Leave your expectations at the door and let Synplant draw you into its weird and wonderful world and show you how to do things differently. The first version was massively bonkers back in 2009, with the idea of creating evolving sounds by growing branches from a seed – yes, really. But Synplant 2 takes the seed of that idea (yes, we did put some thought into that sentence) and grows it up a few hundred walls. It’s like they threw Synplant 1 into some heavily fertilised (or drugged) soil and irradiated it with the suns of a far off galaxy to come up with Synplant 2, for it has more ambition, innovation and – dammit – frustration in it than everything else we’ve reviewed this year (this decade, even). Is it worth the hype? Yes, and it’s likely the best softsynth of the year – but it’s not quite the most synsational plugin of the century. Not yet, anyway.
Growing into v2