It’s kind of crazy that 2025 would be the year where some of the heaviest soft synths got a version update without further warning. Serum 2, Falcon 3, Omnisphere 3. It’s like three giants suddenly shaking things up on a peaceful desert island. Is there even room for anybody else right now?
Well, the advantage of being a small developer like Dawesome is that you can also drop instruments causing just as much surprise, as long as you have a good tagline to match. And Dawesome has done just that with Kontrast this month. Kontrast calls itself “not another wavetable synth” and calls for “non linear wavetable synthesis”, with dual meanings, both points being the same: It’s not “oh no, another wavetable synth” (duh!) and it does not use wavetables in the traditional manner. The technical parts of this is really high level math and physics, too heavy for me to grasp while being creative with it. Other than that, I would say it’s an easily playable synth as much as many others, with familiar UI, controls, effects and options for modulation.
So what’s the catch here?
Well, KONTRAST takes the familiar world of wavetable synthesis and flips it sideways. Instead of scanning through a table in a straight line like a tape head along the length of the stacked slices, it lets you trace wild, nonlinear paths across a sonic terrain with its take on a tape head shaped like anything from spirals, curves, and lines to dots and diffused clouds across wavetables generated from black and white imagery – geometric shapes, other wavetables, audio files or even a photo of your own. Add to this an optional oscillator, and you have the tool to sometimes make sounds hard to make anywhere else. The result is an instrument that feels alive: constantly shifting, evolving, and full of motion.
Kontrast is a smart and playful take on what wavetable synthesis can also be.
OK, so I said sometimes. What I mean is, many sounds in Kontrast sound “familiar”. We’re not talking about the reinvention of sound generation, Kontrast is a smart and playful take on what wavetable synthesis can also be. And as such, it will sound like whatever stuff you put in there, and produce sounds matching the effort. The real gold lies in the way you can manipulate a patch on the wavetable level, on the playhead as well as on the modulator and effect level. I should mention here that Kontrast has an extra oscillator that you can blend in, it has various shapes, a wet knob, octaves and so forth. Great for adding sub or a high leading tone!
MPE is a real thing in the world now
I’m happy to see my Seaboard pop op under the setup menu in the bottom left. offering curves for VEL, PRESS and SLIDE, or whatever I want to setup. I would have loved if some of the specifically MPE catering presets were labelled as made specifically for MPE keys (since there’s almost 400 presets in v1.0 reviewed here), but at least the Seaboard reacts smoothly to pressure with just about any patch, the note glide being a handy feature for pitchy sound checks (After publishing this review I plan to create some kind of crazy MPE instrument with Kontrast – I’ll make sure to make an article with a video).
Setting up MPE can be a bit of a hassle, but you can set modulation source from, say, pressure or glide, just like you set them to the macros. You can also affect the macros with MPE, so the options here are really limitless. I wish that MPE and modulation sources could be part of pressing random…
[…] it can be a very precise sound design tool
When reviewing Atoms earlier this year, another MPE capable “weird” synth, I think one of the most difficult tasks was to have the feeling of knowing what the hell you were doing to arrive at a particular sound. At least with Kontrast, things will happen because of the way you setup your patch. Not that we can all see or calculate it here and now, but my sense of Kontrast is that it can be a very precise sound design tool, it works in values, you set them or let slider values loose. Get to know it, and you will be running your knife across the best slices in the cut.
Hard work & happy accidents
Kontrast strikes a rare balance that makes it as inspiring for quick ideas as it is for deep sound design sessions. And, if you know me by now from my other reviews, I am a total sucker for randomization for quick and lucky discoveries. So that little randomization icon at the bottom right is just +1 automatically for me. And there’s even a random button for patch selection.
I often like to work in audio files only, and Kontrast amazingly lets you drag sounds from a patch directly off the UI keyboard into your DAW. Play a note, and that note, with whatever effects, and playhead position it had, is kept in memory, ready to drag off to your DAW timeline or even straight up back into the wavetable window of the UI. That’s pretty awesome to me, on top of my ordinary route in Ableton by now: Bounce to new track. It all makes for easy ammo for drums kits, Simplers, Samplers and the like. Awesome, Dawesome!
Upon loading up Kontrast for the first time, I did find that a lot of the patches sounded pretty familiar and alike, mostly because of the overuse of reverb and delay on the patch bank overall. And maybe I’m spoiled after playing around with Atoms, Tomofon and Serum 2 lately, so what I may perceive as familiarity in this context is maybe not so bad after all.
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It puts Kontrast up there, while keeping a price tag below 100 dollars / euro during the intro sale (time of writing) – and come to think of it, the price point could actually be a deal breaker for some. If you’re just curious, there’s a generous 90 day, fully functional demo available. I encourage you to try it, maybe you can prove my few gripes wrong.
Try for dry
So there’s one thing I would recommend if you do decide to try Kontrast, though: Turn off the reverb and delay effects, when auditioning each patch. They tend to give the same washed out feel to everything, making it hard to hear the wavetable action. But I mean, I feel the same way about Serum, the onboard reverb really does not have the range of, say, dedicated stuff from Valhalla, Eventide or even the powerful Echo and Convolution reverb devices in Ableton. However, the fact that Kontrast comes packed with everything needed to create a great patch and space for it, should be worth your consideration.
OK, so limited reverb and delay flexibility does not really affect overall what Kontrast can really do. The stock patches that come along with the plugin are great and varied as a whole, even if slightly in favor of cinematic and ambient styles.
In contrast
Turning the contrast up essentially just gives you more difference, even to pure white and black, meaning harsh saw/triangle wave material to scan, while if you smooth things, i.e. grey things out a bit, you’re more into softer sine territory. I love the idea, but I just don’t think the resulting sounds coming from loading up a new table from whatever source makes that much of a difference. I often get sounds in the same category no matter which wavetable source I use. Don’t expect miracles in this department, unless you get under the skin of the playhead at the same time.
Reverse morphology
The biggest revolution in how Kontrast plays into the wavetable synth arena lies in the way the playhead is a physical thing of motion in itself. While most other wavetable synths play each slice as a whole when it hits it, Kontrast plays only what the playhead hits, and being a morphable playhead on the X and Y axes, with size, various patterns, circles and levels of flatness, and programmable movement across the table, there are sounds to be found that, in theory, are hard to make in any other way – it’s just sometimes quite a journey to find something novel. The playhead is the secret, not the wavetable. So, after all, Dawesome got it right: Kontrast is really not another wavetable synth.
This review probably could be read in reverse, with the most important part about Kontrast being revealed in the very last paragraph, but then again, it plays in all directions. See if you can figure out what I actually think, and where to put your emphasis when deciding if this is something you should load up too.
Version reviewed: 1.0 – demo available (90 days)
