Ask A Sound Guy

Image-Line amy be known for their well known DAW FL Studio (formerly Fruity Loops), but they also will soon be known for their line of solid virtual instruments and effects.

Morphine is one of those fine software instruments. It’s an additive synthesizer that comes in VSTi, Audio Units, stand alone, and as a proprietary FL Studio plug-in.

Before we go much further, I must confess: I’m not a synth/synthesis guru. While I know how to get the sound I want out of a synthesizer, I can’t really geek out on them for days. In other words, I’d rather talk about preamps than synths any day of the week.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy playing with Morphine, though. This plug-in is deep. And when I say deep, I mean you can really get lost in it crafting your own sound. It’s one of those rare cases where I actually felt bad using a preset because there’s just so many ways to get your own sound out of this thing.

I would tell you what’s inside Morphine, but the website does a very nice job of doing it for me:

Morphine’s 128 harmonic oscillator engine is fully optimized for producing a high quality, warm sound, with ground shaking bass and crystal clear high frequencies. Based on complex, full 32 bit mathematics, with no internal sampling to avoid interpolation noises so Morphine retains that ‘analog’ quality.

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The oscillator engine is not only thing that makes Morphine sound so great. With an infinite number of harmonic snapshots ‘per-spectrum’, and the ability to map a unique spectra for each note, you can generate a realistic and balanced sound over the entire keyboard range.

Additionally, the four generator sources

can be morphed via the in-built mix/morph envelope or from an external MIDI controller. Combined with the four independent multipoint modulation envelopes, assignable to many internal parameters, you can achieve any sound, just like you imagined it.

The first page I noticed while poking around Morphine was the Morph/Mix window which allows you to mix between the four generators: we’re talking both wet/dry mix and panning. There’s also some noise sampling where you can add vinyl noise, thunder storm elements, and a bunch of other nice sounds. There’s also your choice of three filters (lo pass, hi pass, band pass). There’s also the ability to tempo sync, which has got to be great for all music producers.

In the Modulation window, you can see that you really do have some crazy control over how your signal is routed. You’ve got 12 different slots to route whatever parameter you’d like and a mix knob to control how much of your source you’re sending. There’s also four available envelopes and a dedictated “Pitch Bend Amount” box where you can control exactly what you think you can. I personally do not enjoy working the breakpoints, and Morphine has a lot of breakpoints in it. I’d much rather have a pencil tool or fader to do any sort of automation, but Morphine doesn’t offer that. That may just be a personal hang-up of mine, however.

Obviously, the bulk of Morphine is it’s four generators. These are the areas that you will undoubtedly be spending most of your time crafting your own sounds.

You’ll be free of breakpoints while editing the amplitude, panning, detune, velocity, and window parts of your sound, which I found to be very nice. It certainly gave messing around a much more “organic” flow.

There’s also a great area where you can control the range of the notes you’ll play on the preset. I think this is a great idea once you find a sound you like: a feature like this, when used correctly, can get you out of the “twisting knobs” mode and more into the “get stuff done” mode.

The sounds this synth can make is pretty remarkable. You can go from the lightest of pads, to some pretty wild UFO-ish sounds without much effort. The sounds are also very pleasing; I could really see this synth becoming a part of your software arsenal for videogame/movie scoring. The tempo sync features strewn about Morphine also make it very usable for music, as well. However, the sounds and behaviour of this synth just scream “commercial composer.”

Aside from all that, Morphine has everything you’ll need and everything you’d expect to be inside your softsynth: polyphony control, transposition control, and fine tuning. There’s also a glide knob, controls for your master envelope, and a master level and drive knob which can really give your sounds some grit. There’s also a chorus, delay, reverb, and eight-band graphic EQ. None of the effects will blow your mind, but they’re all good and familiar sounding (which can be a good thing).

The synth wasn’t too processor-heavy, which is great (ed: you can read the specs of my particular system below). It worked well inside Live and I have yet to experience any sort of crash or lock-up. Seeing as I received the AudioUnits version to review, I wasn’t able to test it inside Pro Tools 8, however. The most Morphine ever used my processor was around 34-35% according to Live, which means I could run into some problems while working on a more complex mix/arrangement. I don’t think this is a specific flaw of Morphine, though, as many softsynths consume equal-to or much more.

If you’re shopping for a new synth, I would recommend you download the demo version of this and try it out. Film composer or dance music producer, it shouldn’t matter. Try this one out and see if it fits.

Morphine is available now for $159 from Image-Line’s online shop. It’s available in FL Studio plug-in format, VST Instrument, AudioUnit, as well as standalone for Windows and Mac. / Tested On: 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2GB RAM on OS X 10.5.6 inside Ableton Live 7 / System Req: PC: 2GHz Intel Pentium 3 compatible CPU with full SSE support, Mac: Intel CPU or G4 PPC with full Altivec support, Universal: 512 RAM, and 130MB disk space.