Parallels

I made a noisy ambient piece using only Parallels.

https://abdicant.bandcamp.com/track/parallels

I love Parallels. I also hate Parallels. It's great! It's also infuriating.

It is a serious PITA to work with. Some patches are brilliant, but it is very difficult to find the sweet spots, and there isn't anything it can do that Pigments cannot do better, other than to be quirky. Very slow to load, inflexible envelopes, peculiar filters (too resonant for my tastes), stupid preset manager. ...one of the strangest things about it is how it handles "looping" of the internal sounds: it's very ... flawed. Sometimes this is characterful and interesting, but mostly it's just obnoxious. It's a memory hog, and BitWig crashes if you load more than a handful of instances of it (the above song was tricky to finish, I had to bounce tracks to get it all in).

But I also love Parallels. Despite all of its flaws, I really enjoy wrestling with it, 'cause it's gratifying when you get an interesting sound out of it. Really interesting modulation possibilities, letting you define TWO sources for each destination, and "morph" between them: very unique, very interesting. Decent effects, really interesting in-built samples, interesting UI (I like it), plugs into Modular nicely, and leads me in directions I never would have gone with any other synth. To me, this falls in the category of "software that feels like hardware." (Something that I think Softube really excels at, FWIW.)

It definitely makes my "must have" list.

It would never make my top ten list. Probably not even top twenty.

But you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers!

I hope they make a V2 of it someday. ...or at least make another synth that is at least as far leftfield as Parallels. It's one of the most interesting synths made in the past five years.