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Cube 2.1 Review by Craig Lofton

Cube 2 is an additive synthesis musical software instrument, but uses a different approach to it. You may ask what is additive synthesis? Additive synthesis is a technique of audio synthesis which creates musical timbre. It constructs a complex sound using a series of pure tones and sine waves. Each tone and sine wave usually has its own envelope which allows independent control of each harmonic. A pipe organ is based on additive synthesis.

Cube 2 features a unique design with eight independent additive synths. It has four morphable sound sources, 512 partials per voice, morphable filter banks, three envelops with tempo synchronization and two LFOs (Low Frequency Oscillator) just to name a few. It also includes resynthesis, meaning you can import an aiff/wav sample to re-construct, which was very fun with voice samples. With your imported sample you can re-construct with the pan spectrum, sine spectrum, residual spectrum, special editing and time warp envelope with 64 breakpoints. Cube 2 comes with eight effects which include chorus, flanger, distortion, reverb and delay. Lastly, it also features an arpeggiator.

To use Cube 2, you will need a Pentium III 600 MHz processor or Athlon XP/MP (SSE required!), 512 MB RAM, screen resolution 1024X768 / 16-bit colors, ASIO or DirectX compliant Soundcard, 400 MB free space on your hard disk or a PowerPC G4 400 MHz (Altivec required!), 512 MB RAM, screen resolution 1024X768, CoreAudio (OS X), 400 MB free space on your hard disk. These are just the minimum requirements and I recommend more memory as you will see how powerful you can make this program react. I tested this on two of my systems. Windows XP, Intel 2.4Ghz, 512mb with an M-Audio 18/14 soundcard and OSX 10.4.6, Mac Mini 1.66 Intel Duo Core, 512mb with an RME Fireface 800 soundcard. The installation was an easy one as all I had to do was follow a few on screen directions. When you open Cube 2 it will then ask you for the registration code and license number. Yes! There is no dongle or any time consuming challenge response. I recommend registering your product as you will be sent about 101 more presets and any future updates.

Tech support is very responsive, supportive and will help you with any issues you come across. I also signed up with www.virsyn.net forums, which has great information, user presets, the occasional contests and news/update information. As far as the manual, my copy came with two in PDF format, one in Deutsch and the other in English. I used the later. The manual was clear and informative; it also included some useful tips and tricks.

Now let’s dive into Cube and see what we got. The first thing that appealed to me is that the interface is spread out and easy to navigate. I started with the first Bank ‘Cube Factory’ and the Program ‘Kolophonium’ (each sound bank can hold up to 64 programs). There are more sound banks located in the Cube folder which you can load by using the drop down menu. I played a key and found myself in arppegiator mode which I turned off so that could be my start point. I will discuss the arpeggiator mode a little later.

Then there is also a part selector that holds up to eight parts that can be individually tweaked and sent out to eight individual outputs into your host. There is a slot machine located in the upper right hand corner that you can use to give you random tweak settings.

Next I experimented with the four individual sound sources which are located in each corner of the interface labeled A-D. The envelope editor can be tweaked in two ways; 2D editor in the middle oval screen or the main editor right below to give you more precision if needed. Last, I enabled the arpeggiator (you can also set this to hold) in the bottom right hand corner which is pretty straight forward. With my tempo set to 120 bpm, I started with a 1/8 clock setting in a 2 octave range (can be done 1-8 octaves) and set the mode to up (can be also set to random, down and all) and was on my way tracking some pretty amazing sounds. Now as you can see just from where we started how many sounds we can come up with one bank and program using the many tweaks I described. I didn’t touch on all of the knobs and effects that are available, I will leave that up to you to discover. I will leave you with a screen shot of Cube 2 from the manual that was provided displaying some of the parts and sections.

Cube 2 is for the beginning sound designer, who just wants to use the many presets for now, as well as the Pro user like my colleague Stan who I quote, “Man, I can be programming this synth for years.” The sound is great and clean out of the box and the room for original sound creation and destructiveness is endless. For a more in depth look please check out Richard Zvonar’s review and check out www.virsyn.net for more information and news.