The GUI on this instrument is particularly clever and fun. There is no additive synthesis module, for instance, but there are some standard single-cycle waveforms (sine, saw, triangle, etc.) that you can use as building blocks that would get you to a fairly similar place in most instances. While not exactly programmable in the same way as a real Synclavier, it produces sounds that are pretty faithful to the original's, including the audible effects of aliasing and low-resolution sampling. UVI's instrument combines samples from the Synclavier, the aforementioned ADSR and filter, an FM synthesis module, and a drum machine. I was fortunate to have played around with one in my college days, and it was quite a beast, as implied by the name here. Very few people could afford one of these instruments.
RETORING UVIWORKSTATION SOFTWARE
Those who remember the Synclavier know that it was a monster of an instrument, and no two were alike, as it used a large, rackmount computer a dedicated controller and hardware and software modules that combined additive and FM synthesis along with sampling - all developed in-house. The Beast is a recreation of the New England Digital Synclavier. In that sense, you could look at all the UVI instruments as digital-sampling synthesizers with fixed modulation routings particular to the instruments they are simulating, which gives you almost as much control as some of the more complex modeled instruments like Arturia's. Mello, like all the UVI instruments, offers a standard ADSR envelope a filter that can do high, band, or low-pass and some good basic modulation routing. There are parameters for adding in key noise and mechanical noise from the original tape-based machines. Mello is a software Mellotron with twelve sample groups (with three sounds in each, just like the original Mellotron tape sets), but in some ways, it sounds better, or at least more "real," than my hardware Mellotron M4000D, even though that instrument has 100 sounds. Workstation supports dozens of virtual instruments based on classic synths, three of which I'm reviewing here. The GUI is first and foremost intuitive and easy-to-use, and while the graphics look really cool, they're secondary to the function and don't lavishly copy the original instrument at the expense of usability and CPU needs.
RETORING UVIWORKSTATION FREE
This hybrid approach is made playable in UVI's free Workstation synthesis and playback engine. UVI's solution is to carefully multi-sample classic synths, develop a custom GUI for each instrument that is reminiscent of the original instrument, and then add some real-time synthesis and processing functions as well. UVI has come up with an approach that nicely straddles these two approaches. Their playback engines are far more CPU friendly, but they offer less control over the sounds and are not much fun to play, with pretty static GUIs. On the other hand, there are a plethora of sample libraries out there that have terabytes of sampled sounds, with every note carefully sampled. Arturia also has Analog Factory, which gives you fewer tweakable parameters and a simpler GUI - with reduced CPU usage - but it's just less fun than the full-on virtual instruments. These instruments are also pretty CPU intensive. Arturia's virtual instruments sound amazing, but tweaking them using a mouse and keyboard is a chore in comparison to interacting with the dedicated knobs and sliders of the actual modeled hardware. On one hand, you have Arturia's excellent models of classic electronic instruments that offer control over every possible parameter, including some that never existed in the original instruments. It seems there are two popular approaches to implementing virtual instruments.