Klevgr Tomofon Review
Klevgr has released a new plugin “Tomofon”, they describe as a “real audio synth”. Right off the bat, we see an interesting spectral looking display at the bottom, these are actually different wavetables that have been sliced from either a single or multiple audio sources, then spread out across various key ranges. This can be done manually or automatically, and from my first experiments with Tomofon, is a fairly fun way to play with various samples and recordings to get interesting results.
FEATURES: Tomofon is a bit thin in the features department, this is made up for by the interesting and unique synthesis method, and the level of editing you can do on that side of the synth. But otherwise, you get a lowpass filter, delay, reverb, and eq.
There’s a bit of modulation, with the most detail being in the wave position modulator. I like these msegs, especially the fine control which allows you to really dial in a specific curve or range, really letting you use your ears where many other synths would require you to manually enter values between the on screen resolution.
I will say, I wish the lfo would go slower, and the envelope stages could go a bit longer too. I prefer at least 10 seconds as a maximum length.
OSCILLATOR: The synth engine is where things get interesting though, on the off chance Klevgr is reading this, please correct me if I’m wrong, but the way Tomofon seems to work is by importing an audio file, then a detection algorithm splits that file up into various regions that all work as wavetables, and spreads them across their most appropriate key ranges. What’s really neat about this is that you get different textures, motion and tone per key or range, giving you a result that is more dynamic than just importing one table or sample across the entire keybed. you can even layer in different samples and there’s quite a bit of flexibility in this department, letting you manually chop and assign regions, and even smooth, clean up and normalize regions for that extra polish.
I think I’d describe what Tomophon is doing as sorta extracting the “essence” of the source audio, and creating a new instrument out of it
Other than that, there’s more to Tomofon, but these were the features that stuck out to me. I must say however, this is a very interesting system, and from my brief playing around with the demo, resulted in all sorts of fun and interesting pads and synth sounds. It’s one of those weird quirky synths that does something basically nothing else can do, but I hate to say, not really a whole lot extra. Don’t take that the wrong way, there’s A LOT to explore with that one quirk, and it’s always fun to have these tools for experimental sessions, moments of inspiration, or even just as fun tools to play with instead of tired and tested methods of synthesis
Also it’s worth saying, the UI is absolutely gorgeous, as with all Klevgr products. It’s nice to see this color scheme being used in audio software.
If you plan on purchasing Tomofon from Plugin Boutique, please consider supporting me by using my affiliate links
Tomofon: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth/10064-Tomofon?a_aid=61c378ab215d5