Welcome to another edition of This Thing Rules! This is a really interesting one, as it’s a unique rompler from a small, new company called Heart of Noise, that is quite frankly, unlike anything else I’ve ever played with. GalaXynth is the name of it, and it’s a little hard to review, but very cool and worth checking out.
Before we dig into what makes Galaxynth so unique, check out the demo, “Machine Eyes” which was made all in GalaXynth except for the main drum beat.
Picking out presets is kind of pointless with a product like this, since the goal of GalaXynth really is to experiment. There are presets that I used, and it does come with lots of samples to play with… But its the way in which you mess with and most importantly, combine those samples that creates the sounds that you work with.
Heart of Noise says that GalaXynth is a highly advanced “auditory synthesis” modeled after the human ear. That may sound like a lot to take in but what it comes down to is mixing and morphing any of the 100+ instruments included in very natural and smooth ways. In the simplest of terms, there’s a box that you drag instruments into and depending on where they are on the X/Y axis as well as how close they are to one another changes the sound of the overall instrument you’ve created. It’s as simple as dragging instruments on and seeing how they mesh.
Of course like any good synth, there are further tools at your disposal to further tweak the sound including 7 high quality effects and intuitive performance knobs. The whole thing has very low CPU usage and practically zero load times. I did run into a few crashes though with certain combinations of sounds which was a little disappointing. After mentioning it to the company they pushed out a patch which actually seemed to fix it, so hopefully those crashes don’t raise their heads again, because it’s a fun, unique tool to experiment with.
One other thing about GalaXynth that’s perhaps a little disappointing is that you can’t use your own samples. I suppose the complex nature of making all these sounds mesh together would make that quite hard to plan for, so it’s somewhat understandable. And thankfully, GalaXynth is expandable with Soundbanks that Heart of Noise continues to make available including the Pop Stars Vol. 1, Future House, Classic.FM and Neon Dreams packs. Hopefully they’ll continue to add more. Don’t be scared off though, the initial purchase has enough instrument combinations to really provide a seemingly endless array of possibilities.
GalaXynth is available to buy from Heart of Noise for $99 (there is a free demo available). It’s definitely a product in its own category, but I think it’s different enough to be worth a look.