Green Oak Crystal VST 2 PC

I have been playing keyboard for 23 years, and for a long time swore that I would never use computers to make music. That was until I learned just how much you can do with computers (and dedided to take the plunge once PC's were able to keep up with mac's since PC's are more affordable). Been composing strictly with computers (Reason, Cubase SX) for about 2 years now.

So let's discuss the free Crystal 2.4 VST 2 plugin from Glenn Orlander. The Crystal is a full blown Modular/Rompler style synth that can do pure subtractive, granular, and pcm (rompler) style synth sounds. You can even get a 20MB bank (also free) of samples from the site. But it doesn't stop there, this thing also offers full soundfont support, including SF2! I would say that the closest synth in terms of funcionality is the groundbreaking Native Instruments Absynth, to which I will make several comparisons. Just like Absynth, the Crystal can make devilishly clever animated synth patches, hypnotic swirls, and incredibly complex and evolving sounds. Good for techno music, but is best at ambient, dreamy, and left-field sounds. (SomaFM's drone zone anyone?)

You can get the plugin for Mac or PC at http://www.greenoak.com. Right off the bat, when you fire it up (I'm using Cubase SX), you know this isn't the ordinary "free" plugin. In otherwords, don't let the 'free' part scare you, Glenn has done his homework on this plugin. Decent GUI, panels arranged in a logical mannor, lots of modulation routing. Since you don't have to pay for it, I strongly suggest you check this thing out and see what it can do for yourself...

Only gets a 7 here because there could be improvements. But keep in mind that you are getting an infinite amount of bang for the buck since the Crystal is FREE (mathematically, it's division by zero, which would make it a paradox). There is a bit of a learning curve, and you can only get help from the greenoak website, but I'm not complaining. The tutorials are better than some manuals that I've read for hardware synths (I'm looking in Roland's direction here).

Installation was a snap. No .exe installers, just unzip and add the .dll to your VST plugins folder. There are additional steps you can take if you want to use soundfonts, and it's all explained at the website.

I mentioned the learning curve, and that's in terms of creating your own sounds. Once you get the hang of it, it's not bad. But if you have Absynth and tried to program sounds into it, the Crystal is very similar in nature, and some of the goodies are very hard to enable at first.

The first thing that you will notice is the graphic display of the envelopes. You can have up to 6 modulation envelopes, and the envelope has up to 9 stages or segments (as compared to an unlimited number in Absynth). Crystal scores big here by color coding each segment, making it easy to tell which part of the envelope you are dealing with. You can also set the curve type for each individual segment.

Moving to the oscilators, there are three of them with a full compliment of waveforms, and you can substitute a SF2 sound for the synth waveforms provided. Now here's where things get too cool: each oscilator has it's own dedicated multimode filter, and a seperate dedicated 9 stage amplifier envelope. Keep in mind that all envelopes have a loop mode for continuous(sp?) animation, or can be used in a standard one shot fashion.

Modulation is the main strength of the Crystal, much like the Absynth. There are 6 modulation sources that can be controlled from just about everything inside the synth or mapped from an external midi controller. For some strange reason, you only get MIDI CC 1-120 instead of from 1-127, but I never use more than 4 or 5 assignable controllers in a single patch, so I'm not complaining. The matrix allows you modulate darn near every parameter from Oscilators envelopes, and when you modulate an envelope with one of the LFO's, you see the envelope change in realtime. Wicked. Also, each modulation source is mutable (!).

If you are a fan of LFO, but can never seem to get enough (or you just can't put the LFO in strange enough places), then the Crystal is for you. You get 6 LFO's, all of them full featured that go from 0 to 60 Hz. Nuff said about that.

There is also a not-so-minimal effects section of delay/chorus/flanger style effects that can do some very odd things if need be. The delay is a tape style delay, so you don't get gitters when changing the delay time, but a smooth shift of pitch instead. Rather than go into detail about what you can do here, I will leave this to you to play around with yourself.

All I can say here is wow! However, I haven't used it in a song yet, and have a feeling that some really clever audio processing would have to be done to get the sounds to sit well in a dense mix. The sounds by themselves are very full spectrum, and can dish out a decent amount of bass and deliver shimmering, silky highs. Out of the box, the sounds are very square-and-sawish, but you still get a solid idea of what the synth is capable of. None of the 'out of the box' presets make much use of the soundfonts that come bundled with the plugin.

The granular capabilities are a nice touch, but aren't too versatile. You can make great wierd sounds with it, but doesn't do what you might want or expect in some instances.

Another cool feature is the random sound generator. This enables you to make a new patch based on completely random parameters. Nothing new. But unlike random generators on some soft-synths, this one seems to actually generate useable sounds! In about just three tries, I was able to get a very authentic sounding VCS-3/Pink Floyd type of sound with one oscilator doing some very subtle harmonic work.

Then there is the "breed" function. Much like a morph, but again, I don't think that this feature works like the author quite intended. It attempts to combine attributes from two different patches. Instead, it works more like the randomize function, generating sometimes odd and oftentimes usable sounds, but each time you use the function, a different sound is produced.

The synth can do mono, mono legato, and has up to 24 voices of polyphony. I didn't read the specs off of the website to see what the bitrate or depth is, but it isn't quite the best. While the sounds are very impressive, the crystal doesn't have that sheen that Absynth has. But the sound quality that I got for paying nothing warrants a 10 in this category.

I was just looking around for some free plugins when I came across the Crystal, and was so impressed by it that I decided to write a review. Not many peices of gear that I have paid for have inspired me to up and review it.

Considering that this thing is free, here is the major drawback: The version that I have seems to occasionally freeze up for a second when switching patches. Also, it is very CPU intensive, requiring at least 20Mb of headroom in terms of Ram just to load. However, I only have a P4 2GHz machine with about 768 megs of ram in it. If you have better than this, then you should be stylin'. Absynth has a leg up here since it runs much smoother, and isn't quite that demanding on the processor. The Crystal approaches the Arturia Moog Modular system in terms of horsepower needed to function properly.

I did make it crash once, but I was trying to crash it. It turned out to not be such a bad crash. All I had to do was unload the plugin in cubase, and then reload it in. Everything worked fine again. I would have to try a multitimbral setup and run a bunch of them side by side and see what happens, but I'm not trying that hard to screw my machine up...

But definately worth checking out, y'all! Like I said, it's free, and is about a 4 meg download, so it's not too big. Definately give this thing a look if you need some killer synth sounds, but don't feel like paying for it!