Instruments • Re: Synapse Audio OBSESSION is now available!

Obsession has been a synth that I just struggle to gel with. I don't know if it's the on-board effects (which I don't care much for), or just all the flipping back and forth (front panel, per-voice tweaks panel, back panel).

I never find that, really. It's probably a workflow thing but I tend to do 90% of the work on the front panel and I only need to go to the back panel once or twice in a session. So I appreciate putting all the irrelevant stuff out of the way so I can concentrate on what I want to do.

the weak resonance (in that it never gets near self-oscillating)

Is that important for every sound you use in every piece you work on? I can't say it's something I ever used in a song but to describe the OB's resonance as "weak" is absolutely absurd. It shits all over anything with a ladder filter by virtue of the way it works through the whole frequency range, giving massive bottom end balls to basslines in a way most other filter designs simply cannot manage. OBviously (see what I did there?) it's not as good as the SEM filter but it's still a pretty damned good thing and Synapse have at least added a band-pass mode, which is some minor consolation.

Same here.
A big part is the bogus workflow that you mention -- let's say, as one example, that I want to simply Pan each Voice to slightly different positions--
On Repro-5, all voice pan knobs are side by side on the tweaks page.

Are they? I can't see where anything is on those tweaks pages. For some reason they make no sense and do my f**king head in. It's probably the best example of style over substance, in GUI design, I can think of. I have the RePros but I pretty much never use them, not sure why.

On OB-E, all voice pan knobs are stacked in the top left of the main interface.

That would be the one and only thing that's easy about OB-E. Again, it just does my head in , I find it completely unusable. OB-EZ has been a Dogsend for me. So if it does anything more easily than Obsession, that's a huge issue for Synapse.

Now let's do it in OBSESSION:
• Click the voice 1 button in the bottom of the interface
• Move the mouse up to the top right of the interface and change the Pan
• Move back to the bottom of the interface, click Voice 1 again to exit it, click button for Voice 2
• Move back up to the top right of the interface and change the Pan
• Move back to the bottom of the interface, click Voice 2 again to exit it, click button for Voice 3
• Move back up to to the top right of the interface and change the Pan
• Move back......

WE'VE ONLY DONE THREE VOICES AND HAVE FIVE LEFT....so repeat all of the above steps just FIVE more times and whew, we did it, each voice has an adjusted Pan value.

You left out a step -
• Save as preset so you never, ever have to go through that again.

Or you could just use the "Vintage" and "Spread" knobs and be done with it. That's my solution.

OBSESSION's workflow is horrible. There, I said it. What further evidence is needed than above? It's practically a joke how bad it is.

The thing is, you don't need to deal with any of that. Until just now, when I went and had a look, I'd completely forgotten about all those per-voice tweaks. It's something that's only in there at all because the beta-testers kept pestering Rich to do it and I imagine that was the only way he could think of to fit it into the limited GUI space he had stuck himself with. The good news is that Synapse have finally abandoned that tiny Reason GUI size. Both Prestige and Legend-HZ have much more space for more things on the front panel. Hopefully, once they are out in the wild, Rich might look to freeing up the GUIs for Obsession and Legend, too.

Also, the basic layout makes no sense, based on general Synthesis layouts that are time tested.

Well, you can say that but the Obsession GUI simply mimics the "time-tested" layout of the original OB synths. The top row are the controls from the left side of the synth, the bottom row from the right side.

I'm not actually disagreeing with you, I'm not a fan of the front/back page thing either, but at least I think Rich has done a pretty good job of it and I do appreciate how clean and uncluttered the front panel is, where I do the vast majority of the work. It suits my workflow well enough that, overall, I feel it's a worthwhile compromise. Do you realise you can click pretty much anywhere on that top bar to switch? You don't have to aim for that tiny button every time. It would be great if there was a simple hotkey to do it, like the tilde key or something you could set up for a custom button on your mouse. I think that would make it bearable for pretty much anyone.

Most importantly, of course, is that I love the way it sounds. It's absolutely f**king huge in a way few other synths can match. Use it to its strengths and it will always deliver.

Statistics: Posted by BONES — Mon Apr 22, 2024 1:15 am

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