GMEDIA MUSIC Oddity (MAC/WIN)

Oct 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Brian Smithers

Like the ARP Odyssey after which it's modeled, Gmedia Music's Oddity offers a user interface that's a bizarre combination of utilitarian block diagram and festive color-coded sliders.

Back in the day, when my older brothers worked to expand my musical horizons beyond Cannonball Adderley and Gerry Mulligan, they introduced me to the world of synthesizers and taught me such revered names as Moog and ARP. Now analog synths — virtual ones, anyway — are hot again. Fittingly, the sound of the classic ARP Odyssey lives again in the Oddity ($129.95), a VST instrument with attitude.

Gmedia Music, in partnership with Ohm Force, designed the Oddity to work in any VST host under Mac OS 8.6 or higher (including OS X) and in Windows 98, 2000, ME, or XP. I tested it in Emagic Logic Platinum under Mac OS 9.2 and Windows XP, and it installed easily and functioned perfectly on both platforms.

All Things Old

Oddity successfully captures the sound and spirit of the ARP Odyssey. Improving on its namesake, Oddity's two oscillators can be linked in mono mode or used independently in dual mode. Oddity features a 4-pole resonant lowpass filter and a highpass filter. Two envelope generators are available — an AR and an ADSR — as is a dedicated LFO that can sync to tempo. You can also use VCO 1 as a second LFO.

Oddity's layout is intelligent and efficient but initially daunting — as is the layout of the original Odyssey. If you're unaccustomed to the Odyssey's design, you might fiddle with the sliders and switches for several minutes before actually getting a sound out of it. Fortunately, Oddity has the advantage of presets, so your sonic explorations will have plenty of good starting points. Although Oddity's routing capabilities fall far short of a modular synth's, numerous switches allow you to choose modulation sources for most parameters.

Are New Again

Several aspects of Oddity's user interface are noteworthy. The program incorporates some innovative mouse techniques, including the ability to throw the sliders at various speeds. If you click just above or below a slider and then move the mouse away, you initiate a smooth movement of the slider from its current position to its upper or lower extreme. The more slowly you move the mouse, the more slowly the slider moves. It's great for generating smooth controller data, and as a result, the mouse feels like a better performance controller than usual. After a few practice tries, I was able to throw a slider at any speed, taking from half a second to more than 30 seconds to cover its whole range.

Here's another cool mouse trick: dragging sideways provides finer resolution. Drag up and down, and your mouse moves the slider as if you were physically grabbing it. Drag to the left or right, and the control moves down or up, respectively, in much smaller increments. Enhanced Mouse Mode improves control even more by causing the mouse pointer to disappear until the motion stops, at which point it reappears, still pointing to the slider. Using my trackball, I had the sensation of actually grabbing and moving a slider. It is a minor feature, but it makes adjusting parameters remarkably comfortable, easy, and accurate.

Unlike its predecessor, Oddity features a fantastic patch-morphing function that causes all the controls to glide to their new settings over a user-defined period of between 0 and 99 seconds when you change Presets. That feature lets you easily automate gradual timbre changes by saving your edits as Presets and then morphing from one to the next. You can even record parameter changes into a sequencer as MIDI controller data. All of Oddity's parameters are preassigned to controller numbers, making it easier to operate the synth from a control surface. You can change those assignments with Oddity's Auto-bind feature and save them as Presets.

If you're looking for a virtual synth with a sound that can grab your attention, download a demo of Oddity and take it for a spin. It's intelligently designed, it's fun to tweak, and it delivers plenty of bang for the buck.

---

Overall EM Rating (1 through 5): 4.5

Gmedia Music/eBlitz Audio Labs (distributor)
tel. (805) 258-1465
e-mail eblitzaudiolabs@cox.net
Web www.gmediamusic.com.