Scanned synthesis is a rare breed. As far as I know of, the current offer comprises Qubit’s very own Scanned eurorack module, some Csound applications I haven’t delved into and a recent free plugin called Nettle by Fellusive. Then there are two famously discontinued plugins by Humanoid Sound Systems, which sadly closed doors a few years ago: Scanned Synth Pro and Enzyme. Both have pretty much vanished from the Internet and are extremely hard to come by, except for some demo versions of Enzyme. I’ve been playing around with one of those inside VCV, and I’m kind of blown away. It sounds like nothing else I’ve heard before. I won’t even try to describe it, I’ll just evoke some imagery instead: Antarctica, King of the Koopas, a tiny helicopter landing on your face.
So, has anyone played with it? Maybe you have owned the full thing in the past? What are your thoughts? I mostly use stock plugins, but I’m fascinated by this one!
It seems to me scanned synthesis means a wavetable oscillator with a dynamically created wavetable.
Qu-Bit says about their module it does “animate wavetables that are created in real-time” - so i think it uses formulas instead of stored wavs, but reads them as regular wavetables, but you can change the wavetable in realtime.
I don’t know anything that would have that functionality I think - but you might recreate similar sounds by turning the output of something like this VCV Library - Sapphire Elastika into a wavetable.
Yes! That’s precisely the one I’m using. But it doesn’t give access to every parameter, instead each preset has a handful of different settings you can tweak. So it’s essentially a preset machine. Sounds amazing, though!
I only have back to issue 213, but the Enzyme CM version was included in the CM plugin suite for issues after 202, up to at least issue 258, which you can get here PC Instruments CM258 | FileSilo
