POWER TIP
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> 100 sounds the easy way
> Saving sounds
Get this great plugin for your PC/Mac at filesilo.co.uk/computermusic
With Synthwave Keys you can just select preset sounds with the Left or Right buttons. But to give you a better feel for the ROMpler in terms of its sonic girth, click and hold the preset window for a drop-down menu showing all of the sounds. It makes jumping from one to another that bit easier too.
With no obvious way of saving sounds in Synthwave Keys, you might think that you can’t keep any of the sounds you come up with from this ‘Digging Deeper’ section but you’d be wrong. Many DAWs load plugins within a shell that has saving options. Logic, for example, has a drop-down menu with Save As as an option, so any sound you come up with can be saved. In this case it will be outside of the presets folder at the bottom of the menu and the saved sound can be loaded from this area too.
Beatskillz are relatively new software developers that specialise in instruments and plugins designed to be ‘great sounding, great looking and inspiring audio tools’. They also have a philosophy to make each one simple, effective and intuitive which is certainly the case with their amazing-sounding synth ROMpler that we are giving away with this issue of
Computer Music.
Synthwave Keys is designed for synthwave, vaporwave and nuwave, genres that take 80s synth music and add an up-to-date twist. It’s packed with sounds for these genres.
Synthwave Keys is what we call a ROMpler; that is, it’s sample-based and packed with sounds (over 3GB of them across 100 presets). The definitions of what makes a ROMpler and what makes a synth have been challenged over the last decade or more as sample-based instruments increasingly add controls to manipulate their sounds. Indeed in our recent review of Beatskillz’s own RetroVOLT, we met a ROMpler with huge synth ambitions, so much so that Beatskillz call it a Samplesizer!
RetroVOLT is very much the big brother of Synthwave Keys, packed with extra controls so Synthwave is definitely more old-skool ROMpler, with less controls but sounds as good. There are options for envelope-shaping, filtering and adding an LFO plus some effects, but really this is all about the sample content and playing it back, and here Beatskillz have sampled a load of synth classics for a great set of sounds.
That said, you can delve a little deeper and manipulate the sounds, and over the following pages we will show you how to do that after getting up and running with the software. You can also read a special interview with Beatskillz’s owner Gaurav Dayal on p8.