Synclavier Regen

Can the Synclavier Regen live up to the near legendary status of its ancestors?

Back in the early 1980s there were two names that were almost guaranteed to make a keyboard player’s heart go all a‑flutter. The first was Fairlight. The second, less well known but with even greater mystique, was Synclavier. Part of the reason for this was that they were so far out of the reach of most musicians that legends were created around them — legends that sometimes far exceeded reality. So when the chance arose to buy an abandoned Synclavier II for next to nothing, I didn’t hesitate. Having handed over the cash, I then loaded my car with three large cases, a video monitor and keyboard from the dawn of computing, plus all manner of pedals, floppy disk drives and manuals, and drove them to a gentleman named Steve Hills who ran Synclavier European Services. He spent the next few hours swapping hardware and loading various software revisions until... voila! It leapt into life and functioned perfectly.

The following day, I proceeded to learn how to use it. Or rather, I didn’t. Sure, it looked gorgeous, but it was a bloody hassle to get anything beyond relatively simple tweaks of the factory sounds out of it. I eventually mastered it, but it hadn’t been my finest purchase. Huge, heavy, and always scaring me that it would take a trip to synthesizer heaven, it fell into disuse even though I still love the ridiculous old beast. But wouldn’t it be nice (I mused for many years) if Moore’s Law eventually made it possible to recreate 100 percent of the Synclavier for one percent of the size, weight and cost. I waited for three decades, but here it is. Or at least, here it might be. I wonder if it’s the real deal.

Understanding The Regen

The Regen isn’t a conventional synthesizer, so I’ll start by attempting to boil its extended Synclavier sound engine down to the essentials.

The bottom layer of a sound is called a Partial, and this is built from two waveforms configured as a 2‑op FM voice. Following in the footsteps of later Synclaviers, each carrier can be generated by either additive or subtractive synthesis, or it can be up to 128 samples placed side‑by‑side across the keyboard, or it can be the result of resynthesizing a sample. The modulator is always an additive waveform generated by up to 24 harmonics that can have any amplitudes and phases with respect to one another. A contour generator shapes the amount of modulation, thus controlling the harmonic content of the sound, while a second shapes the level of the Partial. There are two LFOs — one for vibrato and one for tremolo — and (for all but subtractive synthesis) a chorus effect created by cloning and detuning the results. If you don’t want to invoke FM, any carrier can be used as the underlying sound of a Partial.

Hang on a moment... what’s this resynthesis thingummybob? Invented when RAM was hyper‑expensive, it’s a method of slicing an audio sample into short snippets and recreating (as closely as possible) the sound in each using additive synthesis. In the Regen, you can choose how many slices you would like to use and determine whether you want them to start at the beginning of the sample or some specified time later. If you want to edit the slices, you can create different sounds in each and then play them back as a wave sequence, either crossfading or stepping from one to the next. And when the resynthesized sound is used as a carrier, all manner of unusual results can be obtained. Resynthesis doesn’t always work, and the results can be unpredictable if you present it with enharmonic sounds. Even when it works well the results can be a bit lo‑fi, although this can be interesting in itself, and there are so many things that you can do with the slices — transposing, cloning, looping, and modulating them — that you’re going to love it anyway.

Up to 12 Partials of any type can be combined in a single Timbre. You can determine the levels of each, and there are additional controls over the FM depth and tuning, as well as parameters that allow you to spread the Partials across the soundstage, add Timbre Detune — which is what we would now call Analogue Feel — and to stretch the pitch across the keyboard. (Strictly speaking, some of these act at the Partial level, but we won’t go into that.) A Timbre also includes a multi‑mode ‘per‑note’ filter shaped by a contour that offers control over the start, peak, sustain and end levels as well as the times of each of the stages and the curves of the decay and release. You can use this to create many contours that don’t conform to traditional ADSR shapes. In addition, there are controls for the keyboard mode and portamento, an arpeggiator, and a small range of additional effects: decimation, a ‘per‑Partial’ multi‑mode resonant filter, and a ‘per‑Partial’ reverb.

You can have up to 12 Timbres, each of which exists within a Track, so there are 12 of these within the top level, which is called a Session. Track parameters allow you to do things such as determine the volume, transposition, key mapping and MIDI channels of the Timbres so that you can create splits, layers, and multitimbral performances. There’s also a master reverb that affects all of the Tracks and is stored as part of the Session.

The original Synclavier included a sequencer, but the Regen doesn’t recreate this. That seems sensible; there are much better ways to generate sequences in the 21st Century. What it offers instead is the ability to embed a .MID file in a Session. If you load a Session containing one, you’re presented with play, stop and continue buttons, but now’t else. Since the Regen has 12 Tracks, only the first 12 channels of the .MID file are recognised so, if you’re going to import your own compositions, you’ll have to ensure that nothing important is lost. It’s also worth noting that tempo changes are not recognised.

If the replacement of an obsolete sequencer by a MIDI player is no great loss, the omission of the original’s ability to record and manipulate a sample is a thornier issue. I understand the argument that it’s easier to record and edit samples on a computer and then transfer them, but I still think that it would be nice to be able to sample on the Regen itself. The other addition that I would welcome would be a simpler method for importing Synclavier II sounds. You can do so now using a combination of the company’s Synclavier3 and Synclavier Go! products as...