive to be the most inspiring or interesting, besides the fascinating filters, I find myself making some insanely beautiful sounds with Hive nearly every time I use it. The filters alone are almost their own form of synthesis, capable of some very unique atmospheric physical modeling. If I recall, the original premise for Hive was that it would be very easy on CPU, so you could use as many instances as you needed. I never really pay much attention to CPU, so I can’t back up this claim, but it’s worth looking into as a synth if that is a particular concern. I think Hive excels at atmospheric pads and lush textures, a great synth to use if you need to stack up a myriad of ambient tones.

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HIVE:https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth/5392-Hive-2?a_aid=61c378ab215d5