Recording - December 2011 - 27

the sound you want. But we all know that we often have time pressures or are more focused on songwriting than tweaking knobs... and some of us are beginners who want to get great sounds now and learn more about effects programming later. For all those cases, if EZmix doesn’t hold the title of Handiest Plug-in Ever, it’s surely a top contender.

Madrona Labs Aalto
$99; www.madronalabs.com

machine of relatively recent vintage; more importantly, its sounds are generally so rich and complex that playing more than one or two voices at a time is overkill! As you can see in the screenshot, every parameter dial in Aalto not only has a graphic display of its set value but a built-in oscilloscope to display the audio or control signal passing through it! This is a bit overwhelming at first, but you soon get used to the visual feedback when tracing signals and learning about what’s controlling what.

Madrona Labs is a small music hardware and software firm whose flagship product is the Soundplane A, a USB multitouch controller for computer music. Aalto, Madrona Labs’ first software offering, is a patchable software synth with a very unusual sound architecture and an even more unusual user interface—check out the screenshot. Aalto’s main sound source is a powerful FM oscillator with one carrier and one modulator plus a variety of fine timbral tweaks. Its control sources include a set of MIDI control points, one LFO, two envelopes, and a 16-step sequencer; signals from the oscillator are passed through a gate, a waveshaper/delay, a state-variable filter, and a simple reverb processor. Aalto ties it all together with a very intuitive patching system that uses click/drag to draw virtual cables between modules. Each cable’s control amount can be set with a mini-dial at the destination, and cables can be split or merged to form an infinitely complex virtual patchbay with no menu-diving needed. Aalto has a maximum of 4 voices, which is more than you’ll need for pretty much anything you’d do with it. For one thing, it’s not the thriftiest plug-in you’ll ever run, and 4-voice chords on a complex preset will peg the CPU meter on a dual-core

Aalto comes with a large library of musical, educational, and just plain weird presets, and its PDF manual is an education in audio and synthesis as well as a very funny and enlightening guided tour through the many unusual ways you can create and mangle sound in Aalto. This is a synth for unusual sound effects that burble along on their own, or strange and wonderful melodies, or complex evolving pads that fill more than their share of the sound spectrum with a single note. You could program Aalto for vanilla leads or synth sounds, but that’s not why you’d want it. I’m tickled to report that the development path for Aalto is active and fruitful; I tried it at version 1.0.0 and was underwhelmed, but can recommend the current shipping version, 1.2.6, without reservations. It sounds awesome and is a blast to program once you grasp how the signal routing and parameter displays work. Randy Jones, the developer of Aalto, offers a free demo on the Madrona Labs website, well worth checking out. The price is right, the licensing terms are very reasonable and user-friendly, and the sound is reminiscent of the good old days of modular synthesizers; if you’re a sonic adventurer looking for new and inspiring territory, don’t miss out on Aalto.
RECORDING DECEMBER 2011

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Recording - December 2011

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