GForce’s MAP is all new — it’s not a recreation or a collaboration with other brands. But this synth has been to history class, studying modular designs by Serge Tcherepnin, Random*Source, and Buchla USA. Put that in a very modern interface, add MPE expression, and you get what feels like Massive X or Serum from an alternate universe where they’re all about West Coast synthesis.
And that’s a great thing. It’s not that this hasn’t been tried before — but this now looks set to rival one other great approach to do contemporary West Coast, Madrona Labs’ Aalto. True addicts of this kind of synthesis will undoubtedly run both, and possibly have fewer friends, but honestly — just get a cat and play with West Coast synthesis all day. 100% valid life choice, especially if you’ve seen (waves arms) the rest of the world.
There’s a tons of goodness in there:
- Triple oscillator architecture with waveshaping and FM
- Dual filters (multimode and five-band resonant EQ)
- Performance XY pad macros for oscillators and filters
- Three looping envelopes
- Three drawable LFOs
- Full MPE support
- Noise-powered random LFO
- Polyphonic generative arpeggiator
- Color (erm “Colour”) effect with crossover and different distortion/waveshaping options (actually not unlike what I was building in Max for you recently, conceptually)
- Time quad delay
- Space grains and reverb
- scalable, dark/light options
And another nice feature — they’re pretty conservative on system requirements. 4GB RAM minimum, VST2 support is still there, there’s a standalone version (rare these days it seems), Window 7 or macOS 10.15 (Catalina) or better, plus AAX VST3 AU etc.
There’s a seven-day free trial but I’ve also started playing with this since GForce sent it over yesterday.
GForce’s stuff always sounds fantastic; like I said, I’m thrilled that they’re moving beyond emulation into creating their own stuff — it means you get the sound details from analog modeling but with new ideas.
I’ll be California Dreaming with this one through the summer. (Uh, San Francisco Tape Center Dreaming? Whatever. I wish they all could be West Coast synths and Berlin is depressing so it’s studio time. Meow.)
https://www.gforcesoftware.com/products/map
On sale now, 50% off:
Also right now you get some awesome Beatsurfing stuff as a free gift if you buy from Plugin Boutique (RANDOM, 7Deadlysnares):
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