Recording - February 2010 - 56

RECORDING'S SHOWCASE OF SOUNDS control for most users, and Alchemy offers a Simple display mode where this section is all you see onscreen. The built-in arpeggiator can store its settings with each patch, and is based on the structure of the modulation step sequencer, so you can create patterns with stepped amplitude or other control functions, with ties, rests, groove and swing (even imported MIDI grooves), and more. And if you want to have different patterns for different parameters, just add another Sequencer into the arpeggiator and off you go! Avoiding confusion Because there’s so much to see and do, Alchemy’s interface is designed so that each section of the synthesizer is tabbed to show only what you’re interested in working with at any given moment. You can easily turn each Source on and off with a click, which is vital for saving system resources—and your sanity, as you try to figure out what each piece of the puzzle is doing! Right-clicking (control-clicking on a Mac) brings up sensible contextual menus for every control, and streamlines everything from assigning waveforms to MIDI Learn. I could think of some way or another I’d like to manipulate waveforms and control them in a particular fashion, it was only a matter of a little headscratching and assigning modulations to various Source parameters before I figured out how to do what I wanted. I haven’t yet run into any form of waveform or sample manipulation that I want to play with that Alchemy can’t do, and I find that breadth of possibility exhilarating. Of course, if you’re easily intimidated and just want a softsynth that sounds really, really cool, there’s no law that says you can’t put Alchemy in Simple mode and just have fun with the hundreds of great presets. It’s a matter of a few minutes to map all the controls in the Perform Section to your control surface or keyboard, and then you’re off and running! Wrapping up If I have a complaint about Alchemy, it’s that the program requires a lot of horsepower. On my main test system, a MacBook 2 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Ableton Live 8, a single instance of Alchemy could peg the CPU meter with eight notes or less of polyphony on a complex patch. The Camel Audio website claims 50% load on one processor with six notes on the program’s most complicated factory preset on a computer like mine, which isn’t a lot more optimistic than what I saw in my tests. Loading, saving, and naming presets is easy, the hierarchy of patch storage is very simple, and the entire experience is meant to make the programming process inviting. And like Cameleon 5000 before it, Alchemy has a random patch generator that’s enough to keep you busy for months—you can even narrow down its many options and create specific templates for different types of randomizations, one per sound category, so a randomized bass patch can be completely different from a randomized lead or pad! All of this is beautifully documented in an extensive illustrated manual. It comes as a PDF, and is also available online at camel audio.com/alchemymanual (the online version is searchable and has the latest updates, but in my experience the PDF download doesn’t lag far behind it). Taking care of business With all of this technical stuff under my belt, it was time to dive into Alchemy and mess around a bit to see what it could do and I would like to apologize to the nice folks at Camel Audio for waiting patiently, and waiting, and waiting, for me to surface again. Wow, what a synthesizer. What a synthesizer! I’ve been doing electronic music and sound design for three decades, and I’m not easy to impress, but Alchemy knocked me flat on my tail. I have a real love for getting into sample playback data and messing around with it at a fundamental level, and it was great fun figuring out everything that Alchemy could do with a basic sample or waveform. After weeks of perusing the manual and trying this and that, my main Alchemy take-away experience (aside from being consistently flattened by the range and quality of its sounds) was that any timeRECORDING FEBRUARY 2010 This is a good time to find out if your DAW does efficient spreading of processor load over multiple cores, because if you have Alchemy running, the more cores you have to do everything else, the better off you’ll be. If your DAW isn’t good at multicore optimization, you’re going to want to play your synth parts into your DAW and freeze the synth’s output into an audio file. That’s the price we pay for a synth with this much complexity and detail it needs horsepower to do its work. Some people may find Alchemy’s demands to be a deal-breaker, which would be a shame. There really is nothing else like Alchemy out there right now, in terms of its unique approach to programming, its depth and quality of provided content, and its lovely, rich, unclassifiably fascinating sound. With all of its Source options and performance tools under the hood, there’s enough going on to keep even the most dedicated programmer busy for years. Old-school hardware synth players occasionally wonder aloud if there’s any software synth out there that could inspire the dedication that the best hardware keyboards engender, and reward hard work and deep programming with sounds you’re not likely to hear anywhere else. I suggest those folks take a good hard look at Alchemy. Mike Metlay (mike@recordingmag.com) would like to take this opportunity to say goodbye to the late Tim Conrardy, who was responsible for much of Alchemy’s wow factor out of the starting gate. We’ll miss you, Tim.

http://www.camelaudio.com/alchemymanual http://www.camelaudio.com/alchemymanual

Recording - February 2010

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