THORN Review

Dmitry Sches Audio Thorn was one of my earliest software synthesizer purchases, so I have fond memories of this somewhat imperfect synthesizer. That’s not to say there aren’t cool things about Thorn, I wouldn’t be reviewing it if I didn’t find it interesting or in some way unique. Thorn is a wavetable style “spectral” synthesizer with 3 oscillators, a harmonic filter, dual multimode filters, and an effects/glitch section. Thorn’s UI is one of the prettiest out there, especially for a skeuomorphic design, which is already hard to pull off, It just looks incredible. 

ISSUES:

Thorn is far from a perfect synth, and in some ways this can be a strength. Before I get into my complaints, I’ll say that I’ve used Thorn on many tracks in the past, and the slightly more dull/dark sound of Thorn can make it easy to mix in as a background element. That’s not to say it is incapable of brighter harder sounds, just that in general it tends to lean towards a grittier lower fidelity tones. The “spectral” oscillators are more akin to wavetables, except with only 128 partials, instead of over 1,000 like many other wavetable synths.

In addition to this, I’ve had to abandon Thorn in recent years, as the UI struggles on my current computer. I’m not sure many other people have been faced with this, but if you are on an intel imac, be cautious. Though I must say, my older computer handled it just fine, it’s not a matter of cpu power, I believe it has something to do with the display.

OSCILLATORS:

As described above, each of Thorns 3 oscillators use wavetable style spectral tone generation, for the most part this behaves no differently than any other wavetable synth, just with far fewer harmonics. It’s hard to call Thorn a “spectral” synthesizer, as the wavetables don’t really do anything particularly unique to any other wavetable synth, I tend to think of Thorn as a low resolution wavetable synthesizer, with some spectral effects included.

Each oscillator has a dozen different oscillator effects to chose from, including FM, RM, Sync, and different filtering and resonant effects to give a variety of tones. The FM can sound surprisingly rough and aggressive, and the low resolution oscillators almost encourage exploration of many different shape combinations. The table editor allows you to draw 16 different frames that are interpolated automatically by Thorn. There’s some clever drawing modes that allow for som easier tone generation, as well as many right click options to morph and edit individual frames.  I think it’s worth exploring table design at this lower resolution to get a grasp over simpler motions with fewer harmonics, it really forces you to focus in on the fundementals (pun intended) of a sound before going off the deep end with higher partial counts. 

FILTERS:

Thorn has two filter sections, the first of which is a drawable spectral filter. This filter has well over eight thousand bins, allowing for some incredible detailed curves. You can import samples and get a sorta frozen impulse response of the sound. This is great for imparting acoustic properties onto your synth patch. In this sense, Thorn is capable of some incredibly detailed organic tonality, so long as it fits within the parameters of the rest of the synthesizer. Many of the same wavetable editing controls exist in the harmonic filter editor as well. Unfortunately, there is a bit of stepping when modulating the “shape” (cutoff frequency) of the harmonic filter, but the balance acts as a smooth tilt eq on the spectral filter. The main dual multimode filter has some very pleasant sounding analog emulations, there is a nice drive and a cool hyper comb filter as well.

EFFECTS:

Thorn has 2 effects sections, one is a “glitch sequencer” and the second is a standard pedalboard style effects section that you’d find in most other wavetable style synths.
Allow me to discuss the main effects first, they are fine, nothing too exciting, there’s some cool distortion types to choose from, the modulation effects sound fine. Delay is tempo synced only and the reverb is adequate. You can reorganize the effects and modulate the controls of course.

Things get quite a bit more fun when you get into the glitch sequencer, a six lane glitching effect that is so straightforward it just becomes fun to use. The sequencer can be up to 16 steps long with different values per step. It includes a buffer looper, simple filters, bit and sample rate reduction, and a gate. You can randomize each lane as well. It may not sound like much, but I’ve found playing with this sequencer easily gives patches an extra level of digital texture that takes quite a bit more work in other synths. I kinda wish it was its own plugin, as simple as it would be.

MODULATION:

Thorn is a bit sparse on the modulation, you get 27 slots in the matrix, there’s really only 2 LFOs, 3 if you include the vibrato. Three envelopes and two MSEGs. The MSEGs are rather small and tucked into the corner, but they add enough to give some rhythmic variety to Thorn. Thorn does however include a fairly competent Arpeggiator. This arp allows you to sequence out a melody and velocity as well as gates and ties. This is on top of the automatic play modes and octave playing. Seeing as you can set both the glitch sequencer and arp to different step lengths, you can achieve some interesting polymetric sequencing in Thorn

While Thorn is not a perfect synth, it is a beautiful one that can inspire some different play styles. It can be underwhelming for anyone who is used to more advanced and powerful tools, but if you are a creative sound designer, you will likely find something unique to experiment and play with here. For me personally I find the UI inspiring and the more minimalist system forces me to create in some new ways. I love the glitch sequencer and I think loading sounds into the harmonic filter can achieve some unique sounds, however subtle they may be. I tend to find that Thorn nails some of those moody icy plucks, and the harmonic filter can force some tones into very bizarre scales, where notes jump around octaves as they hit frequencies that are sharply cut by the filter. I hope to use it again in the future if my next computer can handle it better.

If you’re buying Thorn or already own it, be sure to download my FREE pack of 25 presets, you can find these and other free sounds in FREEBIES