iSEM Synthesizer 4+

The underlying ideology of the design is great, but the mechanics of it sometimes fall down terribly.

For example tapping on the name of the patch doesn’t bring up a list to change patches… it does nothing.

Instead there’s a “Load” button next to the name of the patch that’s for bringing up the list of patches to then “load”. That’s a little odd. But what’s really odd is how the list of patches behave. They’re in a nice tree structure, which is great, except that the second level of the tree (sound categories) doesn’t have an [ALL] option, so you must first choice a sound designer, then only one of FX, Lead, Sequence, Strings etc before the third level of the tree is filled with the names of the patches that meet this criteria.

Why is this odd? Because something like this synth, which is a multi-page monster to edit and create sounds in, the fastest way to make something you like is to first scour through the presets to find the sound closest to what you’re trying to do and then work from there. But scoring through the presets on this, because of the process and the way it resets, is utterly painful. Which is even more of a shame because the table views the presets are in is really responsive, so it’s just really close to being epic, but miles from it.

Next most annoying thing is probably the lack of numbers indicating the more precise positions of all the knobs when operating them, followed closely by the lack of a meaningful UNDO facility to change settings changed back to what they last were, and before that, and before that… etc. For something that really rewards sound editing, I think this would be a great idea.

There’s no lettering on the keys to indicate what octave you’re in when in Chromatic mode. This is a bit of a bug bear of mine, may not bother others, but it does me, immensely.

Switches SUCK. They’re not responsive to touches in the sense they don’t change mode if you just tap them, you have to actually SLIDE them, which is really tricky and annoying to choose the mid point of small 3 position switches. Just let us tap them, once, to move to the next logical position, and then to the next, and then go backwards again… etc.

There’s tiny little dials for things like Modulation Source and Destination that are so small and hyper responsive that they’re too clumsy to use meaningfully, and certainly no quicker than opening the list by tapping the name of the Source or Destination to open the list and pick the desired option. Which further highlights the problem with the patch names not being clickable to open that list… there’s an inconstancy in UI convention here. But worse than that, these tiny little chooser knobs are taking up valuable space that could have allowed the UI to show more of the names of each Source and Destination, and in a bigger font.

the onscreen keyboard modes literally block MIDI signals coming in on omitted notes, which I find odd. I like to set the onscreen keyboard to “can’t go wrong” scaling, just because onscreen keyboards suck so badly that it’s much easier to experiment with it configured that way, but that doesn’t mean I want to be limited in that manner when using a MIDI controller.

Why the many gripes? Well, there’s more… but I’ll stop there because some of the sounds this thing makes are AMAZING!!!

It’s possible to overlook just about all the grumbles when you find a really great sound and get it to fit just right with something else. Because this thing really does make amazing sound and allow for some great expressiveness because of its Modulation Source to Destination depth. Something that this wonderful developer put in his other project, Nave.

What’s annoying is that this app is very close to being all around amazing, and that’s what lingers most, because once you find some of the great sounds you’ll want to do more with it, and start getting frustrated by the many little oddities to the UI/UX.

I highly recommend the sounds, and hope you are less impacted by the UI/UX than I am.

It’s a 5 star sound with a 2 star UI. So that’s a 4,5 by my calculations, for a synth.

Brilliant memory jerker, trying to add extension or rename a patch crashes the app...but live this,

Stunning synth sounds, I have used this in several projects...
I used the bass arp for "The Dream Sequence - Take Me Home"
Highly recommend, turn almost any sound into a brilliant arp sound
10/10 for me