Dave Smith Instruments Poly Evolver

This is a review of the Poly Evolver Keyboard, version 1. I have owned this synthesizer since May 1, 2005.

The Poly Evolver Keyboard is a very intuitive synthesizer, and although there isn't really one knob per function, there almost is. I really like how everything is laid out and how easy it is to edit patches. I tried out all of the presets, and they provide some nice examples of complex patches that take advantage of velocity, aftertouch, polyphony, multiple routings, and creative pitch and mod wheel use, but in order to really get to know a synthesizer (and electronic music) you have to make your own patches. Dave Smith's Basic Program (Program:128 Bank:4) is an excellent starting point, and I use it almost every time I set out to make a new sound. I copied it to Program:128 of every Bank so that when I want to save it I can write it to where it already is, scroll through until I find a patch I can overwrite, go back to my new patch, save it in place of the patch I'm overwriting, name it, and then save a blank Program:128 from another bank over the one I just edited so that my slate is clean.

I haven't used the software editor because I don't find the knob-twisting way to be limiting at all, although I understand there are some alternate ways to make patches through the software editor that can be very interesting. I'll have to try it out someday.

The manual is pretty straightforward, and I have no real complaints about it, but if you are new to analog synthesis it might seem a bit vague and confusing. The site www.carbon111.com/evolverguide.pdf is a good online manual you should check out if you want a more in-depth introduction. As a side note, if you are new to analog synthesis I think that spending some time with the Poly Evolver Keyboard would be a really good way to learn a lot about it. I've thought about teaching electronic music, and I think this would be a pretty ideal synthesizer to use (unless I could get an ARP 2600).

I gave the Ease of Use category a rating of 8 because of something concerning the rotary encoders, which I'll address later in this review.

You can find a comprehensive list of features elswhere, so I'll focus on their more subjective aspects here.

Four notes of polyphony are more than enough for me because I am not a keyboard player as much as I am a sound sculptor, and when I do noodle around with the keys I find that four notes are plenty, especially considering how overpowering some of the sounds can be. My roommate, who has been playing piano for over 20 years, definitely wishes there was at least one more note of polyphony, but he said that once he got used to the upper limit it didn't feel as constraining as it did initially. You could always buy the original Evolver and connect the two, but that's an expensive extra note.

I'll refer to my piano-playing roommate again for the keyboard action. He said that it's one of the best synthesizer keyboards he's ever played because of its expressive response and semi-weighted solidity. It feels nice to me too, but I'm especially impressed by the velocity and aftertouch. The velocity is as controllable and responsive as you want it to be, but the aftertouch is even better than I expected. Its quality is especially noticeable when you use it to control something like oscillator pitch. You can very gradually increase the pressure on a key and listen to the sound change without any initial catch or stepping, and you can vary your pressure suddenly and erratically and listen to the sound smoothly and quickly mirror your movements. I guess that's how it should be, but I've heard some pretty poor examples of aftertouch in my day. The only problem you might have with the aftertouch is its lack of polyphony. If you're controlling the filter cutoff with key pressure, and you want one note to keep the same cutoff level but another note to open up when you press harder, you'll be disappointed when both are affected equally by the changing pressure of one key.

The built in effects sound very digital at times (because they are), but their quality seems to be determined by the character of the sound going through them. You'll see what I mean if you compare processed acoustic sounds (like playing a guitar through it) with processed electronic sounds. The more analog and organic your patch sounds, the better the effects sound with it. I like the Pre/Post option on the distortion and high pass filter, and I think the Pre setting sounds much better when using distortion (since the filter's character isn't being distorted). You have to be careful when you turn up the distortion because it increases the volume dramatically, but at low levels it can actually take some of the hiss out of a sound and balance it out nicely. I think the white noise sounds horribly digital on this synthesizer, but it sounds a little better to me when the distortion is turned up a bit.

The three delay lines can definitely be used to good effect (especially through creative sequencing and modulation), and the Feedback 2 feature (the delay feeds back through the filter) can be used to get some really great subtle feedback with a little resonance on a partially opened filter, but when it clips it sounds harsh and digital (letting it build up until it almost clips and then taking it down a bit takes some practice, but it sounds really cool).

I was disappointed at first by the Tuned Feedback because of its obligatory semitone stepping and the fact that it's basically just a short delay, but with some experimentation and modulation you can get some awesome sounds with it. Also, and I'll go into more detail on this later, if you control the Feedback pitch with the mod wheel (or pitch wheel) you can change it with a lot less stepping.

The software is updateable via MIDI, but it's difficult to say how extensive the changes could be since I'm not sure how much is determined by the hardware. For example, there's a really annoying click between settings 0 and 1 on the high pass filter, and I wrote to Dave Smith to ask him if that's something that could be changed with a software update. He wrote back and said, "On the highpass, you are correct on the click. It has to do with the re-configurable nature of the highpass, since it can be placed before the analog filters for use on external signals, or after the analog as an additional processing function. I hope to re-visit the internal design to eliminate the click on a future update - fortunately it can be fixed in software." So, that's encouraging, but it makes me wonder about what else can be updated. My biggest complaint by far with the Poly Evolver Keyboard is the digital stepping of every knob, but the filter cutoff's control has been smoothed a bit (probably mostly because of its 0-164 range (most other knobs are around 0-100)), and I asked Dave Smith if this anti-aliasing could eventually be added to all control changes. He wrote back and said, "On the stepping, it is possible to somewhat improve some parameters, but there are limits to many parameters, depending on where they fit in the analog or digital system. Hopefully some day they can be tweaked a bit." I frequently check www.davesmithinstruments.com for software updates, but so far there have been none.

The analog-style sequencer is a really nice feature and one that I should use more often. For simple note sequencing you have to first set the Destination knob to OscAllFreq and then you can either set each knob to the pitch you desire or press Write and then the Start/Stop button before playing each successive note into the sequencer. You can also set the Destination knob to any setting (cutoff, feedback frequency, distortion level, delay amount, etc.) and play those values into the sequencer via the keyboard. For those of you who, like me, do more sequencing than actual key-hitting, you will find that editing a playing sequence opens up a lot of envelope possibilities that your modulated drones don't realize.

This is more of a personal preference than anything else, but I think that the blue LEDs are way too bright, especially when your eyes have adjusted to a dark performance area. It would be nice to be able to tone them down a bit.

The Poly Evolver Keyboard is capable of an unbelievably huge variety of sounds. It can sound warm and analog and squelchy, and it can sound thin and brittle and digital. It can be thick and dry like an Octave Cat, and it can be bloopy and clean like a MiniMoog. It can ALMOST sound like a fully analog synthesizer, but there are some unfortunate digital aspects that keep it from shining as clear and true as I wish it did. Imagine that you've sculpted a beautifully subtle tone on a Doepfer Modular that dips and bends like the full spectrum of refracted sunlight in the surface of a glass of water. The Poly Evolver Keyboard's closest approximation of that sound would be something like seeing this same scene on a high definition television. It's still beautiful, but it doesn't connect with our biology as completely as the infinitely smooth voltage variations of full analog circuitry.

Even though it has true analog oscillators and great Curtis filters, they're so deeply embedded in digital circuitry that you can not sweep any parameter with a knob without stepping. To some people, especially keyboard players, this won't be much of a problem, but to analog synthesis afficionados it is a glaring offense. I understand that this has a lot to do with cost management, but if this is a professional instrument it should be subjected to professional scrutiny.

You can make control changes act much more smoothly when you route them through the mod wheel, and this is what I do whenever I like the way a knob affects the sound. The mod wheel sounds great until you slow it down enough to hear the digital stepping, which is much more obvious for some sounds and control changes than others. You can also route control changes through the pitch wheel, but it steps more than the mod wheel, and the center indent isn't ideal for many applications.

You can sweep the self-resonating filter up and out of the audio range, but the Poly Evolver Keyboard cuts off all sounds (including harmonics) above 25 kHz. Some people argue that there's a certain desirable presence and brightness to a sound when its harmonic content is allowed to resonate infinitely upward. I don't know if this is true or not, but I suspect that it is, and it would be nice to let biology decide rather than electronic limitations. Many people attribute the preference for vinyl over CDs to the fact that CDs can not produce frequencies higher than 22.05 kHz.

The high pass filter steps like a madman (especially for certain sounds), and it adds a very noticeable static hiss. This can be toned down by turning the distortion up to the first active level, 2, but you'll definitely hear the sound change because the distortion goes from 0 to NG (Noise Gate) and then jumps up to 2 in a very perceptible step. You have to have the high pass filter set to 1 and the distortion set to 2 if you want to control them with the mod wheel (or other modulation), but that's really the best way because then when you turn the mod wheel all the way down you don't hear a sharp cut since they can't click down that last step to 0 like they do when you use the knobs.

You might be surprised, given everything I've just written, that I think the Poly Evolver Keyboard is an absolutely amazing synthesizer and a very worthy purchase. It has a few tragic flaws, but I love it anyway, and you would be astounded by the kinds of psychedellic sounds it can make. I've gone on long, strange journeys while working on a sound, and I've discovered so many weird quirks and unrepeatable moments in the immense buildup of small adjustments that I've come to regard this synth as a kind of powerful force that I'm learning to control.

I should mention the four LFOs at the core of this synthesizer's incredible repertoire. I love the flexibility of having so many modulation destinations, and the modulation speeds go from a not quite slow enough 30 seconds to a pretty fast 261 Hz middle C. If you want to modulate something even higher into the audio range you can use digital oscillators 3 and 4 to control pretty much any parameter. For example, you could modulate the pitch of analog oscillator 1 with oscillator 3 and route the mod wheel to oscillator 3's pitch to control the speed at which you modulate oscillator 1 (although the analog oscillators can't handle too much speed, and they turn into a cool fuzzy sound at higher frequencies). I only wish you could take those digital oscillators down to even lower low frequency oscillations because the 127 different digital waveshapes make some very interesting modulators.

There's so much I'm leaving out, but suffice it to say that, aside from the digital stepping, I'm very impressed by the Poly Evolver Keyboard's expressiveness and sounds.

I'm not very fond of the quality of the Evolver's rotary encoders in general, but they're not too bad. They're a bit jumpy (as you will painfully notice when you are naming your patches), and they don't register fast turns very well, and every now and then a knob you haven't touched in a while will show up as a changing value on the screen. The knobs feel a little cheap, and their tightness is inconsistent (some turn much more easily than others), but they look pretty nice, and they're easy to remove for repairs. Whenever I play on my friend's Moog Voyager I'm reminded of how reliable, sturdy, and consistent knobs can (and should) be.

My filter cutoff knob stopped working after a couple months, but Dave Smith very promptly sent me two new encoders, and after a friend and I soldered the new one on it's worked fine ever since. Unfortunately, my feedback depth knob is starting to be a bit unreliable now. However, I've noticed that if I turn it back and forth for a while it works like new again (until I leave my synthesizer alone for a few days), and I always have that extra encoder if I need to replace it.

It should be noted that when I wrote back to Dave Smith to tell him that replacing the filter encoder worked he wrote back and said, "Actually, the encoders have been working perfectly so far. That was the first one to be replaced, except for one other that was damaged in shipment. They should last a long time."

I can't imagine any company having better customer support than Dave Smith's. He has responded promptly and thoughtfully to every question or problem I've had, and I feel really good about supporting his company.

I chose this synthesizer because of its strong roots in classic analog synthesis and its modern bent toward new ideas in sound production. I feel that it's a well-rounded synthesizer capable of an unbelievablely wide range of sounds, and I'm really glad I own one. Maybe I'm a little too hard on things like knob consistency and digital stepping, but I'm a musician, and I care a lot about the quality of my expression. I think the Poly Evolver Keyboard is destined to be a classic.

review for the keyboard version. (first software revision)

there is a knob for everything, which makes such a difference when using
it as performance instrument, or even with your sequencer. Some might moan about the size of instrument and how even with all these knobs, you still have to use the odd menu button to make changes, but it's a vast improvement on the rack version. the presets sound more chunkier or smoother due to having polyphony, and also (i suspect) higher quality DAC's somewhere in the audio chain. The manual is also an improvement too

4 notes, but the sheer character and quality of those notes is imcoparable.

It has a built in delay line with three taps as per the other evolvers and as you now have knobs to access them instantly, they are much easier to mess around with.

It has no further expansion in terms of voices- unless dave smith is planning on something as a retrofit- but the o/s is always updateable.

In terms of midi...everything is covered.

The onboard sequencer is now also easier to use as all the knobs are there for you to tweak with in real time. Some might complain as it isnt as instant as those on a groovebox, but it's superbly implemented and has a character reminiscent of a system 100m sequencer.

the sounds are...unique. This wont be to everyone's taste, as it isnt a rompler.

it will work in any genre, allthough i must add that sometimes even with onyl foru voices of polyphony, the sound is too thick to sit in a mix, but one man's meat etc. They keyboard feels great to play and everything is superbly placed and implemented.

now the not so good part.

I notcied that when you used the sequenced sounds and sometimes stopped a sequence midway, then seeing as the polyphony works on voice allocation, one of the voice cards woudl go off tune, or remain stuck slightly off tune. youd have to press the reset or sequencer button again to rememedy this. In the end I sent mine back to turnkey,and exhanged it for a minimoog voyager electric blue, but thats another matter.

it's very robust, and it is able to withstand a lot of physical whack, but hopefully theyve resolved the voice problem ive emntioned above.

dave smith is superb when it comes to replying to emails. he was even kind enough to send me an os upgrade chip for my evolver- which i still have.

well, i wouldnt buy another one because for me the evolver has enough of a character of its own, anbd the poly version is overkill for my sonic needs, as i do soundtrack and production work. I own romplers and other VA'S liek novation a nd roland gear, and this does haev a unique sound of its ownm due to the prophet vs waves and curtis filters (i think).

if there is anything i wish it DID have, then it'd ahev to be an extra voice to take it up to THE MAGIC NUMBER, as dave smith calls it ;-)

In the end, if perhaps it'd had better reliability regarding the "funny voice" issue, then I would ahev kept it, but it didn't so heigh ho. Would i buy it again? no, not at full RRP.

It's a very unique and characterful instrument, but it wont be to everyones taste. Those who liek clean sounds or romplers shoudl steer clear. My only other piece of advice is to listen to the sounds at dave's website or go to yoru nearest synthstore and have a bash at one.

Love the presets, they sound amazing. Its nice that you can edit on a computer, although the mac verison has a few bugs. I hope it will be fixed in a software update. The manual is pretty simple...

I'm still playing with this puppy, but so far so good. The effects are wonderful, I also have a moog voyager-which is my bread and butter-but the sounds you can get out of this thing is sick. You can connect more that one for more polyphony. This is a very flexible unit.

Personally, I think this is good for any style of music. It don't sound like the voyager or the atc, it stands in a class of its own. If your into analog sounds you'll love this....

The only thing I don't like about it is its construction. For 1300 plus, I would imagine it to be built better. The front panel looks like it is a strip of tape.

No problems so far....

Over all, I think it is a really nice piece. I look forward to dave smith's work in the future..