Harmor

Harmor's biggest strength is also it's greatest weakness, and probably why there are so few reviews for such an amazing synth. You can use Harmor for years, and still feel like a noob only scratching the surface. That makes writing a review difficult. How can you give an in-depth review, when you feel so green behind the ears? You only need to watch a few YT videos (e.g. Seamless) or chat with another user to discover yet another side to this truly versatile beast.

To start off with, Harmor is an amazingly capable subtractive synth. It might be billed as an additive synth, but you can drag in your own waveforms without having to worry about setting any partials. You can completely ignore that side if you want to. You get 4 oscillators split over 2 parts, and you get to choose the mix between the 2 oscillators per part, as well as the mix between the two parts. Where Harmor comes into its own here is in the modulation options. If you've used FL Studio or Sytrus, this part will probably make sense immediately. If you haven't, you'll probably have a bit of a learning curve. Essentially, you can draw any envelope curves you can dream up, including loop points, for pretty much any parameter. Or you can just draw a standard ADSR instead. You also get an LFO for each parameter that is much more versatile than just a simple repeated wave form. Again, you can draw your own and do weird and wacky things. All envelopes and LFOs can be tempo synced or retriggered globally when you play another note.

I find the UI intuitive with drop-down menus to select the parameter you want to modulate (there must be around 70 to choose from) and another drop-down to select the source (envelope, LFO, keymap, velocity etc.). It keeps everything uncluttered while giving you access to a huge number of options.

This makes it extremely easy to create organic and evolving sounds. You also get 2 filters to play with that you can route in series or parallel. And in addition to the standard filter options you'd expect, you can also draw your own filter and resonance curves.

Of course, you can instead create your own waveforms from partials. Under the hood, Harmor works exclusively with partials, which is where it shows its additive nature. If you load a waveform, it will be analysed and broken down into the corresponding partials (which you can view and edit if you want). Everything Harmor is doing is happening at the partial level. Your filter curves are actually being applied directly to the appropriate partials' levels, not to the final audio output resulting from all partials being added together.

Now you can manipulate these partials in various ways, blurring them together or using the prism function to spread the partials across the frequency spectrum so they no longer act as harmonics. This can create all sorts of metallic and weird sounds. Of course, you can modulate the prism and blur settings using envelopes and LFOs. To help you understand what is going on, Harmor has a visual representation of the partials that are playing, and you can see how they drift and blur with your settings. This is immensely helpful. I suggest that you type "can i haz moar view" into the preset description box to make this visual element bigger (hidden Easter egg).

It's very easy to make ugly sounds by manipulating the partials this way. Quite a few of the presets that use these features in more extreme ways fall into the "weird sound fx" category. But they are actually great for creating more metallic tones, where not all the partials are harmonics. The right custom filter curve, and/or partials, and you are good to go! At less extreme setting they can also add bite or grit to the sound.

There's also a unison function, again applied to the partials, as well as a hamonizer that allows you to clone partials and add copies elsewhere in the frequency spectrum, either using addition or multiplication. But there's no way I can list every feature you get. Suffice to say, you can spend hours twiddling knobs just to see/hear what happens.

But that's not all! You can load audio and image files to use as your sound source instead of the oscillators. The audio or image is analysed, and broken down into partials. This means you can play any audio as a pitched instrument, and manipulate the partials. It can be fun to load random images, but I've found that algorithmically generated designs can work really well - things similar to the classic geometric screen savers that just drew coloured lines to make interesting patterns such as spirals. If you load an image, you can actually see the image in the view on the right as your audio plays, which is neat.

There are various ways you can interact with images/audio (which are essentially treated as the same thing). There are various speed settings as well as options for how to map content to partials. Different options here give very different results. You can use envelopes and LFOs to scrub through the image/audio and set an offset/play position. In theory, you can set the speed to 0, and load an audio file consisting of several single cycle waveforms and use the time offset to scan through the waves. I've only done this with images, but I can't think why it won't work for audio too, essentially giving you wavetable scanning as well.

The last section I need to mention are the in-built FX. Harmor has a nice selection of FX, and my god, do they sound luscious. You get distortion, chorus, delay reverb and compression to choose from. And because Harmor can never give you too many options, you get to choose not only the order in which the global FX are applied, but also the order in which the different sections of the synthesizer are applied. So you can first apply EQ, then use the pluck, then apply the prism effect and then filter the result. Or filter first, then phaser, then harmonizer. It's crazy.

As you can probably tell, Harmor is a crazy beast of a synth, and I'm actually trying to keep this relatively brief...

So is Harmor for you? If you are a sound designer, most definitely. If you like experimenting and making your own presets from time to time, it's a wonderful synth to do that on. Harmor is one of those synths I sometimes fire up just to see what sounds will come out. You can easily futz around for an hour without noticing how much time has passed. But if you are a heavy preset user, and the thought of doing more than tweak the odd knob is a turn off, Harmor is not for you.

Because it's so versatile, you could probably use it to replace a large number of synths. On the other hand, nothing can come close to replacing Harmor. That's why it's my desert island synth. It's the one that can do almost everything. I can make beautiful pads, punchy basses, silky leads. I can make ugly metallic clangs, dirty gritty soundscapes. I can sample myself going "ooh" and play it as a choir. Backwards.

I think there are too many 10/10 ratings on KVR, but Harmor is the one synth I have that deserves it. Well done Gol.