NOVUM Review
IMPORTANT
Before we begin this review, it is important for me to clarify something, I now work for Dawesome. I did write this review prior to beginning work with Dawesome (besides preset design, and I did have early access to it, in addition to receiving it for free (like the majority of the plugins I review). From here out, my reviews of Dawesome plugins will be far more clinical and straight forward, there’s no need for me to criticize them because I can direct my ideas towards Peter himself, and praise will be awkward from this position. So in the future my Dawesome reviews will read more like a list of features that I personally enjoy. This will not affect any of my other reviews and as I mentioned already, this one was written before I began working for Dawesome
-thank you for understanding, if you have any concern feel free to email or contact me directly.
Dawesome’s Novum is a granular synthesizer with a fairly unique spectral import system for creating new sounds and textures. Another colorful and creative tool from Dawesome, who seems to always explore something novel and creative in the world of sound design. The core of Novum is its sample import process, which uses a spectral based stem separation system to isolate various sonic elements of the imported audio into their own unique samples. These separated samples are then played back via granular synthesis, fed into a filter, then processed by an effects section.
Importing samples into Novum takes a little longer than most synthesizers as Novum has to analyze then separate the audio into six different layers. Each layer represents a different sonic aspect of the source material, this might mean the body fundamental tone is in one layer, while the textural elements are in another, and the transient on its own layer. Furthermore, after importing a sound and creating a preset, you can mix and match layers between presets to create hybrid instruments. It’s worth noting that this isn’t just banded frequency separation, there’s detection being used to isolate different sonic elements.
The granular engine is applied to all layers at once, but you can decouple any given control to give each layer its own unique granular settings. This allows you to have one layer play back faster than another, or have more stereo spread, or less jitter. You can really layer up some different controls and blur your sample in new ways. On the Timbre page you’ll notice a colorful “flower” or array of dots, these let you alter the sonic properties of a given layer, I’m not exactly sure what each color represents, but you can hear as it either simplifies or adds texture to the layer. Additionally, on the envelope page, there is a drawable curve for each layer. By default this is the natural amplitude curve for the layer, but you can edit and draw your own as well.
These two pages alone would merit endless exploration, but we can find more on the “SYN” page. Here you have your basic filter, where you can add both dirt and one of four different distortion algorithms. This feeds into a comb filter as well, if you want to add a touch of resonance to your patch. Deactivated by default is a “Syntify” control, this uses one of two algorithms to approximate your patch as though it were being produced by an “analog” synthesizer. The results from this “Syntify” control are quite gritty and raw, almost unwieldy, but they add another level of character to Novum and goes to show just how creative Dawesome can be.
The effects are quite similar to what you’d find in many other Dawesome synths; reverb cloud, shimmer, delay, chorus, phaser. They all sound nice, and you can stack up to six effects for some crazy ambient combinations. They work and get the job done, but this is where I’d love to see some more exploration from Dawesome, effects in general, it’d be great to see the creativity that’s been applied to signal generation applied to signal processing.
Modulation in Novum is quite extensive, you can add up to 14 additional modulation sources that range from drawable LFOs to randomizers, ADSR, and MPE controls. When adjusting a control, its label will be displayed above the modulation list, here you can adjust the modulation depth of any of the sources. Unfortunately, if you adjust the modulation of a linked control, you have to reset the depth for each layer should you unlink the control. Drawable LFOs are an interesting choice, I am used to, and spoiled by, MSEGs. It is so easy with an MSEG to achieve rhythmic and controlled modulation, but the one downside to MSEGs is creating organic texture and motion. While I’m not a huge fan of free draw LFO curves, they can be a nice change of pace for creating stranger and more abstract curves.
Novum was a massive step up in terms of complexity from Abyss, I think Abyss actually deserves a lot of respect for its simplicity while still being a powerful creative tool. Novum takes a bit more time to work with, you have six layers, you can mix and match, draw your own curves add any effects and modulation as you please. It’s a powerhouse centered around and extremely experimental sound design method. This is one for anyone who loves to try new ideas, I wouldn’t expect to replace any standard synthesizer with Novum, you’ll want this as a complimentary sound design tool. Novum is perfect for abstract textures and ambience, there’s quite a lot of motion and layering you can achieve with a single instance of Novum and its the perfect tool to really get more out of your samples.