SCULPTURE Review

Logic’s Sculpture sure looks quite outdated, even at the time it was a very alien and obscure design, a lot of people will hate this, but I actually find it to be a bit of its charm. Sculpture is a physical modeling synth and one that lets you explore materials and exciters in an interesting way. Sculpture is built around a central resonator that can blend between four materials via an XY pad: Nylon, Wood, Steel, and Glass. Three different exciters interact with the resulting material to create realistic and acoustic sounding results. This is then Fed into a “body eq” which has a variety of acoustic instrument response curves to really sell the sound. Being one of the weirder UI out there, it’s easy to overlook or be confused by Sculpture, The modulation system is something I’ve never really dug into simply because it can be so tedious to set up. But if you dare, there is a path morphing system and even an MSEG

There’s quite a few exciters to choose from which all give a different initial impact and tonal decay to the sound, each one has a strength and timbre control as well to expand this variety. Out of the three exciters one of them is focussed on damping, things like palm muting or disturbing the resonator in various ways. There is even a fun “bouncing” mode which simulates a ball bouncing on the strings. You can place each exciter anywhere on the resonator and there’s even a couple pickups to capture specific frequency ranges. As for the resonator its self, you can blend between each material, but there’s also four more controls that shape the contour and decay of the resonance. Be careful as it seems they allow you to “break” physics and create resonator types that seem to pop or explode in rather unpleasant ways. 

I used to spend so much time just exploring sound scapes and acoustic experimentations with Sculpture, it’s quite an incredible sound design tool and one of the few things to be excited about as an apple user. It really does come down to finding and exploring sweet spots on the resonator, and how the exciters play with and manipulate the resonator. You really have to finesse the beautiful sounds from this one, and there’s quite a few times you’ll get close to something awesome, and it will seem to completely fall apart. As I don’t really even work in Logic any more, this is definitely a synth I’ll record samples or for use later, which also allows me to be a bit more careless with my design process. If you have Logic, make sure you take a look at this one and play around with it from time to time. While the physical modeling market is growing, there’s still nothing quite like Sculpture as almost every physical modelling synth seems to do things completely different.