SPIRE Review
Reveal Sound Spire is a plugin I used to see far more often a few years ago, but is rarely talked about today. Successive synthesizers in the past couple years have made leaps and bounds in terms of new features, user interfaces and sound design potential, but as out dated as Spire may be, it is still a great sounding synth, and I can understand why it was so revered at the time. Spire is a four oscillator multi-mode synthesizer with two filters, and an effects section. The UI is unapologetically skeuomorphic, but honestly looks pretty cool. Spire has a very present sound, it’s not perfect, but it fits into a mix very well. I think people loved using it for plucks, but I find for some aggressive lead synthesis, Spire fits into industrial music perfectly. If I had to guess, I’d say that there is a bit of multiband compression on the output, I’m assuming this is the X-comp as the effect is more prominent as you increase that control.
The oscillators can be set to one of seven modes: classic, noise, FM, AMsync, sawPWM, hardFM, and vowel. Each mode has two unique controls to adjust the tone of the oscillator. FM and hardFM are both very fun and simple to use, great for harsh metallic sounds. Vowel is a surprisingly fun formant oscillator, capable of creating all sorts of resonant pops and vocal motions. Each oscillator also has a secondary single cycle wave you can pick from a list of dozens of options. This can then be mixed in with the main signal or sometimes interacts with the oscillator type.
The oscillators feed into two filters, which can be routed either in series or parallel. The filters have 6 filter types to choose from, each of which has multiple sub options to pick from for a total of 24 filter types. The majority of filter types seem to be emulations or analog style filters with different characteristics, but there’s also a comb filter for creating resonators and a shaper for adding saturation or wave folding.
The filters are then summed and fed into the effects section. Most of the effects are pretty typical, you get a shaper, phaser, chorus, delay and reverb, then this is followed up by the X-comp and an EQ for a bit of coloration. The Shaper has 11 distortion types to choose from, ranging from subtle saturation to extreme distortion and decimation.
Modulation is pretty basic, you get four envelopes, four LFOs, and two step controllers. There’s an extensive range of LFO shapes including SH, some of the weirder shapes can be really fun as modulation sources instead of your typical triangles and ramps. Each modulation source can be mapped to two destinations from the front panel, but you can route a few more from the old school modulation matrix. The step controller has 16 steps, inside each step you can adjust teh curve and quantity of a ramp. This gives you quite a bit of control over rhythmic modulation, but the system is somewhat tedious to design in compared to an MSEG. Spire does allow you to set start and end points, so it’s possible to create pollymetric patterns. Finally there is an arpeggiator in spire as well, it’s nothing too crazy, but you can write out sequences and create different patterns.
While a bit on the older side, Spire does sound still sound good, and really it’s not THAT old either. I don’t find myself using spire too often, but when I do I actually seem to start making the kind of music I enjoy making. Something about it, once you get that hard synth sound, it just invites you to play and write. The UI is a bit slow on my computer, and I’d love to see Reveal Sound update Spire into something brand new. But it’s still a fun synth to use.
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SPIRE: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/4-Synth/3187-Spire?a_aid=61c378ab215d5