Product Spotlight: Koblo Centaurus

Product Spotlight: Koblo Centaurus

31 July, 2008 | 10.00AM

• Written by: francispreve
• Filed under: Music News:

If you’ve been making music with computers for more than a decade, you might recall one of the first softsynth developers – a small company called Koblo.

Back in the day, Koblo plug-ins were lauded for both their quirky, yet flexible, architecture and the fact that the Koblo synths sounded surprisingly fat and warm for digital recreations of analog signals.

In fact, the sound was so darn good that artists like BT publicly praised Koblo for their craftsmanship.

Unfortunately, the Koblo engine was optimized for Mac OS 9 and the transition to OS X proved to be a bit too much for the small company.

So, when contacted by an old friend with news that Koblo was back in business, we were intrigued.

The big question remained.

Is that Koblo sound still relevant in today’s morass of softsynths and plug-ins?

The short answer is yes.

Koblo’s first new softsynth in over a decade is called Centaurus and not only does it sound terrific, it’s shockingly inexpensive – more on that in a bit.

The architecture is pretty familiar, with a twist here and there.

Two oscillators feed a filter, which in turn feeds an amplifier.

You can brush up on analog signal flow in this tutorial.

Oscillators

Each oscillator includes the essential four waveforms: sawtooth, square/pulse, triangle and sine.

Both oscillators can be tuned in semitone increments over an eight-octave range, though neither includes fine-tuning controls, which is an odd omission.

For timbral complexity, oscillator 1 provides a knob for adding frequency modulation (not pitch LFO, to be clear, that control lies elsewhere).

In this type of application, FM is a great resource for adding everything from nasty grunginess to clangorous metallic overtones.

Oscillator 2 foregoes the FM knob in favor of a pulse width (PW) knob for varying the width of the square wave.

By offsetting the pulse width by a small amount, you can get a head start on fat bass sounds reminiscent of Deadmau5 and Wolfgang Gartner.

Larger amounts of pulse width adjustment can thin the sound in interesting analog ways.

When modulated via Centaurus’ LFO, the pulse width can be also be pressed into service for fat trance leads.

Despite their simple controls, the oscillators manage to cover a lot of sonic ground using only a few knobs.

Filter

The filter section is based on the original Koblo algorithms from the late 90s.

These were prized for their unusual texture, which is two parts analog warmth and one part quirky digitalia, with a touch of old school Roland TB-303 flavor for good ol’ acidic fun at high resonances.

In addition to cutoff frequency and resonance knobs, there are switches to toggle between high- and low-pass modes, as well as velocity and wheel switches for easy MIDI control assignments.

Modulation

Modulation options include a simple attack/decay envelope that can be assigned to cutoff, oscillator 1 FM, pitch, pan and LFO – all simultaneously.

The LFO can modulate cutoff, amplifier, oscillator 2 pulse width and pitch simultaneously, with adjustable amounts for each.

What’s more, eleven waveforms provide some unusual options for burbling and/or evolving sounds.

There’s a sync button at the top of the LFO section that ostensibly locks the LFO to tempo, with the rate knob controlling note-values for the sync, but I couldn’t get this to work despite numerous experiments and a trip to the manual.

Since this is a 1.0 initial release, there are bound to be a few snags here and there.

I spoke with Koblo and they are aware of the issue, so a fix is due out very soon.

Moving along from there, the signal is processed by the amp, which includes a standard-issue ADSR envelope.

The envelope’s curves are quite punchy, so fast decays add nice clicky transients, making it really useful for percussive and minimal parts.

Summing it up

With so much flexibility in such a streamlined package, it’s very cool that the Koblo developers have included a slew of factory presets including leads, basses, FX and - in the next revision - pads.

Frankly, these sounds are good for showing off the potential of the instrument, but if you really want sounds that are more in tune with the current styles, you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself (which you should always be doing anyway, but that’s beside the point).

After spending quite a bit of time with Centaurus, we were suitably impressed.

Its sound is warm, fat and has a really thick low-end, making it a great go-to synth for bass patches.

But there’s more to it than bass.

Centaurus is an ideal companion for Ableton Live users on a budget.

While it’s not nearly as sophisticated as Ableton’s own Operator or Analog, it’s still a terrific sounding synth that’s easy to program and adds a huge palette of analog textures to Live’s arsenal of sampling goodies.

And best of all is the introductory price.

Brace yourself.

From now until August 31, Centaurus is only $7.49 US.

After that, the price rises to a whopping $14.99 US.

In times like these, it’s amazing to see a manufacturer pricing great tools within reach of budget minded producers.

Centaurus will also run in demo mode, so you can test it out for yourself and see why we’re so excited about this product.

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