Jove

The old EMS synths had a pin matrix instead of a signal path. You decided what connected to what, and the instrument was whatever those pins said it was. Jove has eleven source nodes crossing eleven destination buses, with a gain at every crossing that can go negative.

This is not a routing menu with a nicer skin. It rewires the actual audio path. Frequency-modulate any oscillator from any node in the instrument. Chain the two filters in series when the patch wants twenty-four more decibels of slope, or run them in parallel when it wants two characters at once. Patch the output of something back into its own input — which is safe, because the loop is delayed by exactly one sample, so it can howl but it cannot explode.

Half the patches I keep came from putting a pin somewhere I had not intended and leaving it there.

Each oscillator morphs continuously from sine through triangle and saw to pulse with variable width, band-limited so the top octave stays clean — or switches to wavetable mode and scans a bank of sixty-four tables. Each has its own footage, detune, bit-crush and sample-rate reduction, so you can dirty one voice inside an otherwise clean patch.

Underneath there is a sub oscillator an octave or two down, noise, ring modulation, oscillator-to-oscillator FM, and hard and soft sync. Unison stacks up to seven voices per note with detune and stereo spread, on top of sixteen-voice polyphony.

The filters are a Moog-style twenty-four decibel ladder, a state-variable in low-pass, high-pass, band-pass and notch, a low-pass gate for plucked and struck behaviour, and a Steiner-Parker. They are cutoff-matched to each other, which sounds like a small thing and is not: it means switching model while auditioning changes the character without changing the brightness, so you are comparing filters rather than comparing levels.

Three envelopes, three LFOs with six shapes each — tempo-syncable, with fade and delay, per voice or global — and four sixteen-step sequencers that run in melodic or curve mode with swing and direction control. All of them are sources in a thirty-two slot matrix, edited as a grid you can read at a glance.

The part I use most is that the matrix draws itself onto the instrument. Any knob that is being modulated shows the range as an arc around it and a dot moving live inside that arc. You can see the filter envelope pulling on the cutoff while you play, which turns editing from an act of imagination into an act of looking.

There are a hundred and forty factory patches in twelve categories, and they are loudness-matched across the entire bank to within a decibel — measured, not eyeballed. Browsing the bank does not mean riding the output fader, and a patch that seems better is better rather than just louder. Each one still has a trim if you disagree.

Audition mode plays a demo phrase appropriate to the category at the host tempo, so you can go through a bank with your hands off the keyboard. And when nothing in it is right, DICE builds a new patch from a musical archetype rather than randomising every parameter into noise, while VARY perturbs what you already have. A/B compare, copy between slots, revert to the stored preset, and an indicator when there are unsaved edits.

There is an arpeggiator with twelve modes, ratcheting, swing, latch and host-transport lock. And three quality settings — Eco, HQ and Ultra — that oversample the whole voice path at one, two or four times, so you can write with a light CPU load and render with a heavy one.